The Sunnier Side and Other Stories
Author: Charles Jackson
Date: 2013-02-11T13:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Short Stories (Single Author); Psychological; Classics
Description: A masterful collection of short stories exposing the seamy undercurrents of small-town American life from Charles Jackson, celebrated author of The Lost Weekend. A selection of Jackson’s finest tales, The Sunnier Side and Other Stories explores the trials of adolescence in America during the tumultuous years of the early twentieth century. Set in the town of Arcadia in upstate New York, the stories in this collection address the unspoken issues—homosexuality, masturbation, alcoholism, to name a few—lurking just beneath the surface of the small-town ideal. The Sunnier Side showcases Jackson at
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Rights: Copyright © 1977 by Rhoda Jackson

CHARLES JACSON
THE SUNNIER SIDE

Charles Jackson was born in 1903 and raised in the township of Arcadia, New York, in the Finger Lakes region, where much of his fiction is set. After a youth marred by tuberculosis and alcoholism, Jackson achieved international fame with his first novel, The Lost Weekend (1944), which was adapted into a classic movie by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. Over the next nine years, Jackson published two more novels and two story collections, while continuing to struggle with alcohol and drug addiction. In 1967, after a fourteen-year silence, he returned to the best-seller lists with a novel about a nymphomaniac, A Second-Hand Life, but the following year he died of an overdose at the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan.

Blake Bailey is the author of Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson. His other books include A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Cheever: A Life, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He edited a two-volume edition of Cheever’s work for The Library of America, and in 2010 received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.

ALSO BY CHARLES JACKSON

The Lost Weekend

The Fall of Valor

The Outer Edges

Earthly Creatures

A Second-Hand Life

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2013

Copyright © 1950 by Charles Jackson,
copyright renewed 1977 by Rhoda Jackson
Introduction copyright © 2013 by Blake Bailey

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in a different form by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc.,
New York, in 1950.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

“The Break” was originally published in Collier’s and “The Boy Who Ran Away” was originally published in Harper’s Bazaar. Both were reprinted by permission in 1953 in Earthly Creatures.

The Cataloging-in-Publication data is available at the Library of Congress.

eISBN: 978-0-307-94874-8
www.vintagebooks.com

Cover design by Megan Wilson
Cover photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection [LC-D4-18991]

v3.1

To Bernice Baumgarten

If you inquire what the people are like here,

I must answer, “The same as everywhere!”

—Goethe

CONTENTS

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction
by Blake Bailey

The Sunnier Side
The Band Concert
Palm Sunday
Tenting Tonight
A Night Visitor
The Break
The Benighted Savage
How War Came to Arcadia, N.Y.
Sophistication
Rachel’s Summer
The Boy Who Ran Away
Card-of-Thanks and Note to the Reader

INTRODUCTION
Blake Bailey

When The Sunnier Side: Twelve Arcadian Tales was published in 1950, its author, Charles Jackson, was still a somewhat famous man. His first novel, The Lost Weekend (1944)—about an alcoholic named Don Birnam—had been acclaimed as a “masterpiece of psychological precision” by The New York Times, had sold almost half a million copies, and had been adapted into a now-classic movie that almost swept the Oscars in 1946. That same year Jackson had published The Fall of Valor, perhaps the first serious American novel whose foremost subject is homosexuality—a taboo that had also been broached in The Lost Weekend. A younger Don Birnam served as the main protagonist of Jackson’s Arcadian Tales, which might collectively be viewed as a bildungsroman about the bisexual addict that Jackson and his fictional alter ego became, though a “Note to the Reader” in The Sunnier Side claimed that all characters in these stories were “invented” and that the setting itself—the ironically named town of Arcadia—“exist[ed] only in the author’s imagination.”

But the township of Arcadia, New York, does in fact exist, encompassing the village of Newark where Charles Jackson spent his formative years. Around the time of his suicide in 1968, a Newark Chamber of Commerce leaflet identified him as the “most famous person” to have ever been born there, though actually he was born in Summit, New Jersey, and none of his books were available at the Newark Public Library, to which he’d been devoted as a child. Still, Jackson would have been touched by the tribute, since his love for the place was as profound as it was tortured. In one sense, at least, the name Arcadia is apt: quietly nestled in the Finger Lakes region south of Lake Ontario, the town was a lovely place to be a romantic little boy like Charlie Jackson, obsessed with Indian lore, and Newark itself was a village out of Norman Rockwell. On summer nights the children would gather around the pagoda-roofed bandstand in the park for concerts by the Fire Department Band, scurrying off between numbers to buy ice-cream cones and popcorn from Mr. Espenmiller’s two-wheeled cart, or a soda from the pearl-handled spigots of the Kandy Kitchen on Main Street. The public life of the village bustled along three downtown blocks near the local section of the Erie Canal, where one shopped at the haberdasher, the meat market, the dry-goods and drug store, and was entertained by silent-movie serials (The Perils of Pauline, The Million Dollar Mystery) at the Crescent Theatre, or else big local productions (The Elks’ Minstrels & Frolic) at the Opera House.

When Jackson returned to Newark over the years, he was always happy to grant interviews to the local newspaper, in the course of which he’d reaffirm how attached he felt to the place that had raised him. He said this because it was true, and because he never quite despaired of winning the village over; even at the height of his fame, few things thrilled him more than fan letters from home, to which he always replied with the most abject humility. At the same time he was also delighted by outrage, and was careful to remind his old friends and neighbors (via those interviews) that “he constantly creates with this local area in mind.”

But of course they knew that already. Shortly before The Sunnier Side was published, the Newark Courier warned its readers that Jackson (the newspaper’s former editor) had written about people who were easily identified by anyone who’d lived in Newark from 1907 to 1923, particularly the three women featured in the title story, a curious mixture of essay and fiction. The piece had been inspired by a fan letter Jackson had received from one Luceine Heniore (“Miss Dorothy Brenner”), who’d known the author as a boy and had written to congratulate him on a story he’d recently published in Good Housekeeping. “It is a real pleasure,” she wrote, a little chidingly, “to run across such a clean and delightful short story—no sex, no murder and no personality problem.” By way of rebuttal Jackson wrote “The Sunnier Side,” which considered the fates of three popular girls (“the great triumvirate”) from Arcadia: Eudora Detterson, Faith Goldsmith, and Harriet “Fig” Newton, who obviously—despite Jackson’s use of “fictitious names” and “mixed up” facts, as the Courier noted—were based on Bernice Coyne, Edith Warren, and Eula Burgess. Suffice it to say that their lives had gone badly despite auspicious beginnings. Edith Warren, for example, had been valedictorian at Newark High and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith, before coming home to marry her high school sweetheart, Frank, a wealthy businessman who was the first president of the Newark Rotary Club, second president of the Chamber of Commerce, and so on. The Warrens became known as “the first family of Newark.” Later, alas, rumors of Frank’s philandering resulted in Edith’s abrupt resignation from her various clubs, and finally, on the morning of March 28, 1928, three shots were fired inside the Warren house, which was then engulfed in flames: Frank and Edith, burned beyond recognition, had been shot dead; ditto their thirteen-year-old son. Police determined that the murderer must have been one of the family members, though it was impossible to say which. In any event, Jackson’s point in writing about the Warren case was that even the most golden people of Arcadia led far from perfect lives.

The original jacket copy for The Sunnier Side described it as “the modern counterpart” of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and indeed the book was conceived in some ways as a deliberate homage. Like Winesburg, Jackson’s book follows the progress of a particular character, keenly self-conscious, who observes, judges, and is victimized by the repressive hypocrisy of small-town America. In both cases, too, there’s a kind of tortured ambivalence—nostalgia for the pastoral loveliness of the hero’s native land, the place where he was young, and sympathy for its more “grotesque” inhabitants, stunted by a paranoic, insular society. Both books follow the same pattern of initiation, and certain stories and characters are inevitably similar. The young teacher in Anderson’s “Hands” can’t help caressing his pupils’ hair and shoulders in a fluttery, tentative way, until he’s run out of town by neighbors who assume the worst (knowing their own impulses all too well). The rough equivalent among Jackson’s stories, “Palm Sunday,” involves a more predatory teacher—the pedophiliac choirmaster, Ray Verne—whose less ambiguous violation of the village children results in a different but no less plausible response: that is, his neighbors know and yet pretend not to know, since such matters can’t be acknowledged among “nice” people. Meanwhile Don Birnam and Winesburg’s George Willard grow increasingly aware of these uncomfortable realities, until they decide to leave their hometowns for good. The penultimate stories in both books (almost surely by design on Jackson’s part) are titled “Sophistication”; in the Birnam version, Don’s ultimate escape from Arcadia is foreshadowed when he sits in the parked car of his adulterous employer, Marvin Tyndall, who’s about to confess, mawkishly, that he’s never seen his wife naked. Feeling awkward, the fifteen-year-old Don distracts himself with the view: “The village lay spread out below, looking unbelievably small … the breadth of his home town was probably no more than thirty square blocks.… The great world was so limitless, so rich, promising inexhaustible variety—but he had only to look below to see that his own world was so small.”

Originally, and aptly, the final story in The Sunnier Side was “Rachel’s Summer,” inspired by the violent death of Jackson’s sixteen-year-old sister, Thelma, and four-year-old brother, Richard, who were both killed by an express train during a Sunday drive with friends in 1916, when Charles was thirteen. In the story, a further aspect of the tragedy is suggested by an obtuse form of condolence on the part of a neighbor, Mrs. Kirtle: “Think how good it was of God,” she says to the grieving mother, “to keep Rachel home with you all summer. You must comfort yourself with that.…” The mother’s response is snappish, given that her daughter had not been kept home by God—as the shrewish Mrs. Kirtle well knows—but rather for a reason that made her last summer on earth a miserable ordeal. “God in His infinite wisdom,” Mrs. Kirtle and the villagers murmur, since it’s rumored that Rachel was pregnant and had died before the disgrace became obvious. Rachel had protested her innocence, pointing out to her mother that she’d recently refrained from swimming with friends, because she was menstruating. Still, to prevent the rumor from thriving in her absence (she usually spent summers at her grandmother’s farm in the Catskills), her mother had kept Rachel home and she’d died before she could absolve herself. The story ends with the adult Don returning to Arcadia to visit his mother and learning of the terrible rumor for the first time:

I got up and walked to the window. I didn’t trust myself to speak, and I knew I would have to wait quite a while. I looked out the window at the street—this street I had played in, it seemed, all my life—and across the way was the house that always resounded to the thumping of a player piano, and next to it was the O’Connells’ house, and next to that was Mrs. Kirtle’s neat little home, kept neat and trim and painted for her by the son who now lived in New York, the same as I did. What drew us back to this town, anyway, and why did we ever come home?

Thus Don is, at last, disabused of any lingering nostalgia for the place, and we leave him standing at the window gazing at the street where he grew up—the same street and yet so unlike the one in “A Band Concert,” the second story in the book: on that street, as a child, Don had watched the Dettersons’ hired girl, Angela, return to her employer in disgrace, having been seduced (implicitly) by an Italian on the canal bank. “I guess Angela has had her fling,” Mr. Detterson sardonically remarks, and the innocent Don, overhearing, imagines “a lovely picture of Angela leaning over the balustrade of a balcony, flushed and happy, tossing flowers to a throng of admirers below.”

Such a deft patterning of narrative point of view—from innocence to experience, and in the best stories (such as “Palm Sunday,” in which the adult narrator considers his adolescent self) a nuanced mingling of both—enhances the book’s unity of effect, as Edgar Allan Poe would have it, so that one can safely say The Sunnier Side is greater than the sum of its parts. Jackson himself thought so: despite his aversion to certain stories (“One or two I actually cannot bear to reread,” he admitted), the book itself remained “the one [he was] fondest of,” as opposed to his best; as he inscribed one copy to friends, “I put love in it.”

Omitted from the present volume are two of the stories from the original 1950 edition—the very ones, I like to think, that Jackson found hard to reread, “In the Chair” and “ ‘By the Sea’ ”: the first is a rather melodramatic sketch about a sadistic dentist, and the second is a protracted exercise in atmospherics that Jackson himself decided was “so patently ‘beautifully’ written that it almost makes me sick: it’s like syrup, too rich.…” Also omitted is “The Sisters,” for a similar reason: nothing much happens in its thirteen pages apart from a vague and, yes, somewhat syrupy suggestion of erotic awakening. Thus I’ve made room for the “only two” stories in Jackson’s next and final collection, Earthly Creatures (1953), that Jackson himself was “satisfied” with (as he actually announced, with endearing humility, in his “Note to the Reader” for that volume): “The Break” and “The Boy Who Ran Away.” The first gives us Don Birnam as a plucky lad of twelve, self-consciously contriving to trick a dangerous escaped convict into stowing away on a train while Don arranges his arrest: “Don instantly knew or believed that if he acted very matter-of-fact and clever—if he forgot that he was only a boy of twelve and at the same time acted the part to the hilt—this encounter might well turn into the great moment of his life, the chance to be a hero.” For the sake of preserving a rough thematic chronology, I’ve placed “The Break” sixth—between “A Night Visitor” and “The Benighted Savage,” which feature slightly younger and older protagonists respectively. As for “The Boy Who Ran Away,” it comes last here—a kind of desolate epilogue about a man in his late forties named Henry Price, who might as well be Don Birnam, or Charles Jackson for that matter: that is to say, a man who escaped Arcadia but never quite his own worst self.

The “Boy” of the title refers both to the middle-aged protagonist and his sister-in-law Betty’s son, Danny, an effeminate ten-year-old whom Price despises in spite of himself. A successful but almost pathologically self-absorbed advertising man, Price has fled the city, with his wife and two daughters, to live in a tiny New Hampshire village, the better to ensure a solitude devoted to quirky, somewhat juvenile habits and hobbies like collecting toys. What Price wants to escape, above all, is himself: the weak, awkward, tormented “sissy” he was—and (despite a plausible veneer) still is—the boy for whom his nephew serves as the mirror-image: “[Danny] had cultivated a deliberate heavy stomp as if to give his inadequate body a kind of manliness that he sensed, in his precocious little heart, he did not really possess; when he walked, he held his chin in the air defiantly, his bony shoulders ludicrously high, and swung his arms widely as if marching to a band.… He lived in a dream world where nobody could get at him.” Because Danny’s family rents a farmhouse on Price’s property, and because the sisters are close, Price cannot escape the boy’s presence—as though he were being haunted by the ghost of his own childhood—and the more he identifies with him, the more he hates him: “All his experience and sympathy urged him to help Danny.… His instinct, on the other hand, his deepest inner emotions, and his painful memories, made him recoil from the boy in contempt.”

Price greedily seizes a pretext for venting his hatred when the boy accidentally breaks a precious Stanley Steamer toy—a Christmas gift from Price’s daughter—then tries to run away when Price calls him on the carpet. “Because I wanted to,” the boy murmurs, when Price “savagely” demands an explanation. “I’ll tell you why you ran away,” says Price. “Because you’re a coward. Isn’t that true? You’re a coward!” The more shameful his own behavior, the more Price lashes out at others, until at last he proceeds to get drunk, alone, and drunkenly arrives at a bleak, bleak epiphany:

A thought struck him like a shock: there is probably nothing in life more unbearable than to hate oneself, to not be able to stand oneself.…

He drank.—How does one ever get outside of oneself? How is it possible, when one loathes oneself so much.… What does one do about it? Can one become somebody else? Another person? A new man, say? The answer was a dreadful No, No, and again No!

This scathing, exhaustive, brilliant self-indictment appeared in the November 1952 issue of Harper’s Bazaar—the longest story ever printed in the magazine, so Jackson claimed. Given his string of failure in recent years, his hopes for “The Boy Who Ran Away” were almost desperately high; he begged his agent to pass along any “talk” he heard about the story, which he predicted, in exalted moments, would become a much-anthologized classic. At the time, however, it was just another story in the slicks, quickly forgotten as Jackson had also rather feared (“God knows who reads the Bazaar, for fiction I mean.”).

Reviews for The Sunnier Side were so overwhelmingly positive that, a few weeks after publication, The New York Times Book Review quantified the matter for its “In and Out of Books” column: “Only five reviewers out of fifty-seven who spoke up on Charles Jackson’s ‘The Sunnier Side’ didn’t approve. Fourteen gave ground reluctantly and thirty-eight plumped for it.” One of those in the middle category was the Times daily reviewer, Charles Poore, who found the stories “penetratingly written” but so sordid the volume might have been titled “The Seamier Side.” Unfortunately, Poore’s prudish estimation would be the one most embraced by posterity, and Jackson’s stories were deplored and then forgotten for the same reason they ought to be celebrated—he was a pioneer, writing fearlessly about the very subjects his fellow Arcadians affected to find unmentionable: homosexuality, masturbation, alcoholism. When “Palm Sunday” was first published in Partisan Review, in 1939, one of its editors, the great Dwight Macdonald, wrote Jackson that his story was their most acclaimed fiction since Delmore Schwartz’s famous debut, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”—and little wonder, given the journal’s commitment to “Marxism in politics and Modernism in art,” a perfect match for Jackson’s exposure of bourgeois hypocrisy in Arcadia, New York. “Rachel’s Summer” was published in the very next issue, and fourteen years later was included in the first Partisan Review fiction anthology, Stories in the Modern Manner, alongside the work of Bellow, Cocteau, Gide, Trilling, and the like.

By then, however, Jackson’s reputation among less enlightened readers was on its way to being reduced to a tag-line—“author of The Lost Weekend”—while his other books were reprinted, if at all, as a kind of genteel pornography. “Naked village …,” reads the cover copy for The Sisters (illustrated by a garish painting of a clinching couple and a haggard, gray-haired deviant), as the 1958 Zenith Books paperback edition of The Sunnier Side had been retitled.

Nice simple home folks, you think. Pleasant, gentle upstate New Yorkers. Only one day you look around and everything is different.

You’ve seen the two girls sunning themselves on the dock before. But for the first time you notice whom they’re watching. They’re watching you. And there’s a hunger in their eyes as they lie there, bare-legged in the sun.…

There’s a church in town, and a nimble-fingered deacon plays the organ there. Men and boys visit him. You’ve heard odd stories about these men and boys, and now your friend tries to make you one of them.…

How disappointing for the weary salesman who plucked The Sisters off the rack in hopes of a racy read on the train, only to find in the opening story a long treatise on the tension between life and art, to say nothing of the almost Proustian nicety of detail throughout: page after page devoted to evoking, say, the stately Blanchard house in “Tenting Tonight”—the glass doorknobs and powdered sugar and Red Seal records, etc.—or the way a boy, hiding in a culvert, “could see the rolling pastures of Mr. Price’s well-kept farm and Bailey’s Hill in the background, framed in a round formal frame, like a Japanese window or a view seen through a great telescope.” This, for Jackson, was the fun of writing, and such delightful longueurs are especially apparent in his later stories, all of which were written with the help of tranquilizers. This may explain, in part, why earlier stories such as “Palm Sunday” and “Rachel’s Summer” are tightly focused around a main episode and theme, the work of a sober and even rather austere craftsman, whereas “Tenting Tonight,” “How War Came to Arcadia,” and “Sophistication”—written after 1948, when Jackson was addicted to Seconal and casting about for ways to avoid work on his would-be masterpiece, What Happened—are sprawling clusters of memory (“the only paradise from which we are never thrown out”) that are more dependent on incidental felicities.

What should become clear, in reading these stories, is that Charles Jackson was the kindest of men, and his good-humored acceptance of human frailty (save his own, perhaps) is manifest everywhere in these pages. In “The Benighted Savage,” for instance, a worried masturbator consults a library copy of What Every Young Boy Should Know that has “several times been soberly rebound,” and even the staid Mrs. van Benschoten—from whose censorious gaze he shrinks—is reading National Geographic.

The Sunnier Side

37 EAST 72ND STREET
NEW YORK NY
SEPTEMBER 20, 1949

Dear Charles Jackson:

Thank you so much for writing “Tenting Tonight” which I have just read in the new Good Housekeeping. It is a real pleasure to run across such a clean & delightful short story. No drinking, no sex, no murder—& no personality problem. Good for both youngsters & grown-ups. It’s nice to know that you can write about the sunnier side of life, life as it is & should be.

It was especially interesting to me as I spent several summers in Arcadia NY when I was a girl & was often at Parsons Point—once at the very cottage around which your story centers! Of course all that now seems “far away & long ago” as I haven’t been back since I was twenty & have long since lost track of Arcadia & old friends there. But they were golden summers as I remember them, with all our lives before us!

I am older than you by ten years I should think. I am of the era of Faith Goldsmith, Eudora Detterson & Harriet Newton but I remember you as a kid. A very cute youngster you were too, with those big brown eyes always wide open with the wonder of it all & probably just seeing right through everything!

I find all your books interesting & well written, altho most sophisticated compared to the standards of Arcadia, but I suppose true of the world today. Still it sometimes does seem a pity that a man with your gifts should dwell so much on the morbid & sordid, neglecting the sunnier side aforementioned & the wholesome. Do you choose such subject matter on purpose? Life is often unpleasant enough without having to come across the unpleasant in books. Speaking for myself, I read books for pleasure & for their relation to life, which is why I loved “Tenting Tonight.” You surely may be proud of such a charming short story.

I wish you great success & will always watch for your work with the greatest of interest.

Sincerely,
(Miss) Dorothy Brenner

ORFORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE
SEPTEMBER 27, 1949

Dear Miss Brenner:

Thank you for your nice letter. I’d better answer it now and get rid of it, and so be able to get back to my work. Like a souvenir out of the past, it has been lying on my desk a full week now; and during that time I’ve taken it up again and again, only to be swamped each time in a flood of memories evoked by the names you mention. If I wait any longer I shall find myself writing a novel instead of a letter; or worse—imprisoned in this chair by memory and association for the rest of my life.

Far away and long ago indeed, but present in my mind as if it were yesterday. Curious how the picture and people of those years are clearer and realer to me now than events which happened last year and even last month. I remember the very sounds and colors of those times, including thousands of tiny details completely uninteresting and irrelevant. But Total Recall is the writer’s affliction; he either remembers all, or nothing. For example, your mentioning Eudora Detterson brings to mind things I didn’t even know I had remembered or retained—inconsequential, ordinary, but true nonetheless, true in the sense that they “happened” (which does not mean, necessarily, true for the purposes of fiction or the writer, or true of “life”).

I suppose I pick the Dettersons first because they lived next door to us, and the name “Detterson” immediately calls up, among other things, two distinct memories that go far back into my earliest childhood: Mr. Detterson was always Marshal-of-the-Day on Decoration Day and rode at the head of the parade on a white nag called Spooner, borrowed for the occasion from Harriet Newton’s father; and the other memory is of the time when Mrs. Detterson died. I remember overhearing my father say to my mother, “Her blood filled a whole pail.”—But even as I write this, still another association comes to mind: I had a pet sparrow which, it so happened, died the same morning. All that day my father was in and out of the house next door, being neighborly and helpful; and at night, when he seemed very distracted at supper and once or twice spoke to us sharply, I asked my mother later, “What’s the matter with Papa tonight?” and she replied, “Your father’s always upset by death, that’s all.” Only weeks later did it occur to me which death my mother had alluded to. All along, in my childish (and still characteristic) preoccupation with self, I had thought she meant the sparrow’s.

Look what happens. It’s a kind of chain reaction: one reminiscence leads to another, and that one to another, and so on, and on, each deeper, or at any rate different, but never-ending. Perhaps it is best not to start at all; or if you do start, not to look too closely. Things of the past have great charm, the charm of nostalgia; but as I said, the writer remembers all, or nothing. Thus it is that I also remember Mr. Detterson’s nocturnal habits, so upsetting to my mother. When he went to bed at night he liked to have all the shades up and the lights on full; then he would stand in the middle of the room and undress, for the benefit of my twelve-year-old sister Rachel whose bedroom windows were opposite his. This pleasure didn’t satisfy him for long, though. On summer nights he took to wandering across the lawn into our yard, in his BVD’s, and peeping into our windows. But perhaps the memory has a sunnier side after all, for I remember how Rachel—a very spirited girl, if you recall—swore that one night she would dump a pail of water on Mr. Detterson from her upstairs window. Mother forbade this absolutely; but one night Rachel did.

Of course Arcadia had its full quota of the changing seasons, with green budding shoots, turning leaves, and snow and ice as well, but somehow life seems to have been one long perpetual summer then, doesn’t it?—or so it seems as I look back on it now—with sweating young men in proper pants and shirts (not stripped to the waist as we see them nowadays) plodding along behind whirring lawn mowers, girls drying their long hair over the back of a kitchen chair in the backyard, and whole families strolling out in the cool of the evening (not, of course, like Mr. Detterson’s evening stroll). A better life then, we wonder? Happier times? I doubt it. For surely our parents also looked back twenty or thirty years to a better life and happier times than we knew in 1913. People must always have looked back, out of necessity; for life has a way of getting grimmer as it goes on—or maybe just realer—so that reality fools us into thinking that we were all better off when we were young.

… Faith Goldsmith, Eudora Detterson, Harriet Newton, and Dorothy Brenner—of course I remember you all. Harriet, I remember, was called Fig (we thought that was wonderful: Fig Newton), and you were called Dolly. Are you still, Miss Brenner? You were good-looking girls, all of you (Eudora particularly was a genuine beauty), lovely not only with natural good looks but even more so with the promise of life. I can see you now, coming down Dalton Street with linked arms (you always went four abreast, do you remember?), facing the world and the future—forgive a writer’s phrase—with healthy happy faces, ready to sweep everything before you. During those wonderful summers of your girlhood, I remember the four of you dressed alike as much as possible. You wore your hair down your back, your hair ribbons tied in a broad stiff bow at the nape of your neck; you wore white shirtwaists and long black skirts; and I remember one summer you sent away to the city for—and then gaily wore, all together, like a badge signifying your own little coterie—broad red patent-leather belts; and that summer you wore red hair ribbons to match. You made a lovely sight as you came down the street arm in arm. Did you know that old Mrs. van Benschoten always called you “the great triumvirate”? As the four of you rounded the corner at the top of the hill and began your swing down the street, Mrs. van Benschoten would call across the hedge to Mrs. Verbridge: “Here comes The Great Triumvirate!” Mrs. van Benschoten’s shaky scholarship was one of the things that endears her to me in retrospect.

And since you speak of Parson’s Point, I remember you there too. I can see the four of you now, walking along the dusty street (tall Faith Goldsmith and chubby Fig Newton were always on the outside, it was always so and I used to wonder why—was there any reason?), past the dance pavilion, past the bowling alley, past Harry’s where I had my first hot dog, and on toward the dinky station under the weeping willow and cottonwood trees, where everybody gathered every afternoon to watch the four o’clock train come in from Arcadia and see who got off. Four abreast, in white sneaks, black cotton stockings, black bloomers and white middy blouses, you stood leaning against the iron railing that separated the platform from the bay—and the whole bay and the floating islands beyond were a background to your charm. As the passengers climbed down from the dingy coaches, you must have known how they looked at you—those who knew you and those who didn’t—all admiring alike. And of course not the least of the charm of the picture was your collective indifference to this. You loved each other, you were full of secrets and plans, you needed no one else. Had the handsomest beau in the county come along at that moment, you would not have given him a second glance. Now that the train had been seen to, nothing on earth could have deterred you from your next objective, observed every afternoon at the same hour like a ritual: ice-cream cones at Matt’s at four-fifteen—where, do you remember, they had those wonderful homemade cones that we loved as much as the ice cream itself?

But of course those golden summers didn’t last forever, and in a little while you were grown up. You say you haven’t been back since you were twenty? That must have been around 1915 or ’16. I too left when I was twenty, in 1923, but I have returned to Arcadia often and always will. Thus I am able to tell you something of the later years of the three remaining members of The Great Triumvirate—though as far as Arcadia goes, “remaining” is the wrong word. Eudora Detterson lives in San Francisco, Honolulu and Guadalajara. Faith Goldsmith and Fig Newton are dead.

Were you in Arcadia that summer when Harriet Newton gave the “Pink Party”? In those days “pink” meant just that, with no taint political or otherwise. It was the talk of the town for years, and of course the Newton place was perfect for a party of any kind. That enormous ivy-covered house, the big cupola on top, the vast barn with its matching cupola and its stables and dovecote, the rolling lawns, the flagstone walks among the iris, the fountain, the sundial, the tennis court, the tree house and the Greek-style summerhouse—they all seemed made for Fig’s pleasure alone; not only seemed but, in literal fact, they were. People used to say they never knew a girl who was so idolized by her father as Harriet Newton. It is certainly true that she was the apple of his eye; everything that he could think of was done to please her, as though he lived under a constant anxiety that he could not make her happy enough or show that he loved her enough. I had often heard as a child how her father had only been cross with her once, and it was a curious story. Fig came home from Sunday school one Sunday noon, Mr. Newton took her on his lap, and during the conversation she said, “You’re not my father, did you know that, Daddy?” “Oh really,” he said, “why not?” “Because God is my father, not you.” Instantly, as if by reflex, his hand went out and slapped her sharply across the cheek. The story went round the neighborhood, people thought it was terribly funny and laughed and laughed, and of course I did too; but the real sequel to the episode was that, that very week, the stricken and remorseful father bought the child a Shetland pony and a charming pony cart, which were later supplanted, in a kind of chronological testimony of her father’s constant love, by Spooner and the surrey.… But indeed, all the Newtons were like that; she was the adored of that numerous family, all those uncles and aunts who always seemed to us, like Fig’s father and mother, older than our own grandparents, much older than children’s parents generally were.

Fig, the only child, loved it all; and yet in a way she laughed at it, too. And when others laughed at her nickname—or, later, laughed and kidded her when she began to run to fat—she laughed with them. To this day, whenever I think of Fig Newton, I think of her laughter; she was always happy, always laughing, as if bubbling over with sheer fun and the joy of life. I think of her piano-playing, too, which was forever rolling out of that house, across the broad lawns, and all the way over to our house on Dalton Street; and of course I think of her pigeons. Do you remember those pigeons? But who could forget them! Fig saw some fantail pigeons at the Palmyra Fair, it was said, when she was ten or twelve, beautiful white puffy ones, and clapped her hands for joy at the sight of them. That same fall Mr. Newton built that enormous dovecote at the side of the barn and stocked it with prize pigeons of the kind that Fig had fallen in love with. From then on, for years, they flew about the house and lawn and gardens, dozens and dozens of them in great white fluttering circles—and I can still see Fig now (and doubtless you can too), sitting in the big peacock chair by the tennis court, watching them wheeling overhead and laughing with delight.

Small wonder that Fig didn’t marry till she was in her mid-twenties, old for girls in Arcadia. She had too good a time, had everything she wanted at home in the admiration and love of her parents, enjoyed life and herself far too much to want to settle down with any one man. Boys were playmates merely, she never saw them singly or alone, she surrounded herself with four or five at a time, and it was all a lark. Evenings she would fill up the surrey with her friends, the hired man would harness Spooner between the shafts, and Fig would drive them around town, singing.

Since the musical comedy Oklahoma!, I can’t but regret that song called “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” Fig Newton’s surrey had fringe on top too, I can see it jiggling now as she drove along the gradually darkening streets—but it isn’t the same; it’s spoiled, somehow. When I mention that the Newtons had a surrey with fringe on top, the description comes out quaint, now, a prop in a stage piece, and for that reason I wouldn’t dream of using it in a story. Fig’s surrey was never quaint or “period” or a prop. It was what it was: real.

I remember once she piled a whole bunch of neighborhood kids into the surrey, me included, and took us all to the movies, the first movie I had ever seen. There was a kind of documentary, I remember, about the Russo-Japanese War, and the feature was a lurid drama of acrobats and circus life called “The Four Daredevils.” I can recall the details of this movie as if it were yesterday. (Why one’s mind retains such trivia is beyond me, but I guess the impressions of childhood are ineradicable. A good thing, too, perhaps; where would a writer be without them?) The four daredevils were trapeze artists who performed without a net; the quartet included a husband and wife; and the climax of the picture came when the husband, just after learning that his wife was the secret lover of the other male acrobat (children are born wise, it seems), “missed” catching her outstretched hands as she flew toward him in The Giant Leap; accidentally-on-purpose, as we kids used to say. A second after she fell sickeningly to the dirt arena below, he relaxed the grip of his bent knees on the trapeze bar and dropped too. The last shot showed him lying in a crumpled lifeless heap, and I remember I was enthralled by one vivid detail: a thin stream of blood flowing down from the corner of his mouth, widening as it reached his neck—the same effective touch that was used a year or two later in “The Birth of a Nation,” in 1915, after Mae Marsh had plunged from the cliff to escape the clutches of Walter Long, except that in this case the blood spread a little farther, to cover the sleeve of Henry B. Walthall’s Confederate uniform as he lifted his dying sister in his arms.

But the party—the Pink Party.… If you were there, Miss Brenner, you have never forgotten it. The party was given for old and young alike, and it seems to me now that very nearly the whole town was there, always excepting the people across the canal, of course. There were four great pink tents erected in different parts of the lawn, pink lemonade was served, a vast pink-and-white-striped awning was suspended above the tennis court where the players batted pink balls back and forth, and the tablecloths of the buffet tables, long, reaching in folds to the grass, were pink linen. Fig herself, getting quite plump now, wore a pink organdie dress with many ruffles, and there were pink ribbons in her hair. How she laughed with delight—and laughed all over again, each time—when one by one the guests discovered that the very sugar in the sugar bowls was pink. The jugglers, magician, and fortune-teller, brought down from the city, were also costumed in pink, of course; but the crowning touch, the most triumphant moment of the afternoon—crazy, everybody said, simply crazy—were the pigeons. Fig had had the pigeons dyed or tinted for the occasion, and one great concerted cry of “Ooooohhh” went up from the guests as the pigeons, released all at the same moment by the hired man up in the cupola, fluttered down over the party in great whirling pink clouds. “Of all the crazy stunts!” people said. “Absolutely idiotic! But isn’t it just like Fig?”—and by that “but” they meant, of course, “Isn’t it delightful, isn’t Fig wonderful, don’t we all love her?”

During the festivities her father hovered in the background—dear me, the way I’m “spotting” him here, at just this crucial point, makes him sound like the villain-of-the-piece, but since this is a letter I’ll let it stand; if it were a story, however, I’d go back and reorganize and rewrite, rather than mislead you so unfairly—Mr. Newton, as I say, hovered in the background, with eyes for no one but his darling. Fig’s laugh rang out all afternoon; and if people glanced at her father to see his answering smile, they were disappointed. His face was serious and thoughtful, yet restless, almost impatient, as if he were secretly eager that the party would soon be over and all these people go home—yet just as eager too, perhaps, that the party would never be over.

(Forgive that one, Miss Brenner. Writers often think that a casual touch of hindsight gives an extra dimension to a story, but I doubt if it ever does.)

Before she was twenty, Harriet Newton began to get really fat. And the fatter she got, the happier she seemed to be and the more she seemed to laugh and the more her father loved her. It was almost as though her getting fat (or “stout,” as we called it in those days) was a kind of assurance for him—a tacit promise—that Fig would never marry. Plumpness was still somewhat the fashion then, but even so, few young men would have proposed to a girl of Fig’s size, in spite of the considerable advantages of her well-known family, the huge Newton place, and all that money.

But one summer—it was long after your summers in Arcadia, Miss Brenner—Fig met a man called Tyson Phillips. He was in his fifties, his hair was a mixture of black and gray, like pepper-and-salt tweed, and his mustache was white. He looked not unlike the middle-aged gentleman in black tie and white mess jacket that one sees in whisky ads, or in ads depicting the luxuries of the lounge on a cruise ship; but the really striking thing was that, except for the mustache and figure, he looked very much like Fig’s father. He came into the bay at Parson’s Point one afternoon on somebody’s yacht, made a favorable impression the first night at the Yacht Club dance, then lingered the whole season at the Point as the guest of one or another summer resident. After he met Fig Newton, he moved in to Arcadia that fall and soon became her only beau, the first “steady” that Fig had ever had. Little was known about Ty Phillips except that he had been married and divorced. He seemed to have no money, yet he was able to put up at the Ganargua Inn indefinitely. He was handsome and amiable, but my mother thought he looked like a “sport.” Nobody knew what he “did”; and since he seemed to do nothing, the rumor went around that he was a professional gambler—which is what Arcadia always called a stranger, you’ll remember, who had no visible means of support.

Of course Mr. Newton put his foot down. No man was good enough for his Harriet, and certainly not a man twice her age. Leaving his wife behind, he took Fig on a tour of the west, and daily she sent back letters to Mr. Phillips from the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Rainier National Park, Banff and Lake Louise. When they returned home after two months, Tyson Phillips was still at the Ganargua, and Mr. Newton bought Fig a touring car, on condition that she wouldn’t see Mr. Phillips again. For a few days she didn’t; but within a week, she took to driving out, afternoons and evenings, with Faith Goldsmith (Faith Gordon, by then). She would pick up Faith at the Gordon home, drive around town for half an hour, take Faith home again, then drive to the Inn to pick up Mr. Phillips.

One afternoon when I was on a hike in the country, I saw them sitting on a hill at the very spot that had always been a favorite place of mine, the spot where Bettina and I (do you remember Bettina Chapin?) spent so many Saturday and Sunday afternoons lying in the grass reading Keats and Wordsworth and Tennyson and Francis Thompson aloud. I saw them from the pasture below, just as I crossed the brook into the field, and at first I didn’t know who they were. They looked to be merely a middle-aged couple sitting on a hill admiring the view, the man tall and thin, the lady fat. I went up the hill, careful to move past them a good hundred feet away—because I had thought that I didn’t know who they were—but when I approached I saw that it was Fig and Mr. Phillips. From below I had seen that they were leaning somewhat toward each other and talking earnestly together, but when I came up the hill and passed in front of them, they were silent. They watched me move by without a word and, when I turned my head, Fig said just “Hello” and nothing else. She didn’t even call me by name. It wasn’t a bit like her. I was about to say, “Gosh, isn’t it wonderful out here?” but for some reason I thought better of it and went on. When I went down the other side of the hill into the woods, I knew I was out of their sight though I could still see them; and to my shame I lingered behind a tree trunk for a while, looking up the hill and listening. I could not have heard their conversation, even had there been one, but I did expect to hear Fig’s old laugh once in a while. There was no laughter at all. A week later they eloped.

Fig telephoned her family from Buffalo, it was said, and announced that she was married. She talked only to her mother, because Mr. Newton refused to come to the phone. From that hour, as far as anybody knew, he did not acknowledge her existence; and, in the difficult years that followed, though he knew that she needed his help, he did not yield. It was exactly as though he had never had a daughter.… Pretty trite to put it that way, but it was that way.

Fig and Mr. Phillips returned to Arcadia and began married life together in a series of boarding houses, moving from one to another according to their finances. Fig had little money of her own, Mr. Phillips seemed to have none at all (it must have been a bitter disappointment to him when her father cut her off), but from time to time an uncle or an aunt would give them a check, secretly of course. Within a year Fig had her first baby, a son, named Tyson after its father, and within seven years she had five children in all. She had grown very fat by this time, and they were now living in the upper half of a two-family house over on Canal Street. For a while Fig made a little money by giving piano lessons, but her pregnancies and the ensuing babies interfered with this, till finally her pupils stopped coming altogether.

Meanwhile Fig had become an ardent Christian Scientist. She had been converted to this faith by Mrs. Bender, our neighbor on the other side, who gave weekly “readings” in her parlor every Monday night. Apparently this came to mean a great deal to Fig Newton Phillips for, babies or no babies, she seldom missed a reading or a Sunday service. Monday evenings we would see her coming down Dalton Street toward Mrs. Bender’s, having walked all the way over town from Canal Street. She breathed heavily when she walked and took it somewhat slowly, for she was very fat now (far different from a member of the Triumvirate that used to swing down that same street), but always she had a ready laugh and a gay or pleasant word for us when we called out to her from our porch as she went by.… And beyond the Bartles’ lawn across the way, we could see the big ivy-covered Newton place on Seneca Street in the next block, the windows of the cupola still hung with gingham curtains from the time when Fig and her playmates used to play house up there, the rambler roses that covered the high wire backstops of the tennis court, the abandoned dovecote on the barn, and the charming Greek-style summerhouse that had been the scene of so many little parties, secret girlish confidences, and doubtless the beginnings of the romance with Mr. Phillips.… Far from ignoring her old home, Fig used to speak of it openly and affectionately. “Somebody ought to tell them to paint the dovecote; I can’t,” she would say; or, “I do wish they’d keep the tennis court up—isn’t it awful the way they’ve let it go?”

But I remember, too, another way she talked, another thing she said. Once when she came up to the front steps to chat with my mother for a minute before going on to Mrs. Bender’s, I noticed that she kept sniffling as she talked, her eyes were slightly watery and her voice husky; so I said, “Fig, you sound as though you’re coming down with a cold,” and Mother said, “Yes, Fig, you really should have worn a wrap or something.” Fig looked at Mother sharply for quite a moment, and then at me, and finally she said, “Cold? Cold? Me getting a cold? Why, you’re just imagining it.…”

When Fig’s second child George was three years old, he was taken very ill one spring, and Mrs. Calcagni, who lived downstairs, said that it was pneumonia. Fig refused to have a doctor for the child; he was simply not sick, not sick at all. So Mrs. Calcagni ran up the alley to her husband’s store and phoned Fig’s mother. Mrs. Newton came to see her daughter and grandchildren. Her husband would not come with her, and people say that this was the only time that Mrs. Newton called on Fig, or saw her, after the marriage. The grandmother wanted to send the child to the hospital or at least call in a doctor. Of course Fig insisted that the child was all right—and (I guess this is where the “of course” belongs) the little boy died a few days later. The only entrance to the flat was by way of a rickety wooden stairway that went up to the second floor from the backyard, and those who went to the funeral said that it was a sad sight indeed when the small coffin was carried awkwardly down those wooden steps, around the corner of Mrs. Calcagni’s kitchen, and up the alley to the hearse.

Well, the rest is quickly told. Some years later—not many (I believe Fig was only forty when she died)—the final catastrophe happened. Fig was now as big as a house, as they say. One morning she came out on the back porch with a basket full of wet wash. There wasn’t enough room on the upstairs porch to hang up all the washing of her not inconsiderable family, and I guess her intention was to go down to the yard and hang most of it on Mrs. Calcagni’s lines. Anyhow she started down the stairs. A few steps from the top, one of the boards gave way—they weren’t too solid, in any case, and Mr. Phillips wasn’t much good at keeping things in repair—and Fig and her load of wash were pitched to the side. She was thrown against the flimsy railing; it gave way, and Fig fell to the ground. Mrs. Calcagni heard the noise. She rushed out and found Fig lying at the side of the stair, a good part of the broken rail and all the wet wash on top of her. Mrs. Calcagni bent down and heard Fig murmuring to herself, haltingly, chokingly, because of the blood that flowed from her mouth in a widening stream to her neck: “I must remember—I wasn’t hurt—I wasn’t hurt—I am not—hurt.…” But her back was broken, and that night she died.…

Of course there’s something wrong with this story. As a story, that is. Much of it is too good. It’s too pat, too neat, too rounded off and “finished,” like a plot—which is why I have never written it as a story. For example, “hep” readers would know at once that after such a beginning—the parties, the gaiety, the only child and favored darling, the pigeons and the pony cart and so on—only tragedy would follow. One doesn’t write about the sunnier side for itself alone; its best use is by way of contrast. Or if you do restrict yourself to the sunnier side, you’re sure to be using only half.

Another thing: as if the father’s devotion weren’t bad enough, the story is nearly ruined when I describe Tyson Phillips. His age and his resemblance to Mr. Newton—my God, by that time the reader is practically writing the story for himself. He has read his Freud and knows exactly what’s coming next, which is why you try to avoid the familiar patterns when you treat a situation as a story. And the detail! I’ve already spoken of the surrey with the fringe on top and why it has become too quaint a prop for realism. But the same thing goes for Fig Newton’s very name (“Fig” Newton—why, I wouldn’t dare!), for the rambler roses swarming over the backstops of the tennis court, the endless piano-playing, the endless laughter, and the pigeons—the pink pigeons above all. Life used exactly as it is, is never good enough for fiction. The writer takes his material from life but makes something else of it, even if it means changing the original into something entirely different—but “makes-something-else-of-it” for the purpose of giving the story meaning, identification, and, if possible (and happy the writer who can), a kind of universality. It’s almost as though what he’s trying to create is not life but “life.” Is that clear as mud, Miss Brenner?

Unclear, muddy, teasing, equivocal—all of that, I’m sure, because the distinction is so elusive, so difficult to get at. It is all but impossible to define the difference between life and “life,” as I have had the temerity to suggest above. One is concerned with what is true, the other with truth; and they are worlds apart. Truth is what we believe in, what we respond to, what we feel; sometimes, even, it is what we hope to be true, and sometimes it is the yet-to-be-discovered. It has nothing to do with the literal, of course; the accurate, the photographic, the true-to-life. We can see the true-to-life any hour of the day merely by glancing out the window or at the daily paper. Saying or even showing that life is such-and-such does nothing to our imaginations or our hearts, though the representation may have been true enough. But when the representation has been lit from within by emotion or identification, however small or brief, then it becomes truth. Recently my six-year-old daughter and I had a conversation about God. If Kate had ended the discussion by saying, “Papa, I believe in God,” that would have been literally true because she does; equally, it would have meant nothing. But she didn’t say it and (like the artist and like the child) she never would have said it. What she did say was, “Papa, can’t we invite God for the weekend sometime?”—and thereby she revealed to me the profound truth of her belief in God because she put herself in it. To try to impart this quality of participation is the writer’s compulsive task, compulsive because, like Kate’s, it is also an act of love. He is under a spell at the time, he cannot help himself, he says what he must, he describes life as he sees it, with his own infatuated vision, and it matters not at all if what he says and describes has little relation to the true-to-life—any more than it mattered in Kate’s impractical idea of having God for the weekend.

Curiously, literature becomes truth because it is make-believe, because it is remote from life, and because we are lifted out of ourselves. The great novels are full of characters whom, in actuality, we would not care to know, with whom indeed we would be bored, or whose company we would not tolerate for a second, but whose fortunes, in the story, we follow with a sympathy and understanding denied to us in everyday life. We are like Françoise in Swann’s Way who had nothing but disgust and contempt for the labor pains of the kitchenmaid but who, when she was sent to fetch the “doctor book” and therein read a description of the pangs of childbirth, wept floods of tears over the agonies of the poor girl whom but a moment before, when the girl was underfoot, she had accused of malingering. “The sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself”—just as all those readers of The Grapes of Wrath could feel pity and indignation over the plight of the Joad family so long as it took place between the covers of a book or in far-off Oklahoma, but if a single Joad in filthy clothes had turned up at the door of their Park Avenue apartment or Lake Forest home and asked for a meal or a bed for the night, they would have called the police and turned him in.

Does this mean, then, that literature is a sham and a fraud? On the contrary. It means that in real life we are something less than our best self, the best self that is brought out, widened, and deepened, by literature. Our limited lives are such that it is almost as though the one reality we can get our hands on, so to speak, and really believe in, is the unreality of literature (“life” as distinguished from life); for what happens in literature is often far realer to us, and of greater truth, than what happens in everyday life. A situation that moves us in a novel might pass unnoticed if it were right under our noses. In real life our perceptions and sympathies are circumscribed by personal prejudices, indifference, familiarity, lack of time, preoccupations, and so on; in literature they are released, become limitless, larger than life—larger than we are capable of, on our own. Let’s take, for example, the funeral in The Great Gatsby. If we had known Gatsby in actual life, had been his guest many times at those fabulous parties, had heard of his death, and then learned that none of his friends had shown up for the funeral, we would have cried righteously, “Why those dirty hounds! I happened to be busy at the time, couldn’t go myself, but what was the matter with Jordan or Klipspringer or Clarence Endive or the Willie Voltaires or any one of those hundreds of other sons-of-bitches who were only too glad to go there every night! God knows they enjoyed his hospitality often enough, certainly you’d think that at least one of them could have had the decency to go to his funeral!” But when, in the novel, we come upon those two words, “Nobody came,” our perceptions are a little clearer, because Fitzgerald has transformed the situation into his own world of the imagination and made us see the story through his eyes. We know why nobody came; and still more, we know that we ourselves wouldn’t have come, either. Not by scene-setting, not only by accurate detail or characteristic prop, but by identification alone, the novelist has made us realize something about ourselves which, under the same circumstances in real life, would not have occurred to us: we would have behaved no better than anybody else.

Some writers are very adept at filling their stories with realistic and characteristic detail, so accurate that, as we read, we find ourselves thinking: “Yes, that’s exactly the kind of dress that she would be wearing, and she would buy it at Lerner’s, too; absolutely he would read the Transcript instead of the Globe, and of course he would be a member of Porcellian and not Spee; most certainly she would keep cigarettes in a white pigskin box and not a gold one or silver one or lacquer one or any other kind of one.” This is called verisimilitude and is okay as far as it goes. But do these observations tell us anything we don’t know? On the contrary, they tell us exactly what we do know. We have already acknowledged the details to be correct, we have ticked them off with a sense of recognition and, as far as a shared experience is concerned, at the end of the book we are just about where we started, knowing the same things we knew before. From what they put into their work and what they leave out, it almost seems as if some writers’ knowledge of life has been acquired by skimming through the advertising pages of a dozen popular magazines. Unless something is revealed from within, some knowledge of character or feeling communicated, in short some “life,” all that cataloguing is wasted. It’s like a beautifully produced play, with conscientiously realistic sets; the most infallibly correct props, and costumes accurate in the minutest detail; but if the playwright has not been able to give his play an inner life of its own, all we have been seeing when the curtain falls were sets, props, costumes, and we have felt nothing.

Of course the reverse is equally true. In Crime and Punishment, we are told over and over again that Raskolnikov had yellow paper in his room; but for all we know, the “correct” wallpaper in that time and in that place might have been brown or blue or even no wallpaper at all. Does it matter? Far from it. For Dostoyevsky has made us suffer in that dismal room, we have lived with Raskolnikov there, lived there as if we were the hero himself, and the color of the wallpaper is no more important for the purposes of the story than the color of the paper in a room where, say, we had a certain shattering experience ten years ago, which color, nine times out of ten, we have forgotten in any case. Verisimilitude is great, I like it fine, but is it this which gives Childhood, Boyhood, Youth its marvelous life? Within five pages, such is the magic of Tolstoy’s imagination, we ourselves have become that child, that boy, that youth—and this in an atmosphere of Czarist Russia that could not possibly be more remote from our own small-town upstate background. It isn’t enough, by whatever skills, for a writer to make a story plausible or true-to-life. It’s got to be all of that, of course; but by some mysterious power of creativity—by scenes and characters so intensely imagined that they read like personal experience—he must make the story yours as well as his. When he is able to do this, you do not merely read the story; you experience it with him, so completely that it becomes your own—your own in the sense that it is happening to you, and that it is even “about” you.

Often a detail too clever, a characteristic too “characteristic,” an incident too lifelike, or a prop or name too accurate, will come between the reader and the story and destroy that same verisimilitude which the writer has been at such pains to establish by that detail, that characteristic, that incident, that prop or name. My hometown is a case in point, and a good one. As a writer I would no more dream of choosing Arcadia for the name of a town in a story of mine than I would call characters by their right names. “Arcadia”—Lord, the critics would have it in for me. They’d say, “Oh, come now!” or, “That’s really going too far—too deliberately ironical, too self-conscious, too artfully artless,” and they’d be right. But you know the town as Arcadia, I’m writing about a place and people we know, so I let it stand.

You see what you’ve done, Miss Brenner. Your letter raised a lot of questions. And maybe eventually I’ll be able to explain, to myself, what a story is and is not, how it is done and not done, what are the materials of fiction, et cetera. But I don’t know. Writers generally talk a lot of nonsense when they talk about writing. I’ve been playing with the idea of turning this into an essay instead of a letter and calling it something like “Thoughts While Thinking,” a title vague enough to excuse my failure to cover the subject of why I write what I write. But perhaps “Thoughts While Not Thinking” would be better, since writers aren’t thinkers at all, they’re feelers. In my case I stumble and fumble and eventually bring out something half-pertinent to the subject, but only half. It’s like talking about love-making—it can’t be done. You know how to do it, you know what it is, but you can’t tell anybody else. A lady is said to have asked Victor Hugo, “Is it difficult to write an epic?” and his reply was: “Madam, it’s either easy or it’s impossible.” I’m on surer ground when I talk about people, so let’s return to Mrs. van Benschoten’s “great triumvirate.”

I knew Eudora Detterson better than I knew you and the other girls, first because she was our next-door neighbor, and second because she and I, in a tiny sense, “worked together.” Have you ever seen a more beautiful girl? I don’t think I have. So straight, so proud, such a marvelous complexion and skin—and that hair. The truest and purest of blonde, neither yellow nor straw-colored, colorless in fact, but lit up with tiny glints of white-gold as if sparks of sunlight were hidden within, winking on and off as she moved or turned her head. But her beauty, in one so young, was somewhat austere, formidable even. She had more reserve than most girls of her age and at sixteen or seventeen she behaved like, and looked, a mature woman; more, a woman of the world. How she came by her sophistication I have no idea; I guess she was just born with it. After a certain age, I remember, she had little use for the trivialities that occupied other young women. She was much alone, she cultivated her singing voice (which was not only excellent but extraordinary), and, like Harriet Newton, she played the piano very well. She used to lie on the grass in the backyard, watching us kids at our play across the flower beds that separated our two lawns; often she was in our house, chatting with Mother; and always, it seems to me now, she was unsmiling, almost stern looking. It was not unfriendliness—merely that natural reserve of hers which made her seem remote from other people and, in a way, remote from life.

I suppose my own childish awareness of Eudora’s beauty came to me first through my father. Whenever she was in sight, my father looked at her in a way that mystified me then (the way that Mr. Detterson, gazing across from his bedroom window mother-naked, must have looked at my sister Rachel): his eyes narrowed, a faint but rather grim smile played about his lips, and his nostrils distended, always the surest sign that he was keeping something to himself; and when Eudora moved out of his hearing, he would murmur aloud, “A daisy, all right—a real peach.” Mr. Towner, the neighbor on the other side of the Dettersons, forever pruning the arborvitae that edged his property, was similarly afflicted; he found dozens of occasions in a single afternoon to engage Eudora in conversation; and Mr. Bartle, mowing and re-mowing his lawn across the way, always paused as he reached the curb, mopped his brow, and, before he started back, cast a hungering lingering look toward the Detterson house, in the hope that Eudora might appear on the porch or at one of the windows. Looking back on it now, I can almost believe that Dalton Street must have been a street of dreamy lechers.… You say that you find my stories “most sophisticated compared to the standards of Arcadia”? No, Miss Brenner, I think the shoe is on the other foot, as anybody who ever lived in a small town can tell you.

Some time after she graduated from high school, Eudora got a job playing the piano nights at the Crescent Theatre, our one movie house. The piano was below and to the right of the screen, and it had a little shaded lamp above the sheet music on the rack. I can still see Eudora sitting there now, the light shining white through her white-gold hair, her head tilted upward and her eyes on the screen, as she followed the story of the film and improvised appropriate background music for the romances of Bessie Barriscale, Mary Miles Minter, Anita Stewart, Beverly Bayne, Jackie Saunders, Clara Kimball Young, June Caprice, Alice Joyce and Arline Pretty—and, in the male department, Herbert Rawlinson, Eugene O’Brien, Francis X. Bushman, Niles Welch, Robert Hilliard, Elliot Dexter, Carlyle Blackwell, Dustin Farnum and James Cruze. Because of the kind of music that she supplied for these palpitating lovers, you would have thought that Eudora was in love, too; but she was equally noted for her burglar music, her dawn music, and her United States Cavalry music at the climax.

When I say that we worked together, I mean only this: Friday nights and Saturday afternoons, I “took tickets” at the Crescent Theatre, for a dollar a week. Thus I could call myself a colleague of Eudora’s, and a wage-earner besides—and of course I was the envy of other boys because I saw so many free movies. The manager of the Crescent was a New Yorker by the name of Bickert who owned a string of small movie houses throughout the state. Nights when he wasn’t in the office, that tiny boxlike cubicle next to where the piano stood, he was in one of the neighboring towns, Palmyra, say, or Macedon, overseeing his theatre there. But weekends he was always sure to be in Arcadia and never failed to be present to pay me in person on Saturday night.

Mr. Bickert, when Eudora and I first knew him, was about thirty-five, and Eudora couldn’t have been much more than twenty-two or -three, for I was fourteen at the time. He was a swarthy man in a brown suit, short but stocky, powerfully built for a man not tall. He had no friends in Arcadia and did not seem to want them. During the picture, he sometimes stood in the back of the house for a while, chewing a cigar, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets (he always wore a brown suit, I never saw him in anything else, not even at Eudora’s wedding, and it was said that he owned half a dozen brown suits exactly alike), nodding curtly to an occasional customer, but never speaking. He was pleasant enough to me, though, and sometimes let me sit in his tiny office, looking through the fascinating exhibitors’ catalogues and trade magazines of the entertainment world. But sometimes when I went down to the office to report my count of tickets after the show, I found the door locked. I knew he was still there because I could see the light on, through the frosted glass. This happened two or three times a month, at first, and it was on these nights that Eudora didn’t ask me to wait and walk home with her after her work was done. I didn’t realize why for some time, till one night, long after I was home and in bed, I heard a car drive up in front of the house next door, the engine stop, and nobody get out. I got out of bed and went to the window. In the blue-white glare of the arc lamp in the street I could see that it was Mr. Bickert’s car, and the two of them were talking together in low tones.

As I write this, I can’t help wondering why I’m writing it—not writing it at all, but writing it to you, who may not have heard the story. You’ll have to take my word for it that I am not prompted by malice; I assure you it is not for the purpose of gossip. To me, no part of it is “wrong” or vicious, it’s only interesting—nothing more, nothing less (but that’s a good deal!). People are interesting (where have we heard that one before, Miss Brenner?), what happens to them is interesting, life is intensely interesting in whatever direction it may take, happy or tragic; and it is a peculiarity of the human species that the unhappy holds more interest for us than the happy. Certainly the pure and the good—the “wholesome” was your word—have little place in literature. Longfellow and Whittier fairly pullulate with wholesome sentiments, and there is scarcely a line of real poetry to be found in their work. “Fine feelings are the stuff that bad literature is made of,” writes André Gide; and the opening line of Anna Karenina reads: “Happy families are all alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” whereupon Tolstoy proceeds with breathtaking art to lay bare for us the superb story of a miserable marriage; and even in War and Peace, of all works of literature the most “normal,” bursting with health and sunlight and joyous with affirmation of life, the face of evil, which is always the other side of the coin we treasure, constantly reveals itself. Or, to take Crime and Punishment, of all its many characters, who but Svidrigailov, that most depraved and lost of men, is chosen to reveal to us the profoundest meanings of the novel and, in his tortured recollection of a child seduced, to shake our heart to its roots with pity and love for mankind. As it is with the great novels, so it is in life. Whatever is, is—and I’m interested in it.

As for “gossip,” Eudora’s affair was apparently nothing new, except to me. I spoke of it to my mother and she said, “Where have you been all these weeks? It’s been going on for some time, everybody knows it, and there’s nothing to get excited about. Forget it, pay no attention, these things happen.” She might have added, “Pretend it isn’t so,” which was always Arcadia’s attitude when trouble was brewing. As long as you pretended it wasn’t so, anything could be going on and it was all right. Which I suppose is a fairly adequate substitute for what Arcadia really thinks it is: tolerance.

Then one summer, to the vast relief of the whole neighborhood, Mr. Detterson announced the engagement of his daughter to one Roger Sullavan Denham of San Francisco. Where Eudora met him I’ve forgotten, if indeed I ever knew; but several days before the wedding he came on to Arcadia with his mother and sister, and everyone was charmed with him. He was tall, slender and attractive, with gentle manners, humor, and genuine refinement. (Perhaps I may be pardoned the word; at least it’s a cut above what the neighbors said: “Breeding stuck out all over him.”) It was obvious that he was rich. The Denhams owned sugar plantations in Hawaii, and divided their residence between San Francisco and “the Islands.” Everybody was happy for Eudora; and she, though unsmiling as ever, seemed happy too.

The only flaw in the wedding was that Eudora insisted on Roger’s having Mr. Bickert for best man. It was embarrassing, but the bridegroom didn’t seem to mind. Besides, he had no friend of his own in Arcadia to serve as his attendant, and what could have been more natural than to choose a friend of Eudora’s? This settled, the wedding went off without a hitch, then, in early June, with the bride stunning in her mother’s bridal gown, the bridegroom in cutaway and striped trousers, and Mr. Bickert in his brown suit; and immediately after the reception, Mr. and Mrs. Roger Sullavan Denham left on the night train for the west, on the Twentieth Century no less. Of course the Twentieth Century never stopped in Arcadia; but, through connections of Roger’s, it was arranged for the train to make a special stop. I remember there was a separate write-up about it in the Arcadia Blade, quite apart from the account of the wedding, with the headline:

FAMOUS TRAIN STOPS
IN ARCADIA
FOR FIRST TIME

Within a month Eudora was back, to spend the rest of that hot summer in her father’s small frame house next door to ours. Her husband had gone on to Hawaii, she explained, to prepare their new home there for next winter. It was a reasonable explanation; but it did not explain why she returned to Arcadia every summer, thereafter, for the next five or six years. Meanwhile she continued to see Mr. Bickert as before. She received him openly in the parlor of her father’s house, went driving with him in the evening, and several times they were reported to have been seen dining and drinking together at the Onondaga Hotel in Syracuse or the Sagamore in Rochester.

But as time went on, the gossip strangely changed. There was something about Eudora’s very beauty, something in her reserve and dignity, that began to give scandal the lie. It was hard to believe that a young woman of her coldness, friendly but unsmiling, was involved in a sordid affair with a man like Bickert. It couldn’t be true; and the longer it went on, somehow, the less it was true. People found that they no longer needed to “pretend it wasn’t so”; it simply wasn’t. For reasons known only to themselves, they were good friends merely; a strange friendship, but Arcadia had often known stranger; and finally the only thing that was hinted about them was that Eudora was drinking too much. Mr. Bickert would bring around a bottle after supper and the two of them would sit all evening in the parlor, with the shades drawn, drinking together till midnight, when they would go out for a ride. On one of these evenings I heard Eudora laugh out loud for the first time in my life. It was one of those hot, still, summer nights, the town was absolutely silent, the only sound that could be heard in the night was the intermittent sputter and spit of the carbon arc lamp in the street, when suddenly there was a long cascading laugh, hard and harsh. I didn’t tremble as I heard it, but if I were writing a story I might say that I did.

Mr. Bickert’s chain of theatres had been expanding through New England, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and by the time I left Arcadia he had left too, to make his headquarters in New York, it was said. I also lost track of Eudora at that time, but I did hear that she seldom returned to Arcadia after Mr. Bickert’s departure, and that when she did return, it was only for a couple of weeks or so. She was by then living permanently in Honolulu, Mother wrote, with her husband.

In 1939, I was assigned to do a movie with a San Francisco background. Because I had never seen the city, the studio sent me up from Hollywood for a few weeks to absorb some of the color and atmosphere of that marvelous town. I had an expense account, so I stayed at the Mark Hopkins. Before I was out of bed on the second morning my phone rang and a man’s voice said, “Is this Charles Jackson?” I pulled myself awake, said that it was, and he went on, “We saw in the paper that you were here. Well, I don’t know whether you’ll remember me, but I’m Roger Denham and I married—” … “Roger,” I said, “of course I remember you! Where’s Eudora? How is she?” … “She’s right here beside me and she’s wonderful. Lovelier than ever.” … “Put her on!” … “No,” he said, “we’ll save it. Look, we’re leaving for the Islands day after tomorrow, can’t we get together before we go or are you terribly busy?” … “Can we not! Why don’t you come and have a drink with me this afternoon?” … “Love to.” … “Five o’clock. And the Top of the Mark? I can’t get enough of that view—it’s better than Shaw’s Hill. Ask Eudora, she’ll know.” … “We’ll be there.” … “Give her my love—tell her I can’t wait …”

And indeed I couldn’t. To me it is always exciting to meet people from home after many years, even though I find that my delight in the occasion sometimes embarrasses them. They seem to expect me to be different, they refuse to let me be myself, they stand aloof because they expect me to be aloof, they forget that I grew up in Arcadia just as they did and will never be anything but a small-town boy. And another thing that embarrasses them is the things I remember. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen that strange and strained look come over their faces as I recall, with nothing but joy over our infant foibles, some episode out of our mutual childhood. They say, “No, I don’t remember”—and if they really don’t, then I’m sorry for them for having cut themselves off from such a never-failing spring of delightful reminiscence.… Do they remember, Miss Brenner? And are they just saying they don’t, so that I won’t laugh at them? But I’m not laughing at them, I’m laughing at us, at myself too, and at all the pain and fun of growing up. Only last winter I ran into an old friend from home, a man I grew up with from early boyhood, and during the conversation I said, “Bill, will you ever forget the time Mother lifted the flap of our tent at an awkward moment, and after she’d caught her breath, began to shout: ‘The trouble with you boys is you need a hobby! You ought to cultivate a hobby! Do something with your hands!’ Do-something-with-our-hands indeed! I’ve laughed over that a million times. Will you ever forget it?” Bill didn’t say, “I don’t remember.” His eyes narrowed, his mouth partly opened, there was a sharp but silent intake of breath, and after a moment he said, “Say, they tell me you’re pretty well fixed—fifty thousand a year, is that right?” But of course Bill is a middle-aged father now, the father of boys who are doubtless doing the very same things that we used to do; and it’s not only better to pretend-it-isn’t-so, but that it never was.

The Denhams were on time, or almost; just late enough to let me get there first. I knew them the moment they stepped out of the elevator (who could ever forget that hair?), and as I advanced from the bar, I saw that Eudora knew me. She walked straight toward me, head up, unsmiling, almost stern, but she gripped my hand warmly and said, “Charles, I’d forgotten you were bald. You weren’t, back home, but I did see a picture of you somewhere—some magazine—I—This is my husband—” … “But of course,” I said, “we know each other, don’t we, Roger? My God I was at your wedding—don’t you remember?” … “Oh yes, so you were.” … “I’ll never forget that wedding,” I said, “—one moment in particular. In the mad scramble when everyone was throwing rice and stuff and you and Roger were running to the car, I tripped and fell to the sidewalk, almost at your feet, and you stopped—you actually stopped at a time like that—and bent down and said, ‘Charles, are you hurt?’ I’ve always loved you for that, Eudora. And think of it, I was sixteen at the time, not a little kid at all.” … “You were? That was a long time ago.…”

We took a table near the window, looking down Nob Hill, overlooking the bay and Alcatraz and the bridge and all that marvelous land- and seascape called the Golden Gate. Eudora and Roger sat on one side of the table, I on the other; it gave me a wonderful chance to gaze at her to my heart’s content. She sat erect, her hands folded together at the table edge, the fingers clenched, in fact; and in a moment or two Roger put his hand firmly on her arm as if reassuring or steadying her and kept it there during the next half hour.

I ordered drinks. At first Eudora refused, telling me firmly that she didn’t drink at all; but Roger said, “Now, hon, this is an occasion,” and asked for a sherry for her. He and I had whisky-and-soda.

“We celebrated our twentieth anniversary last week,” he said. “That’s why we’re back.”

“Is it possible …?”

“The old girl’s looking well, isn’t she?”

“Marvelous. Eudora, you simply do not change at all. At all!”

“Come, Charles.”

“But it’s true!” And it was true. Her face was unlined, it was as beautiful as ever, as cool, as regal, as reserved and calm. Well, perhaps not as calm. There was a persistent tiny twitching in her left cheek, and I noticed a certain tenseness of expression, a kind of facial rigidity that was something more than her characteristic coldness. Her hand trembled as she gripped the stem of the sherry glass between a tight finger and thumb, and when she raised her eyes to answer my toast “To Arcadia,” I noticed, for the first time, something else, something that was very disquieting. She may have thought that she was looking into my eyes, but she was not. She looked slightly to the left and slightly above them; and when I moved my head to be in her line of vision, her glance moved upward and leftward again, so that our eyes never quite came in contact with one another. I relaxed, and her gaze relaxed with me, still holding me; but it was not at my eyes that she looked, though she may have thought so. It was at some point just above my left temple.

I have noticed this odd and disconcerting characteristic in two other women I have known; and since I am speaking of it in connection with Eudora Detterson, I am sorry to say that they were women I did not trust.

I am also sorry to say that our meeting was a failure. Roger and I naturally had little in common, and Eudora was obviously preoccupied with some private concern of her own. She turned her head away and seemed to be studying the broad backs and figures of the soldiers, sailors, and marines who sat or stood at the great circular bar in the center of the room. Her hair was as brightly blonde as ever, white-gold, with flickering tiny lights that came and went before you could notice them; it was the kind of hair that would not show gray. Finally she made a little face of distaste and pushed the sherry glass aside, still half full. “I suppose you hear from your mother,” she said, and it was exactly as though she had ostentatiously glanced at her watch, or nudged Roger that it was time to go.

But I would not be put off. “Do you still sing, Eudora?”

“Never,” she said, so sharply that I felt it necessary, somehow, to change the subject.

“Tell me about ‘the Islands,’ as you call them. Is it wonderful there?”

“Don’t you see the Lurline advertisements—in color?” she said. “They tell you everything.” It was said without a smile, without a shade of humor, and I could not but feel a chill fall over the table.

“When did you say you’re leaving, day after tomorrow?” I asked. “I want to send flowers to the boat.”

“Don’t.”

“Well, a book, then.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” and here Eudora made an effort. “We loved your movie.”

I have become so used to having people say “We loved your movie” instead of “We read your book” that now I merely say “Thanks.”

“Do remember us fondly to your mother, won’t you,” Roger said as they got up.

I got up, too. “Thank you, I will.”

“Please don’t bother to see us down.”

“If you don’t mind,” I said. “I can sit here for hours, with that view. It’s a thrilling city, isn’t it?”

“I’m going to kiss you goodbye, Charles,” Eudora said, and she did. I was touched. Then she walked away toward the elevators. Roger and I shook hands and then he, too, was gone. I looked out of the windows into the west, the opposite direction from where Arcadia lay so far away (a writer’s crotchet, Miss Brenner). A low fog was moving in from the sea and the stanchions of the bridge were already obscured by mist. The bar was filling up, more and more servicemen were piling out of the elevators, the whole place began to throb and teem with life. And I could say that I sat there alone for a long time amid all that teeming life, absorbed in memories of the past—but because I am a human being and not a character in a story, in a little while I got hungry and descended to dinner.

Three weeks later, at noon of the day I was to leave on the Lark for Los Angeles, another call came that had to do with the Denhams. A woman’s voice said, “Is this the Mr. Jackson who is a friend of Mrs. Roger Denham?”—and in the background I heard a husky voice fairly snarl, “Say Eudora Detterson!” Alarmed, I said I was and who is this please? “I’m Mrs. Denham’s nurse. Could you call on her this afternoon? She wants to see you.” … “Certainly.” She gave me the address. “I’ll be there after lunch,” I said.

At two o’clock, I rang the bell at an apartment on Russian Hill. A young woman in a white uniform let me in. “I don’t know how this is going to go,” she said as she closed the door, “she changes so.” … “Changes?” … “I’ll say! All night long she talked about you and talked about you till I thought I’d go crazy, and only this morning she began to make sense enough to be able to tell me how to reach you. But now she’s off again. I’ll be darned if I know where she gets it.” … “Get’s what?” … “Liquor. Come on in.”

It was a comfortable three-or-four-room flat with a large attractive living room; probably their San Francisco pied-à-terre. I sat down, completely baffled, very depressed. “Where is Mr. Denham?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s gone off to Honolulu.”

“But I thought Mrs. Denham was to go with him?”

“She was, but at the last minute she just didn’t. She often doesn’t, you know.”

“No I don’t know. May I go in and see her?”

“Wait a sec, let me take a look first.”

I was left alone; but the nurse hadn’t been gone thirty seconds when I heard a voice—deep, throaty, growling, raw—cursing me up and down.

“Tell that—son-of-a-bitching bastard—to get the hell—out of here.…”

The nurse reappeared and gave me an apologetic smile. “I told you I didn’t know what it was going to be like. I’m sorry, Mr. Johnson.”

“I understand. Tell me, does she have a doctor?”

“Oh yes, a doctor and two nurses. I’m waiting for my relief right now—she was due at twelve noon, the stinker.”

“Has the doctor been here today?”

“No, nobody but an old friend of hers who comes around sometimes. The doctor isn’t due until six or seven tonight.”

“Is he a good one?”

“He’s all right, but between you and me he won’t last long. Oh, she’s cute, I tell you. She’s just as cute as the dickens. She’s way ahead of doctors—way ahead of them!—and as soon as they catch up with her, she changes them. She only hangs onto a doctor as long as she can fool him. Isn’t it awful? Such a nice refined woman, too. But right now, just dis—disgusting.”

Suddenly a deep guttural wail came out of the bedroom, and at this point—writer or no writer—it’s all right for me to say that my spine tingled. “Charrles! Charries!” It was all but a bawl. The nurse nodded to me and I went in.

A half-naked woman, with her nightgown up around her middle, literally writhed on a wide double bed. She was soaked in sweat; the sheet under her was drenched gray with sweat too, as far as the edge of the bed (through the sweat I could see the stitching of the pad underneath), and the pillow was a sodden sweaty mass of wet linen, ticking, and feathers. The woman turned on the bed, tried to lean upward on her elbows, then fell back and rolled her eyes up at me. They gazed into space a foot above my head. I pulled her nightgown down, then sat on the wet edge of the bed beside her.

“What can I do, Eudora, isn’t there anything I can do?”—and I have never felt words to be so futile in my life. I called her Eudora because I knew that it was she, but not in a single expression or feature of that face that I thought I knew so well, not in her eyes, her voice, her gestures, not even in the color of her hair (all the glinting lights were gone, it was nothing but a wet mop of lifeless, colorless matting), could I see Eudora Detterson. It was as though she had been replaced by some obscene impostor.

At the sound of my voice, she tried to pull me down to her; then she half-raised her body and threw her arms around me. Her cheek was against mine, and she kissed my mouth hard. She was covered with perfume, it was as though bottles of perfume had been poured over her, but through the reeking scent I detected a different, an ether-like odor—paraldehyde, it seemed to me; and, if it was paraldehyde, the perfume was intended to offset the vile stench of that medicine. She clung to me with such a blind frenzy that I was sure she didn’t know who I was. With difficulty I unclasped her arms from my neck, her kiss from my mouth, and, as gently as possible, forced her to lie back again.

Through the open door I heard the apartment bell ring; the tardy relief, I thought; and I hoped the new nurse would be more capable and sympathetic than the one I had met.

I won’t attempt to reproduce the accents of the halting, gasping, choking conversation that followed, nor even tell you what it was she said. I was so shocked by the spectacle before me on that sweat-soaked bed that, of the whole confused twenty minutes or so, I only distinctly remember three separate things, and the order in which she said them. Their sequence, far more than their content, was tragically revealing to me.

She said, “Oh, Charles, I’m dying, I’m going to pieces, and it isn’t drink, Charles, I don’t drink at all, I haven’t had a single drink, not one single drink for weeks and weeks, it’s just sheer nervous exhaustion, I want to die, I can’t stand it any more …”

Not many minutes later she said, looking at me above my left temple, “Be a friend, won’t you, Charles, don’t be nasty, do me a kindness, hand me that bottle in that thing there,” and a vague hand indicated the small mahogany commode beside the bed. I opened the door of the cabinet and took out a fifth of whisky, three-quarters full. A tumbler stood on the shelf. I didn’t hesitate.

Why should I?—it was medicine now; and if the whisky could give her even a small respite till the doctor arrived with his sedatives or whatever, who was I to withhold it from her? She was so far gone in drink by now that one more could do her no harm (it wasn’t as if she’d been off liquor); on the contrary, it might relax her into sleep. I filled the glass nearly full. She sat up in bed, reached for it with both hands, and the edge of the glass struck her teeth sharply as she pulled it to her mouth. Her hands trembled violently and some of the liquor slopped over, but she got it down—and, appalling to watch, got it down in a series of convulsive swallows without pausing once for breath. Then began such a coughing, choking, racking and retching fight for air that I truly thought for a dreadful moment that she would not recover. But in another moment she sank back quietly upon the pillow, reached out a hand and put it on my sleeve, nodded, and gazed into space inches above the top of my head. When she spoke again, her voice was very tired. “Oh, Charles, if you only knew what I’ve been through, they come with those awful tanks and those awful needles and they stick my arms and give me those awful intravenous feedings, and oh, Charles, they take so long, they hurt so, they take so long, so long.…”

I took her hand, held it in mine, and said, “I know, Eudora, I’ve had them too, many times, you’re forgetting, I know what they’re like, and I know they’re no picnic.” And then she said the third thing that, in connection with the first two—still more in connection with what I had witnessed only a minute before—made such an impression on me and filled me with a shattering despair for her. She nodded her head up and down, smiled widely and slyly, waggled a ribald finger at me, and gazed high over my head. “Ahhh,” she said, “but yours was for liquor.…” A few moments later she was asleep. I got up and returned to the living room.

As I came in, I saw that a man was sitting on the sofa, reading a newspaper. He did not look up at once, but I would have known that brown suit anywhere. He put down the paper and gave me a glance without surprise.

“Hello, kid,” he said. “Long time no see.”

I heard myself saying idiotically, “What are you doing here?”

“Why, I live here.”

“Here?”

“Frisco.”

The nurse came in from the kitchen. “Oh, have you two met?”

“We have,” I said.

“Oh my yes.”

“Tell me one thing, Mr. Bickert.”

“Anything you like.”

“Did you bring her that bottle in there?”

“This morning.”

“Why you thorough—”

“Listen, stupe,” he interrupted. “We’re not in Arcadia now. You might as well get used to the idea, Eudora’s a nympho and dipso from way back. I thought you were the boy who’s supposed to understand these things. But when you meet up with it you don’t like it, is that it?”

“I don’t like you.”

“That’s your privilege. But don’t you tell me how to handle Eudora. I know her like a book. She’s got to have her liquor and—well, even that silly husband of hers knows that. If he can take it I guess you can. As for the bottle I brought her, I know what I’m doing, see? You wouldn’t have her jumping out the window, would you?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think—”

“Well, don’t think—and you’ll be much better off. Just run along and peddle your papers. Only, if you ever see her again, don’t let her know that you saw me too—do her that much of a favor, will you? He knows, but she don’t want anybody else to know.…” And when I remembered how Roger had kept his hand on Eudora’s arm during our half hour at the Top of the Mark, I knew that he did know.…

But there are serious faults in this story, too, Miss Brenner, more fundamental faults than in what I was able to tell you about Fig Newton. I confess to a bewilderment throughout, an uncertainty and shakiness, a lack of confidence in my ability to illustrate how it really was. For of course I don’t know. As a writer I have always had one hard and fast rule: Don’t write about anything you don’t know anything about. It goes without saying that the better you understand a story and the more intimately you are able to identify yourself with it—the more, even, that you can “become” that character, be it male or female—the better the story will be and the truer for the reader. Which is why I write so much about myself: what is true of me will be more or less true of the reader, for no one is unique. But in writing about Eudora I am handicapped. Had I known her better, had I been in on some of those missing years, I might have been able to give you the story as it should be given, from within. As it is, I can only skip around, offer bits and pieces widely separated in time, and only the external or surface values at that. This again is why I cannot write Eudora’s story as a story, and why I would not attempt it. Factually reported case histories (and this is hardly more) are not the proper materials of fiction, much less of literature. Reading such “cases,” you experience nothing but a cool detachment and a sense of self-congratulation, perhaps, that the history is not your own. But properly imagined, understood, and told, Eudora’s story would have been your own; you would have been intensely interested, you would have suffered through it, and you would have followed it with a sense of self-discovery. In short, you would have lived a little during the story, learned a little, and perhaps been a little better for having read it.

Apart from my knowing so little about Eudora’s history, the chief fault here is the quality of it. Her story is tragic enough, but it is not tragedy. Like so many others, Eudora was a defeated woman; life defeated her and wrecked her so that it became too much for her; somewhere along the way she was forced down the wrong path and could not retrace her steps—and we pity her. But we are not uplifted. We say, “Too bad, isn’t it awful, such a shame and such a waste,” and forget it. We are as untouched internally, so to speak—in our innermost hearts, that is—as we are when told of the misfortune of a friend, even though it concerns someone we have known all our lives or someone we once loved. We are genuinely sorry and can even afford to devote several minutes to expressing our pity aloud and to shaking our heads in sympathetic commiseration, experiencing meanwhile a rich swelling of the heart and a kind of pride in our generosity of emotion; but in the long run it does not really concern us very deeply, we have our own lives to lead and there is work to be done. What is lacking is the understanding, the “participation,” and, if I may use a lofty Aristotelian word, the purge. “One may hear the most private affairs of other people,” writes D. H. Lawrence, “but only in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and in a spirit of fine discriminating sympathy.… And here lies the vast importance of the story, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the story, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.” I have respect for the struggling, battered human soul that was Eudora Detterson, and my sympathy was, and still is, profound (indeed how could it be else, after seeing Eudora with my own eyes at the bottom of the pit, not even struggling to get out, deluding herself that she was not in the pit at all, and all the while digging the pit deeper and deeper); but “sympathy” here merely means “feeling sorry for,” which could scarcely be further removed from its real meaning for literature, “the fact or the power of entering into the feelings of another,” which is what we experience when we follow the events of Anna Karenina’s life or Emma Bovary’s. We feel sorry for Eudora but we are not really informed how it was with her, we are not cleansed or freshened, and the passional secret places of life remain unexplored. To explore them, one would have to tell the story, not write a letter as I do here.

How can this be done when the story is not your own and the character not yourself? Some writers write truly well only when they write from out of their own necessarily limited experience; others can range at will, godlike, throughout the whole vast complex of humanity itself, entering into the life and heart now of one character, now of another. How we would all like to write a War and Peace, giving to Natasha, say, so much of ourselves that it would seem as if she were the sole character in whom we were interested; then turning with equal prodigality to Andrew Bolkonsky; then achieving the “impossible” by being able to do as much for and with Julie Karagina, or the old Count Besukov, or Dolokhov, or Prince Anatole—and at the same time having the capacity to turn the full illuminating light of our imagination and sympathy on an obscure unhappy guest at Madame Rostova’s name-day banquet, revealing him in such a way that, though he is never to be mentioned again, the reader will never forget him—thus: “The German tutor was trying to remember all the dishes, wines, and kinds of dessert, in order to send a full description of the dinner to his people in Germany; and he felt greatly offended when the butler with a bottle wrapped in a napkin passed him by. He frowned, trying to appear as if he did not want any of that wine, but was mortified because no one would understand that it was not to quench his thirst or from greediness that he wanted it, but simply from a conscientious desire for knowledge.” What does it? What is it that makes us so instantly familiar with that unhappy stuffy little man, as familiar with him as if we had spent years in his company? The trying-to-remember, the being-offended, the frown, the wanting-to-appear-as-if-he-didn’t-really-want-any-wine-at-all, the mortification, the conscientious-desire-for-knowledge, plus his implied rationalization that that was all he really wanted—it is an art that cannot be learned, alas. Beyond us! And how well we know this, how conscious we are that it is so! Meanwhile, for what it is worth, we each offer our own special little thing, we do our best, we give the little that we have, and we are grateful for the will and the patience to try to express ourselves, no matter how small the range. But the other? It is best not to think of it too much. There is a story that a young man came to Mozart and said, “Master, will you teach me how to compose in the sonata form?” Mozart asked, “How old are you?” “Twenty-four,” the young man said. Mozart shook his head. “I’m sorry, you’re too young.” “Too young? But Master!” protested the young man, “you wrote the Adelaide Concerto at the age of ten, at twelve you were working in the sonata form, and at fifteen you had composed a symphony!” “Yes, that’s true,” Mozart replied, “but you see, I never asked anybody how.”—Luckily, when we sit down to our solitary task, we forget the Mozarts and the Beethovens, else we should never write a syllable.

An alibi, Miss Brenner? But an alibi only for my inadequate telling of what happened to Harriet Newton, Eudora Detterson, and Faith Goldsmith. I admit you will learn little from my recital; but if it interests you—if what I have told you here interests you at all and holds that interest to the end—that will have to be enough.

Or perhaps I can supply something of the necessary cleansing-and-freshening—the purge without which no proper drama is complete—if I go on and give you the finale of Eudora’s story, telling you, however reluctantly, what ultimately happened to her. I will try, but it is a lurid, a bizarre, ending. It is outrageous and it is just. Painful though it was, I accept it; for in the denouement, our poor, floundering, lost Eudora seems to have come into her own at last, and perhaps to have found what she was looking for.

The tale might have come straight out of that D. H. Lawrence from whom I have just quoted; and, like many of his stories, the scene is Mexico. In 1945, I was stopping for a few days with some American friends in Guadalajara. One afternoon I sat with my host in the patio of his house, sipping tequila, and listening somewhat absently while he spun yarns about his adopted country. The terrace overlooked a broad richly colored valley, with purple mountains in the background capped by tinted snow, more coral than pink. A cool breeze blew toward us from out of the distance and stirred the iron-stiff leaves of the maguey on the slope below, too cool a breeze, it seemed, to be blowing across all those hot colors.

“… It’s a screwy country, Mexico,” my friend was saying—and fondly, theatrically, he pronounced it Mai-hee-ko. “It’s a land of bloodshed and savage violence, but the violence never lasts, hatred and passion are over in a second. Anything can happen in a sleepy landscape like this. Life and death tangle inextricably together—Christ they’re almost interchangeable—and one is no more important than the other. In fact, the odds are in favor of death, if anything. Life in itself isn’t worth a peso here, or even very much esteemed. But if you die, your death is cherished, celebrated, made much of. Oh, they make a big thing of death down here—it brings them closer to God, I think, or to their everlasting Blessed Virgin.…”

It was the kind of talk I had often heard; the American expatriates below the border are eloquent on the subject; and at any moment I expected him to use some such funny phrase as the currently fashionable “mystique”—“Death is the mystique of Mai-hee-ko” or something like that. But he had already gone on to tell of an American divorcée, appropriately rich and beautiful, who, a couple of years ago, had bought a house nearby, and soon became the talk of Guadalajara.

“… The place went to her head, I guess. Rich as she was, and blonde—with good God the most beautiful head of hair I ever saw in my life—she went native with a vengeance. Filled up her house with Mexican silver, and turquoise, and pottery, not just turista crap either; draped serapes over the balconies and window sills, and took to native dress—Christ if she didn’t wear a falda de campesina complete with rebozo like the Indian women—actually went to market like that, when she was sober enough. Of course everybody does it more or less, I wear these damned huaraches myself—good God you can’t go around dressed by Savile Row or Schiaparelli in a place like this—but nobody carries it to the lengths that she did. I mean, well, she lost no time in completing the role by getting herself a native lover, a peon no less—a big, husky, lady, no-good peon with a physique like Joe Louis. Or maybe Tony Luhan would be better. His name was Robustiano—how do you like that?—and somehow or other she managed to get herself married to him, or at least said she did, so that she could drop her husband’s name, which was Denham, and sign herself in real Mexican style: Señora Detterson y Nogales. First name is Eudora, so that’s all right—I mean it sounds spic enough. But there was one thing she drew the line at. No tequila or pulque for her. No sir! Straight gin was her drink, and plenty of it. Cases of gin, they say, came down regularly from California. She could have got it from Mexico City just as well, or even here, and saved herself a lot of dough in duty alone. But San Francisco is where it came from.”

I don’t know why, but I was not surprised at any of this. The moment he began the story, it almost seemed as if I could have stopped him and supplied the name of the lady myself.

“… She and her Robustiano got along all right for awhile. She didn’t mix at all with what we ourselves call, defensively I suppose, ‘the gringo set,’ but one of the servants would report occasionally that the two of them were as happy as larks—drunken larks, sure, but what the hell, happy enough. And sometimes, maybe on some wonderful morning—and it had better be early, because by noon she’d be too drunk—you’d be going by in the street and from over the wall of the patio you’d hear her singing. Christ what a voice! It was thrilling, I tell you. I tell you it was positively thrilling!”

I could have told him that myself, and later I did. Later I told him how I had known Señora Detterson y Nogales from childhood, but I didn’t want to interrupt him now.

“… There were a couple of chinks in the armor, of course. One was that she took to sleeping with other peons besides Robustiano, who didn’t seem to mind, however, and the other was that all that luxury soon began to pall on him, or maybe he just wanted to show off his finery and his white woman—in that order, naturally—to his own kind. Anyhow he began to pine for his native village, a hamlet of about a thousand peons south and west of here, little over a hundred miles—Purifiçación, it’s called.” (Sorry, Miss Brenner, but that was the name.) “So the Señora packed her Robustiano into the Chrysler and they took off. And either she didn’t know what she was getting into or did know and didn’t care—good God maybe she was even asking for it—but it seems that Robustiano was already married to some Indian woman. Not only that but they had nine kids, no less. And he and his blonde rich-bitch hadn’t been in Purifiçación more than a few hours when the thing happened. It was like a revolt, we heard; an uprising, a regular revolution. To a man, the whole village rose up—though I should say ‘to a woman,’ too, since the women were behind it all, I’m told, and saw it through, shoulder to shoulder with their men, right up to the terrible end. What happened was that the Señora was seized and dragged to the public square, stripped of her clothes, tied to a post, and then and there, before the whole assembled village—with nobody lifting a finger to stop it, not even Robustiano—she was publicly horse-whipped. Something, isn’t it?”

Deeply shaken, I could only ask what happened then. And what happened then was that, a few days later, she was able to return by herself to Guadalajara. Robustiano stayed behind where he belonged, with his family. And the very day after she returned, Eudora summoned a priest and asked him to begin her instruction. Months later, she made her declaration of faith and was baptized into the Catholic Church. Unbeliever though I am, I could not but be relieved for Eudora when I heard this, remembering my early teaching that the greater the sinner, the more he is loved by Christ. But I was not able to call upon her when I was in Guadalajara, because by that time, after a due period of what they call “postulancy,” she was already serving her novitiate at El Colegio del Sagrado Corazón, preparatory to taking her final vows as a nun.

… Does it satisfy us, Miss Brenner? Does it make us feel better? Are we cleansed and freshened? Whether or not, it seems to me a fitting end to Eudora’s story, right and just, except for one small fact of no real importance at all: the fact that I made it up. The storyteller will out; I found myself inventing willy-nilly, because I was reluctant to leave it where I left it in life, ending it in San Francisco. But “inventing” is not the word, either. The Mexican episode did happen in fact, but to someone else, to another woman I knew, and I gave it to Eudora because it seemed to me a suitable climax and resolution to her dilemma. And does it matter that it is not factually true? It matters not at all if it has held our interest and belief. A story is told for its own sake. The writer never asks you to believe it, the reader never asks if it is true. In his own heart he will know if it is true or not, without needing to know whether it ever actually happened in what we call real life. In any case, the horse-whipping in the public square of Purifiçación—Arcadia indeed!—is the only invented part of the story.

But is it? I don’t honestly know. How am I to tell? A writer draws his material from many sources; everything is grist to the mill, fact as well as fancy. When he is “hot,” the least word uttered by his wife, his children, his neighbor, becomes a possible line in his story; the smallest episode that occurs in his domestic routine in the morning, such as spilling his coffee or noticing that the sunrise looks more like a sunset, might go into his story that night. Memory plays a greater part in his work than imagination, or is it the other way round? At any rate, when the work is finished, he would be hard put to say definitely which incident sprang from fact and which from fancy. But that is not his concern or his problem: his sole task is to make the story convincing to the reader, make it “true.” I have never been in Guadalajara, nor in Mexico for that matter, but you put in a line like “too cool a breeze to be blowing across all those hot colors” and you are there—and for all I know at this point, Mr. Bickert and his brown suit may be invented too, perhaps it was my sister Rachel and not Eudora at all who played the piano at the Crescent Theatre, it is quite possible that Harriet Newton never gave utterance to that childish declaration, “God is my father, not you” (did I hear this wonderful statement from one of my own children?), and the famous Pink Party may never have taken place except in my own imagination first and then here on paper. But by now the Pink Party is on its own, so to speak, and whatever impression it has made can hardly be affected one way or another by anything further that I might add, no, not even if I were to deny it up and down. The Pink Party is yours now, mine no longer, yours to believe in and even to remember, if you like, while I, having got rid of it at last, am free to go on to other things—to Faith Goldsmith and her sleepy-eyed beauty, to her wise-guy brother, her Latin teaching, her husband and son and the violent deaths of all three. As for what is literally true and not true in my story, I must borrow from Henry Handel Richardson, who says it for me and says it better: “The woof of fact and fiction is so intricately spun that, even for their author, the unraveling would prove a difficult and lengthy task.”

What goes on around him, of course, and what he remembers from the past, the writer appropriates for his own use. This you will inevitably put down to theft and larceny, but you should first consider the mitigating circumstance in the peculiar nature of writers, that queer tribe which sprang originally, no doubt, from Judas. Confidences and secrets are the writer’s dish, his personal secrets no less than someone else’s; private life is his oyster. And his own mother is no more “safe” from him than a total stranger who might happen to strike his fancy as being likely material for a story. He must essentially draw from life as he sees it, lives it, overhears it, or steals it, and the truer the writer, perhaps, the bigger the blackguard. He lives by biting the hand that feeds him, a profession older than the one generally supposed, for there was most certainly a storyteller around that original campfire (else how would we know now that there had ever been a campfire at all?). He is the terrible infant of the arts and there is no use spanking him, because he will only turn around and, quite disinterestedly, report the spanking and expose the spanker, with that same innocent absorption in life and all its mutations that leads him to betray even his own most incriminating and secret thoughts. What he observes through a neighbor’s keyhole and what transpires in his own bed are equally legitimate for a story. Trigorin in The Sea Gull must interrupt the process of putting poor Nina through that fate which is popularly acknowledged to be worse-than-death in order to take down firsthand notes on a seduction, and no reader ever followed the tribulations of Eugene Gant with greater fascination and interest than did young Mr. Gant himself. And if the writer should suffer a qualm about putting his best friend in a story (though it is hardly thinkable that such a qualm would arise), his next thought will be, “Okay, I’m a snake, but first there’s a story to tell.”

But, robber though he may be, paradoxically the writer can never use anything that is not his own. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone has told me, or sent me, a story that he thought I would be interested in and thus make use of, free-gratis-for-nothing. It might be the most unusual story in the world—brilliant plot, marvelous people, rich in situation and meaning—but unless I have observed it with my own eyes, known the people intimately, and experienced at least some of it myself—taken part in it, shall we say—it is useless. And if I had another dollar for each time a friend has said, “I want you to meet So-and-so, he’s a real character all right, you could write a book about him,” I’d be a millionaire. Usually the real character turns out to be merely a type, one of thousands like him, not nearly so interesting, say, as the real character who introduced me to him. These people mean well, but they have nothing to offer. The writer’s job and life are a solitary one, no one can help him, all the king’s horses cannot drag him to his typewriter unless he goes there by himself with something of his own, all the king’s men cannot give him an idea from all their vast and varied experience that will be worth a nickel to him. The idea grows from inside him first, in some mysterious place within (his mind? his heart? his psyche? his unconscious?—even he himself is unable to tell you where, or why, or how), and only after it has begun to take shape as a possibility for a story does he look about him in the outside world for the material with which to clothe it.

Someone has said that an unhappy childhood is a writer’s gold mine but I don’t know, growing up in a small town is just as good. Such a background fed Sherwood Anderson for years, and Thomas Wolfe, and Sinclair Lewis, and Willa Cather, and even the great Mann—and by “fed” I do not mean “put bread in their mouths,” though it did that too: I mean fed the wellsprings of their—well, their will to work or their animating actions (you can see that I’m breaking my neck to avoid using “inspiration” here, a word I abhor as much as I would abhor using a quill pen). In a small town it’s practically impossible not to know practically everything about practically everybody else (the secretive Faith Goldsmith shall be the exception that proves our rule), and this, plus the fact that one’s childhood impressions are the deepest and most lasting, the purest and probably the most universal, makes for a never-failing source of fiction. For example, I could just as readily have substituted four other girls in place of the four you mention, or forty others, and the material furnished by remembering those forty girls would thus have been multiplied forty-fold, but I have confined myself to the four you cited and let their stories tell themselves. Or the stories of three, rather, since only you yourself could tell the fourth.

After reading a new story of mine recently, my wife said, “I’ll bet the neighbors back home will be making book on who is to be your next victim”; but somehow I have never thought of the protagonists of my stories as victims and never will. Once they are set down on paper they cease to be neighbors and become characters of my own, which of course is exactly what they are to the outside world and to the readers (multitudinous in number, one always hopes) for whom one writes. For every ten or twelve who know the “real” situation and the “real” facts—actual identities and names and places—there are hundreds and hundreds who don’t, and who accept the story as you give it to them, uncorrupted by the kind of parochial malice that delights in seeing someone else “written up” and congratulates itself (doubtless with fingers crossed) that itself has been spared—thus far. It is true that it’s difficult to write without hurting somebody, but it is also true that the writer is never “harder” on anybody else than he is on himself (indeed, who is more interesting to oneself than oneself, whom does one know more intimately, who else can supply one with such a mine of material experienced at firsthand?). The writer does not want to hurt people, but if he stopped to think of the possibilities of this, he’d never write at all.

A friend of ours wrote my wife: “I’ve often wondered if your husband liked us, but now I know. In one book he named an adulteress after me, and in his new book he names a streetwalker after my daughter!” (It must be admitted, but in all innocence, that I had.) And the sum total of all that another friend was able to get out of The Fall of Valor was a single word, the word “angular.” Up to a point she had taken pride in the idea that she was the model for one of the characters (this was vaguely true), but after she came upon that adjective in a description of the lady, she could not forgive me. It did not ruin our friendship, but it has put upon it a severe strain. To this day, whenever the novel is mentioned, she raises haughty eyebrows, curls her nostrils, holds her angular figure erect, and rasps at me, “Angular!”—And now I find myself blushing for my own kind when I admit, somewhat sadly, that the lady is a professional writer herself.

Of course, instances of this kind could be multiplied ad infinitum from any writer’s experience. Except for the fact that time itself soon takes care of it, there must be a good twenty possible answers to the lady and her daughter whose Christian names I unwittingly besmirched, to my angular friend, and the dozens of others who have written to me at one time or another: “I must say I don’t think it’s very nice of you to put in cold print for all the world to see that Gert Winterbath’s father was a brakeman on the N.Y. Central when you know very well that he was a foreman of Baxter Brothers Box Factory and earned at least $4000 a year”; or, “I am literally appalled at your cavalier treatment of Dr. Becker. He was a good friend of yours and helped you immeasurably when you needed it most. Thus for you to caricature him in return and to allude to him throughout as ‘the foolish psychiatrist’ is both a gross insult to a great man and proof-positive of your thoroughly small and despicable nature.”—Answers aplenty, I’m sure; but would they do any good? I doubt it. The human species is a fallible breed and has a stubborn tendency not to see the woods for the trees. Writers themselves can’t help muttering repeatedly when they read an acknowledged roman à clef, “But So-and-so isn’t like that at all, the guy’s got it all wrong,” and who knows?—if I should pick up a new novel tomorrow, and discover that I myself am the villain (or, equally distasteful, the hero), perhaps my howl of pain would be louder than that of my angular lady-friend. If this shattering experience ever comes to pass, however, I hope I shall have the good sense to take The Long View and remind myself that when others got around to reading the book I could relax in the secure knowledge that nobody would know the character was me but me. That failing, I’ll try to remember to look up and absorb again Thomas Wolfe’s sensible and, for once, concise words on the subject, viz.: “If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose. Dr. Johnson remarked that a man would turn over half a library to make a single book: in the same way a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single figure in a novel.”

Of the four of you girls, Faith Goldsmith married earliest. From grammar school days, as you yourself must have heard, she had been in love with Wilbur Gordon, but nobody would have known this if her kid brother hadn’t told it all over town. Jess Goldsmith was four or five years older than I, a big difference at that age, but he used to tell me when I was hardly out of rompers that his older sister kept a photograph of Wilbur Gordon in her bedroom, draped with a piece of pink tulle that had been torn from an old evening gown of her mother’s, that she wrote about him in her diary daily whether she had seen him that day or not, and that every night when she went to bed she took off the pink tulle, kissed Wilbur’s picture, and then put it under her pillow till morning. This was wonderful, it thrilled me to know that such things happened outside of books, I felt that I was really living, however vicariously; but Jess otherwise instructed us younger boys in the facts of life. For example, one afternoon when he and my younger brother and I were on a hike into the country, Jess told us about babies—not only where they came from, but how they got there in the first place. I was stunned, shocked into silence. (I must have been about twelve at the time, and my brother was three years younger.) We had already heard about that dreadful act—I mean that there was such a thing—but it was something that only nasty people did, not fathers and mothers, and people on the other side of the canal at that, bad people who didn’t know better. It couldn’t possibly be true, not about parents! If it were, how could Mother, with a thing like that on her conscience, scold me for such a simple disobedience as, say, forgetting to empty the ice pan? How could she appear at the table, before her own children, and smile and everything, if she had ever done a thing like that? But of course it simply wasn’t true and could never be true! Jess was only making it up, and I must say I didn’t think it was very nice of him to be joking about such things, making up such stuff about a sacred institution like parents. Finally I found my voice. “You’re crazy, Jess,” I said, “it can’t be true. No sir! Not Papa and Mama! Papa and Mama would never do a thing like that, never in all this world. No sir, not Papa and Mama!” My younger brother had said nothing at all. Finally he said, “Well, Papa might, but Mama wouldn’t.”

At an early age, you’ll remember, Faith Goldsmith was tall; as a woman she was very tall indeed. When I think back on her now, I remember mostly the glamorous legendary creature that my imagination made of her face and figure, tall, straight, sleepy-eyed. To me she seemed the epitome of the fatally attractive women out of the romantic age of the troubadors; she might have been the reigning queen at some Court of Love in Provençal (or Avignon, or Carcassonne, or Lyonnesse, depending on what I had been reading at the time). With her sleepy-eyed beauty, secretive and aloof, she was the incarnation of all the women in Edgar Allan Poe, and once in my early teens, in spite of the prosaic happenings in her bedchamber duly reported from time to time by her brother with ribald comments, I wrote a poem about her and called it, shamelessly, “Ligeia,” though in a later version she became “Ulalume.” Had it not been for the fact that her brother, in one of his raids on her boudoir, would most certainly have apprehended my poem and spread the scandal all over town, I would have copied it painstakingly in green ink on a sheet of Mother’s heavy deckle-edged stationery, sealed the luxuriously lined envelope with purple sealing wax, and sent it to her in the mail, romantically anonymous.

Faith married Wilbur Gordon when she was nineteen and he was twenty-four. Wilbur was one of the up-and-coming young men of the town. He already owned his own nursery business, and had branched out into lucrative sidelines of insurance, canned goods, and what people at home call “extracts,” in which he did a considerable mail-order business. He was a big sweaty man with a deep voice, loud laugh, and a heavy lumbering walk. He was seen more often in shirtsleeves than not; he wore delicate-looking pince-nez, oddly enough, which set very fragilely on the broad bridge of that big nose; and he was very popular with men. In high school he had been a valuable athlete to A. H. S., but he gave up sports entirely after marriage and devoted almost all of his time to his many thriving enterprises.

Before he was thirty, Faith had a son called Jamie, and Wilbur was already rich. He was also spending a good deal of time away from home, not only evenings but several nights a week. People were certain that he was no more aware of his wife—who she was, that she was there, what she looked like, how she was dressed, to say nothing of the incontrovertible fact that she loved him—than if she had not existed. To give herself something to do, for time hung heavy on her hands, she registered her name at the high school as a “substitute” teacher, preferably in languages, to take the place of other teachers when they were ill. Many times I had her in Latin class, and she was wonderful. Our regular Latin teacher was called “Wop” inevitably—“Wop” Hardwick—just as our German teacher was called “Dutch,” but nobody dreamed of calling Faith Goldsmith, or Mrs. Gordon, “Wop.” I can still see her standing in front of the class while we huddled over our Cicero, pretending an interest that we didn’t feel for an instant, or writing notes to one another in the margins of the pages. I doubt if much of this was lost on Mrs. Gordon, though she never took any notice of it—anything to keep peace was her attitude, anything!—and we appreciated her aloofness and took advantage of it. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, almost half-closed; a faint, inappropriate, and secret smile played continually about her mouth; and this absent-minded smile—the kind of smile that had probably become fixed, as though she had long since forgotten that she was smiling at all—seemed to indicate that her mind was on other things. It was not the smile of mirth—even I was old enough to see that. The smile was a mask, defensive, hiding who knew what private torment, yet all the while promising Arcadia that they would never get it out of her, nothing would ever shake her impassivity no matter what the cost, no matter how bad things were at home: the secret and the peace would be kept. I remember once that Hortense Paget wrote in the margin of her book, “Look what those two sparrows on the roof are doing,” and turned the book so that I could read the message. Mrs. Gordon passed along the aisle just at this moment, reached down, picked up Hortense’s book, most certainly saw and read the scribbled note while we died a thousand deaths, pretended to mark a passage for Hortense to translate at sight-reading, walked slowly back to the front of the room, turned, faced the class again, half-closed her eyes, smiled her sleepy, mysterious, abstract smile, and murmured, “Very well, Miss Paget, you may begin now.”—Anything to keep peace.

After Wilbur’s affair with an Italian girl in Palmyra had become so public that it could no longer be ignored, Faith Goldsmith Gordon quietly resigned first from the Coterie Club, then from the Tuesday Club, then from the Shakespeare Club, then from the Travellers’ Club, then from the Arcadia Library Association, and finally she withdrew her name from the “substitute” list at the high school.

At about this time, an odd story was told of the Gordons, and of course it came from Faith’s irrepressible brother Jess. The son Jamie was probably eight by now. On one of those rare evenings when Wilbur was home, the family sat down to dinner in something more than their usual silence. The reason for this was startling indeed. Faith had removed the customary centerpiece and replaced it with a floor mop from the kitchen, the handle of which had been cut off to about six inches. There it was in the middle of the table, its filthy gray strings draped artistically over the edge of the silver bowl in which it stood. Nobody said anything. They went on eating in silence, Wilbur bending low over his plate, wolfing his food as always and not looking up at all. About halfway through dinner, suddenly Faith picked up her water tumbler and threw it at her husband. It missed him and crashed against the wall above the sideboard. Wilbur glanced up apprehensively. His wife had risen from her chair, and now she put both hands on the table, leaned forward, and screamed at him as if her son and brother had not been present. “Damn you,” she cried. “Oh, damn you! Don’t you ever notice anything at all? For all you know of what I am or what I do, I might be a piece of furniture! Do you see that mop in the center of the table? Do you? Do you? I put it there on purpose—to see if you’d notice it. But no, you didn’t even so much as speak of it! Or even look at it, or at your son, or me, or anything else!”

For a woman of Faith Goldsmith’s gentility, quiet temperament, and sleepy-eyed countenance, it was an outburst unheard-of in its fury and passion. But there were some, my mother among them, who put a different interpretation on the episode. They felt certain that, when Wilbur came to the table, he must have seen that preposterous centerpiece at once, wondered what it was all about, then decided to lay low and take no notice—because, for all he knew, it might be the first alarming symptom that his wife was, as they said at home, off her trolley. In any case, whether he noticed it or not, it was an indication that the marriage had gone far wrong. It could not nor it would not come to good.

… And now as I approach the end of Faith Goldsmith’s story and the end of Faith Goldsmith herself—only just now, Miss Brenner, at this very moment, have I suddenly realized for the first time that once again I’ve been covering the same old ground that you deplore so much in my work: “drinking—sex—murder.” But all these things and more, Miss Brenner, much more, are known, and known familiarly, to every inhabitant of a small town; and why or how they can come to him as a shock or surprise when he reads of them in a book is, and will always be, a mystery to me. And I suppose here is the time and place to speak of the subject matter of my work, which after all was the most pertinent question that your letter raised.

What does subject matter amount to in itself? I have always believed that the “subject” doesn’t count for much, provided you have something individual to say. Certainly it doesn’t count in the other arts; why should it in writing? An art critic has said that Cézanne makes an apple important, while Thomas Benton makes a lynching unimportant. Which of course is another way of saying that it’s not the subject matter but what the artist does with it that counts. Isn’t this true of writers and writing? If, for example, you should happen to decide arbitrarily that you didn’t like books written in the first person, or books about whaling, or patricide, or prostitution, or war, or wretched poverty, or divorce, or madness, or adultery, or homosexuality, or cripples, or the most erotic kind of fornication for fornication’s sake, and thus should rule them off your list, you’d be doing yourself out of some of the greatest works of literature in the world’s history—in fact, nearly all of them. What counts, it seems to me, is what the writer brings to his story, not the subject itself: his observations, viewpoints, interpretations, sympathies, insights. We don’t read Proust to get the lowdown on Parisian high life, or the gossip of the faubourg, or to learn about inversion in the Baron’s pursuit of the tailor; Crime and Punishment details a couple of the most sordid, the most violent and wanton murders possible to mankind, yet the book throbs throughout with a spirituality that can only be equaled in the New Testament, and the subject of War and Peace, it may be said, is neither war nor peace but families and family life, children and parents, dear friends, lovers, people, domesticity, and a great and healthy morality. That may be oversimplification, but what I mean of course is that a Tolstoy could choose the subject of dipsomania or nymphomania or any of the “unpleasant” subjects and make it interesting, important, and revealing of all life. Dostoyevsky wrote of criminals, prostitutes, thieves, epileptics and idiots and gave literature a further range, reaching deeper and farther in The Brothers Karamazov than Shakespeare does in King Lear; and Thomas Mann, selecting a subject that has no relation to average or “normal” life whatever, made of Death in Venice perhaps the only story in all literature that can be called a flawless, a pure, work of art.

A Hollywood wag recently said to me, “Say, Jackson, I hear your next book is to be about necrophilia,” and in view of the “subject matter” of my first three novels, I am sure he thought I had it coming to me. But I got to thinking, why not? If I knew anything about necrophilia at all, if I knew anyone who did or had any experience of it, and if there was a good story to tell with such a background—one with a real relation to life, one that would perhaps tell us something about ourselves as well as about others—then good heavens why shouldn’t I write a book about necrophilia? But, in any case, I hope, regardless of the subject matter, the story would be about people first of all.

One last word, then I’m done with the subject matter of “subject matter.” Have you ever read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, that novel so notorious for its “vile” language and “filthy” content? If so, I am sure you will be interested to know that the beautiful passage I quoted earlier from D. H. Lawrence was culled from that most immoral and disgusting book.

No, Miss Brenner. You may quarrel with me about my inadequate handling of a story, or the weakness of my characterization, far-fetched coincidences, top-heavy symbolism, sloppy writing, and even grammar, and I’ll hearken attentively and with respect; but you cannot quarrel with me on my choice of subject matter.

If you read the headlines in March 1930—and you must have, because they were all over the country for a day or two—then you already know what happened in the Gordon house on that fateful night. Well, what actually did happen, nobody alive ever knew or perhaps ever will know, but the story at home went something like this:

In the middle of the night, someone in the house next door to the Gordons’ happened to glance out the window and saw that there was a fire upstairs in the Gordon house (“Gordon mansion,” the papers reported). He rushed downstairs and phoned the fire department; the siren blew, the firemen came, and, as always happens in Arcadia, practically the whole town turned out. Neighbors and townspeople, only too eager to be helpful, flocked into the house along with the firemen, and carried chairs, pictures, rugs, whatnot, from the burning dwelling. On the floor above, the fire was intense, and at first no one could get upstairs. To add to the horror, none of the Gordons had yet appeared below (brother Jess was living in Seattle by that time). After some difficulty, the firemen managed to put out the fire in the upstairs hall, and everybody streamed up the stairs. Young Jamie’s room was filled with smoke. Someone rushed in, found him lying unconscious in bed, apparently overcome by smoke, reached down, picked him up, and started out. As he did so, he noticed that the lad was bleeding from the back. Jamie was still unconscious when they got him below, but as they put him on the floor, he gave one last, deep, shuddering sigh, and died. There were two bullet holes in the middle of his back.

Consternation, of course. Then somebody found a .32 Colt just inside the door of the still burning bedroom of the parents. The gun was snatched up, passed excitedly from hand to hand, and in no time at all, practically the whole town had planted its fingerprints on it.

Meanwhile the fire in the Gordons’ room was burning itself out. By the time the firemen were able to enter, they found two charred bodies lying on the twin beds, burned beyond recognition. The bodies were carried out and down, the town’s one ambulance was called, and the three were taken off to the Arcadia Hospital, where X-ray plates showed a bullet lodged in the brain of both Faith Goldsmith Gordon and her husband.

The district attorney ordered an investigation. But inside a week, what with the town swarming with rowdy reporters and photographers from the city, Arcadia began to withdraw. There was not enough evidence, it was decided, for a trial of any kind, or even a hearing; nothing could come of it; it would be a terrible expense to the county and township if they didn’t drop the matter at once, for good and all; the dead were dead; leave bad enough alone; no use crying over spilt milk; let sleeping dogs lie—in short, pretend it isn’t so.

Which almost concludes my account of Mrs. van Benschoten’s “great triumvirate,” the fourth and last member of which is yourself. Naturally, with my characteristic inquisitiveness, I have been conscious throughout of the fact that you signed yourself “Miss” and can’t help wondering what lies behind it; but of course that’s another story entirely, a story that I will probably never know.

“Life as it is & should be,” Miss Brenner? I can’t agree with you. For who are we to say what life “should be”? It’s a large order, and its prescription and fulfillment are in larger hands and hearts than ours. Of course life “should be” happier than it is; our American ideal would certainly be bigger-and-better happiness; but to insist on this, or to lament the fact that it isn’t so—that would mean challenging the gods themselves. Fortunately, the older I grow, the more I find myself willing to accept life as it is, with no qualifications, and not merely because I am a writer athirst for material. As for what life “is,” we only partly know (unless we accept the eminent Professor A. V. Hill’s wonderful definition, “Life is a dynamic molecular organization kept going and preserved by oxygen and oxidation”); and even then, our knowledge is tempered by our own experience, philosophy, and blindness.

“It is not enough to exist, and then to have existed,” writes André Gide. By which I suppose he means that something must be gathered along the way, accomplished, lived. Who knows what Faith or Fig or Eudora got out of life? Whether their lives had purpose or point is anybody’s guess, but it’s a pretty safe bet that Eudora at least, after descending into the very depths, must have brought up something rich and strange; and none of them lived out their lives in the kind of blind happiness which, by its very nature, is doomed. And since now we know something of their ultimate fate, we find ourselves wondering: were none of these women happy?

But of course they were! Each of them was happy at one time or another, very happy, as we all have been; as happy, probably, as anyone in this life is ever allowed to be. And for that small happiness we should be grateful, for it is not constant. Is this pessimism mine alone? I don’t think so. I am not enough of an intellectual to have formulated a cynical philosophy of life, or indeed any philosophy; as I said before, writers are not thinkers primarily, they’re feelers if they’re anything at all. But I have read enough to know that the best minds of the past and present—poets, novelists, philosophers—have one and all been pessimistic about man (or, if you prefer, realistic). Does this realism-pessimism belittle or hold in contempt the human heart? Indeed it does not. Their eternal preoccupation with mortal and immortal man speaks only of their respect for him, their interest in him, their awe of him. And who but a man affectionate of his fellows, like our beloved humorist Mark Twain, has written, in a children’s book at that: “We belong to a singular race. Every man is a suffering-machine and a happiness-machine combined. The two functions work together harmoniously, with a fine and delicate precision, on the give-and-take principle. For every happiness turned out in the one department, the other stands ready to modify it with a sorrow or pain—maybe a dozen. In most cases a man’s life is about equally divided between happiness and unhappiness. When this is not the case the unhappiness predominates—always; never the other. Sometimes for an hour’s happiness a man’s machinery makes him pay years of misery.”—But rather than end on a note so grim (and of course untrue), let us recall that “hour’s happiness” typified by the golden summers we started out with. Let us remember our girls when life was kinder to them, when the future lay before them with all its untold promise, when they were heiresses of all the world, and nothing—nothing that could possibly happen to them, nothing ever!—could defeat them.

First of all, you, Miss Brenner—or “Dolly,” as I must think of you now; for you were “Dolly” indeed at the time of which I write. You were the “new girl” in town, a girl from the city, someone from outside and beyond our humdrum village where we all knew each other too well, where the fairest face was familiar and no one had anything surprising or different to say; and because you were the “new girl” you did not have to be the richest or the prettiest or the gayest to be the one most sought after, the one who attracted and held the greatest number of boys. I remember one summer evening when we had all joined together in one vast game of pom-pom-pullaway, little kids and big ones alike, swarming over the enormous backyard and lawns between the Newtons’ big house and their stables. It was the first time I had ever seen the “new girl”—Miss Dolly Brenner from New York City—and because of something you said, I will never forget the impression you made on me. At one moment a playmate, someone your own age—maybe it was Fig, or Eudora—slipped and fell in the dewy grass about ten feet from where you were standing, near the canna bed, and you said, with that casual insouciance of the young and the self-assured, “Come here and I’ll pick you up.”—Gee! I thought that was wonderful—witty, worldly, brilliant—the kind of latest-thing that hadn’t yet reached Arcadia, not at least till you came. You couldn’t have dreamed, Miss Brenner—Dolly—how I, and the fallen Eudora or Fig, envied your sophistication at that moment.…

It is told that Mr. Newton, after the funeral of his beloved Harriet, spoke in private for some time with Mr. Brittain the minister; and he said, “Harriet was always a happy and rewarding child, and no one can know how we loved her. I suppose—at a time like this I think—that we should perhaps have had other children, but I didn’t dare. It would be tempting Providence, it seemed, and I didn’t dare; tempting my blessings. Now that she’s gone, I keep thinking only one thing: ‘I’ve had twenty-five years of love—what more can a man ask?’ ” Mr. Newton was not alluding to his wife when he said this; he was speaking of Harriet’s age at the time she left home to marry Tyson Phillips … That’s what people at home remember, the man’s bitter grief and that tragic pronouncement; but what I prefer to remember is Fig herself, a plump little girl of fourteen, coming out on the rostrum of the Baptist Church during the annual piano recital by Miss Foster’s pupils, walking out chubby in black stockings, white dress with eyelets, pink sash and pink hair ribbons, twisting the velvet-covered piano stool till it was adjusted to her height, and then, just as she sat down, bursting into laughter and covering her face with her hands, out of nothing but sheer irrepressible high spirits. It was very naughty of her, everybody said, very undignified; but still, people had to admit that Fig did better at that difficult moment than some of the children, for two of them had burst into tears instead.

And Faith Goldsmith.… She stands in front of our Latin class, heavy-lidded, sleepy-eyed, half-smiling, unruffled by any disturbance that went on in the room, no matter how much some of us tried to get a rise out of her—completely unruffled except once. Then (I forget the reason) she moved forward to the desk, placed her hands flat on the closed lid, leaned slightly forward toward us, and said, speaking barely above a whisper, “It is a sin and a shame—I’m ashamed for you—I truly am—that you refuse to take seriously the study of Latin. I know you complain that it is a dead language and I’m tired of hearing that complaint. How can it be dead when it was the glory of the ancient world, where would we be now without that glory? The past should be as real to you as the future; both have their glories. The past is but the counterpart, already fulfilled, of all the limitless promises that lie ahead of us, the glorious possibilities of life that await us all, and which are merely waiting for us to come and take them, but only when we are ready for them.…” I tell you, Latin meant something to me indeed for the rest of that year, and I have never forgotten it.

As for Eudora—could one ever forget Eudora? There was a purity about Eudora’s beauty, an austerity in her very youth, that was proof against the neighborhood lechery; and I’m sure that the most covetous old man, gazing hungrily at her from his lawn mower or glancing up covertly from his pruning shears, felt nothing but pure thoughts—perhaps to his chagrin. He may have undressed her with his eyes, as the saying goes, but after a shamefaced second or two he dressed her right back again, in the white robes of an angel. I will never forget the time that Eudora sang a solo, on her seventeenth birthday, in church on Sunday morning. The solo was “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth,” and, to the astonishment of all, she sang it a cappella. It was an enthralling occasion. Ray Verne at the organ played a few bars by way of introduction and then stopped and sat back. There was utter stillness in the church for a full moment; all eyes were turned on Eudora where she stood alone in the chancel in her white cotta, white collar, black-silk tie and the black mortarboard that did not confine the white-gold mass of her hair. Then she folded her hands at her waist and launched into the thrilling aria alone, unaccompanied throughout.… At the finish, there was that outrageous moment when, to the horror of all present—and to his own intenser horror an instant later—old Mr. Towner, carried away like everybody else but forgetting himself and where he was, suddenly burst into applause. It was the scandal of Arcadia for months; but, at the time, the congregation did not turn in their pews to gaze reproachfully at Mr. Towner where he sat, scarlet-faced, toward the rear of the church. Everybody knew how he felt.

My first memory of the four of you together goes back to a time—oh far far back—when, it seems now, I could hardly have been old enough to register it. But I was, for I can still see you as Campfire Girls, paddling earnestly (I might even say grimly) along the bay in twin canoes, you and chubby Fig in one canoe, Eudora and Faith in the other, your hair parted in the middle and hanging straight down on all sides, long, below your shoulders, bound with a beaded bandeau encircling your forehead just above the eyebrows. In fact, I can still hear your Campfire cry, “Wo-he-lo!”—and the words of the song that went with it:

“Wo-he-lo for work, Wo-he-lo for health, Wo-he-lo, Wo-he-lo, Wo-he-lo for love.…”

Faithfully yours,
Charles Jackson

The Band Concert

When Angela came to town that summer, Mother said it would be nice if we kids would play with her once in awhile, when she was free, and so help her get used to the strangeness of the neighborhood and our American ways. Angela was the hired girl of the Detterson family next door, and she had come to them from Canada. She was a big solemn girl with blonde braids wound around her head, and though she looked like a grownup, Mother said she wasn’t much older than we were. During the first week, she sat on the Dettersons’ back porch evenings with her hands in her lap, just sitting there very solemn on a straight kitchen chair till long after dark. But when we got to know her, Angela turned out to be anything but solemn. She laughed easily at nothing at all, played harder than necessary, and shrieked and screamed over the excitement of our games. She cried just as readily, too. Once when I called her a fool for doing something silly in a game, she burst into tears and rushed into the house. Mother explained later that, to English people and Canadians, fool meant an imbecile or a feeble-minded person: it was a word not to be used lightly and we must be more careful of our language, hereafter, when we played with Angela.

The big thing in Angela’s life that summer, the one thing she seemed to live for, was the band concert held in the park every Saturday night by the Arcadia Military Band. She’d start to get excited over this along about the middle of the week, till by Friday she couldn’t talk of anything else. Saturdays we’d hear her singing about the Detterson kitchen or on their back porch, and in the afternoon she’d begin preparing their supper much too early, so that she could get an early start for the band concert. Though it didn’t begin until half-past seven, we’d see Angela go by our house while we were still at supper, hurrying up the street as if she had to take part in the concert herself and mustn’t be late for rehearsal. I don’t know why she always went so early. It wasn’t that she wanted to get a good seat because she never sat at all, even when there were seats left. She always stood, as though she couldn’t enjoy the music to the full in any other way.

Mother said she never realized how much these band concerts must have meant to some people until she saw Angela there one night, standing beside the bandstand and gazing up at the cornet player with eyes shining as bright as the shiny cornet. But that was because Mother didn’t go to the band concerts more than once or twice a summer and so didn’t really know what they were like. We kids knew, because we were there every Saturday night; and though we wouldn’t exactly speak of them as “jolly,” the way Angela did (an odd word, we thought), the band concerts were indeed very impressive, very exciting, and something in our town not to be missed.

The Military Band was composed of various businessmen and merchants and a few factory workers, and we were acquainted with many of them. Maybe that’s why the concerts never seemed so glamorous to us as they did to Angela who, of course, didn’t know any of them. At least not at first. The band was led by Ray Verne who conducted the choir in our church, and he stood in a little square box in front of the band, dressed in white flannels and a blue coat with brass buttons. When a piece was finished he’d get down off the box and turn around and bow, and sometimes he’d make the men get up and bow too. Then the noise would be deafening, with boys whistling and all the auto horns blowing, till the band played again.

They played in the bandstand, which was all lighted up for the occasion, while the rest of the park was dark. People sat in the rows of seats that were put up each Saturday night facing the band, or on benches along the cinder paths that stretched away from the bandstand like the spokes of a wheel. Other people strolled around, up and down the walks, or lay on newspapers on the grass; and still others, many others, sat in their cars parked at the curb. Children ran throughout the park, darting in and out of the seated groups or chasing each other across the grass; and young girls in twos and threes, arms linked together, their white dresses gleaming in the reflected light, sauntered round and round the bandstand, giggling softly among themselves as they flirted with the boys. Kids gathered at the drinking fountain near the Main Street side of the park and squirted water at each other, till the ground around the fountain was black with wet. They yelled when they got soaked, and were shushed by the older people seated on the benches in the dark. At the Elks Club across the street, the Elks would all be out on the porch, because you could see the glow of many cigars moving up and down as the men rocked in their chairs. All evening long a man with a cart, who wasn’t allowed in the park when the band was playing, would make the rounds of the cars, selling popcorn and peanuts to the people parked in their automobiles. And then the music would stop and Ray Verne would turn around and bow and all the people would clap and the boys would whistle and the noise of the automobile horns would begin. They’d all start tooting at once and it would sound like one mighty horn, deafening and incessant, till Mr. Verne raised his hand and the music played again.

All this time Angela would be standing close up to the bandstand, in the full glare of the light, a little to the left of the conductor so that she could watch the band. We’d see her there many times during the evening in our continual tour of the park. But she never saw us or indeed looked at anyone else except the men in the band. Often I looked up to see whom she was watching, and it was always Tony di Santo the cornet player, a handsome smiling Italian who worked in Mr. Miller’s canning factory. He was always smiling, even when he played, and he would continually look down at Angela and roll his eyes and raise his eyebrows and grin so hard that it seemed he wouldn’t be able to blow properly. Then Angela would suddenly clap her hands over her face and stamp her foot, simply beside herself; and once I saw her bend over almost double and whirl completely around, as though she couldn’t contain herself another minute. I never could see that Tony di Santo and his cornet were as funny as all this, but Angela seemed to think so; and the more she watched him the more he made these faces and raised his eyebrows at her, as though he was playing his cornet for Angela alone. Between pieces, while he was wiping off the mouthpiece, he smiled at her even more, and just before he put the cornet to his lips again, he winked.… Angela was right after all, I guess. This was “jolly.”

One Saturday night in August, long after the band concert was over and we were home in bed, Mother came into our room in the middle of the night, sat on the edge of our bed, and woke us up. When she was sure we were awake enough to understand, she asked us if we knew where Angela was—had we seen her at the band concert? Yes, we told her, we had. She had been there the same as always, but we hadn’t come home with her because we supposed she had come home ahead of us. When was it we had last seen Angela, Mother asked; and we told her we’d seen her standing in front of the bandstand where she always stood, looking up at the band. Mother sat there a moment longer, as if thinking, and then got up. “All right, that’s all I wanted to know,” she said. “Now go back to sleep as quickly as you can. Good night.” She turned out the light and went out.

The next morning, just as I was getting dressed, I saw Mr. Detterson come out on the back porch next door and then come down the steps. He walked across the lawn to our house, and called through the living-room window. “Ellen, they’ve found Angela,” he said. I heard Mother come to the window and speak to him in a low voice. I leaned out and listened to what Mr. Detterson was saying. “They found her up on the canal bank, back of the canning factory. The man was Tony di Santo.” Mother said something else and Mr. Detterson started to walk away. Then he stopped and kind of laughed. “Well,” he said, looking back at Mother with a grin, “I guess Angela has had her fling.”

I didn’t know what the phrase meant but I was excited. It conjured up a lovely picture of Angela leaning over the balustrade of a balcony, flushed and happy, tossing flowers to a throng of admirers below. She wore a cap of pearls, her arms were filled with roses; and looking up at her from the crowd was the handsome smiling face of Tony di Santo.

Even while I was picturing this scene, a car drove up in front of the Dettersons’ and two men got out. They were Mr. Miller, the owner of the canning factory, and Dr. Wallace. They opened the back door of the car and Angela stepped to the sidewalk. She had on a man’s raincoat, very long, and her hair was down; it hung in a wild flaxen cloud about her shoulders. Then each of the men took an arm and she was hustled into the house.

That was the last we ever saw of Angela. On Monday she was gone—back to Canada, we heard—and the Dettersons managed to get along without a hired girl for the rest of the summer. The next year they got someone they knew.

Palm Sunday

We were in a cellar looking at a boat. It was down in South Jersey where we often visit, and the boat was made by one of the boys there, Ted his name was: a nice boy, modest, industrious, and very intelligent in an unassuming way. That morning his father had come over and told us about the boat, proud, but quiet about it, and asked if we didn’t want to come and see it. So we all went over.

It was in the cellar, and there we stood now, my brother and my wife and I and Ted and his father, standing around the boat and looking at it where it caught the light from the three or four small windows up near the ceiling. The boat was new and shining with varnish and Ted and his father looked at it calmly in a very masculine way (exactly alike) as if there was nothing remarkable about the boat and they had always been used to it, while we stood about making appropriate comments. These came out naturally enough as the boat was a beauty and we were filled with genuine admiration; at least we ourselves had never been able to make anything half so good or even thought of it. We might have been able to draw a better picture of it than Ted and his father, or describe it better, but we couldn’t have begun to make the thing or even planned it. We stood around looking at the boat and I was thinking how different Ted’s adolescence was from what mine had been.

It was funny that morning. I seemed unusually receptive to associations of the past, that day, as if I had suddenly acquired a sixth or seventh sense, so perhaps what happened later was bound to happen anyway, in one way or another, even if we had not gone to see the boat or if the radio had not begun to play when it did. As we walked over to this neighbor’s cellar with Ted and his father, things kept coming up in my mind that disturbed me and made me want to stop and identify them, place them where they belonged in the past, and link them to me and the present by whatever associations were convenient or true. Going along the tiny lake where the waves slapped against the dock, I kept thinking of the big waves that pounded against the breakwater on Lake Ontario where we used to live; and then as we rounded the tennis court, soft and yellow and soon to be rolled and made ready for the summer, I thought of those other courts years ago, the beautiful red courts of the Arcadia Tennis Club where I used to watch the older fellows play on hot summer afternoons, and how once one of the men came over to me as they were changing courts and said, “For gosh sakes, I should think you’d roast in that Indian suit, on a day like this.” For no reason at all, all these things that kept coming up in my mind made me want to stop and kind of savor them, but now we were at the house and Ted and his father lifted the cellar door and we went down.

The boat was held up by some props or a cradle of some sort and looked indeed a very fine and workmanlike job and, in fact, a professional one. We stood there looking at it, filled with surprise and genuine admiration. It was about twelve feet long, oval of course and blunted at each end, with a rectangular depression cut out in the middle where you’d sit and handle the tiller or raise and lower the keel. This depression wasn’t cut out, though; it seemed to have been built first, and then the rest of the boat, or what in a larger boat would have been the deck, had been shaped around it, the boards curving beautifully and delicately from the stem to the stern. The whole thing, especially the smooth glistening deck, seemed to have been made of very fine wood, fitted almost like inlay work, but Ted and his father said this was only because of the varnish.

Lying along a rack on the side wall was the mast. It was about eighteen feet long, strong-looking and perfectly shaped. It was varnished bright like the boat (in fact everything was varnished a bit too much for my taste but Ted and his father said this was for protection against the water), and, like the boat, it had been made entirely by Ted. He had gone into the woods and picked out the cedar himself, cut it down and lugged it home, and now it was this beautiful mast shining in the rack along the side wall like a long golden icicle, as foreign to the woods from which it came as it was to this damp sunless cellar. My wife and brother and I could only say that it was swell, and we meant it, but our praise sounded flat and meaningless in the presence of the finished product that spoke with such authority for itself.

This was what Ted had hurried home to from school all winter long. While other boys went skating or trapping, or played pinochle in the backroom at the gas station, Ted worked here in the dim cellar. And on Saturday when other kids hitchhiked into the city to go to the movies or played hockey on the lake, fooled with their sending- and receiving-sets or monkeyed with their fathers’ cars, Ted was here, all day at work, emerging from the cellar only for meals—quiet then, uncommunicative about what he had been doing.…

How different was this work and his absorption in it from the things that similarly occupied me when I was his age. I too hurried home from school, directly after school was over, but for different reasons. I wrote stories, composed verses, drew pictures, lived in fancy entirely, and then had little to show for my industry. All one spring I was engrossed in the making of a colorful romance called “The Story of Strongheart, An Indian Brave,” but actual work on it consisted mostly of imagining new and thrilling episodes which I seldom put down, talking about it endlessly to anyone who would listen (chiefly my mother), then going again to my notebook, turning to a fresh page, and printing the fascinating title once more in fancy letters: THE STORY OF STRONGHEART, AN INDIAN BRAVE—and under it my name, with the careful note: Aged Eleven (11). Then, a couple of years later, there was a long poem called “Phaedre,” a formal thing with many antique terms: trireme, charnel house, agora, obolus, pharos, architrave, peristyle, petasus—words I collected as other boys collected stamps or those tiny silk-fringed carpets that used to come with cigarettes; but who Phaedre was, whether male or female, mortal or god, no one ever knew and I have forgotten.… One more thing: an allegory entitled “Printemps, Été, Automne, et Hiver”—an elaborate picture worked in colored crayons on cardboard that came in the laundered shirts of the father of a friend of mine, who saved these cardboards for me as there was no father in our house. The words that composed the title of my picture I had copied painstakingly out of a French dictionary, taking special delight in marking the strange accents, and innocently avoiding the article, as one does in English. Why my allegory should have been titled in French I do not know, but it seemed better that way.

These, then, were the things which occupied me, not only, like Ted, after school, but all day long too in the classroom: a never-ending daydream that made me deficient in my studies, a stranger to my classmates, a nuisance to my mother, and forever restless and dissatisfied with myself.

“Tell them about the sail, Ted,” said Ted’s father.

“They don’t want to hear about it.”

“Of course we want to hear about it,” I said.

“Ted fooled me that time, didn’t you Ted? He certainly put me in my place, all right. Tell them about it, Ted.”

“There isn’t anything to tell.”

“Oh yes there is. You just don’t want to show up your old man, do you Ted. I know you.” Ted’s father laughed. “Anyway, he said he could carry forty yards of sailcloth—”

“Thirty-six,” said Ted.

“Well, thirty-six, and I told him he was crazy. So who was right? So Ted was. As usual. If you don’t tell them about it, Ted, I will. I’m not proud.”

We stood around listening to Ted’s father kidding him and then gradually I became aware of music playing somewhere, an organ, and it seemed several minutes before I realized that it was a radio in the house upstairs. Nobody was paying any attention to it but I was, because I now heard the chorus or choir and they were singing “The Palms,” a song we used to sing in church on Palm Sunday years ago when I was a child; and then, with a sudden unaccountable misgiving, I remembered that today was Palm Sunday. It is actually true that my heart beat just a little faster for several minutes when I first heard that music; but when I remembered why, and reminded myself that I should long since have overcome my feeling about Palm Sunday and that song, I was all right again and able to go on listening to the conversation here about me in the cellar.

“Of course you’d have to see the sail to appreciate the story,” Ted’s father was saying. “It’s a dandy, all right, but thirty-six yards—why, he’d never be able to carry it in the wide world, his mother and I told him. And then, of course, when it came to a showdown, Ted made us out a couple of ignoramuses like he always does, didn’t you, Ted?” … So the conversation went on, I listened and did not listen, heard and did not hear the music upstairs, Waving green palms the throng moves on its way, a phrase of music that once had the power to sicken and excite me, but now only caused me to glance involuntarily at my brother, to discover that he too had received (unconsciously at first, perhaps) a similar association.

My brother was looking at Ted’s father, obvious interest showing in his face; and then, after a few moments, as he became aware of the music, I saw that he was not looking directly at him but a little above him, just above his head, and his expression was thoughtful, reminiscent, absent; and so he remained for some time, not so much listening as thinking, tracking down in his mind some dim recollection of his own. At length he turned toward me, and his faint smile of understanding was verification that for a moment we had shared some remote and secret connection of ideas. For him the music meant church and childhood, and for me it did also, but back of the music, the particular music of “The Palms,” was a realer connection, something that I could only now, for the first time in my life, willingly explore.

“Ted wanted to buy this sailcloth and I gave him the money and he was going to go into the city on the bus and buy it himself. Then his mother came to me and said what was I thinking of, to let a little boy like him—that’s what she called you, Ted, not me—go into the city and carry home thirty-six yards of cloth all by himself. And being sailcloth, his mother and I naturally thought it would be some kind of material like canvas, and thirty-six yards would certainly make a bolt bigger than Ted was himself. He insisted it wouldn’t and his mother pleaded with me not to let him go, till I got fed up with the whole business. ‘All right,’ I said to his mother, ‘let him go in and find out for himself, the dumb cluck. Then maybe he’ll listen to reason and let me get the cloth for him the next time I go to the city with the car.’ ” Through all his feigned exasperation, you could see that Ted’s father was really pleased with Ted’s insistence and stubbornness and was enjoying the story, but I was listening with only half an ear, as it were, thinking all the while of that person whom the music upstairs had recalled so vividly to my mind; a man, I felt sure, unlike any Ted would ever know.…

There was a man in our town (I suppose every town has such a man) who made a tremendous impression on me when I was about Ted’s age, and on a good many other boys of my generation, I later learned. Most of us, I guess, passed through his hands at one time or another, briefly or for a longer period, depending on the temperament of the boy, though none of us knew about the others at the time and never spoke of it or acknowledged it later when we did know. He was a singer and a musician, a man of real talent, who was active in all the musical and church affairs of the town and very much in demand where a good singer was needed or a man who knew music and could play the piano or organ. Everybody admired his talents and liked him personally, too, and when he sang, men and women alike were genuinely enraptured with his voice and considered our town lucky to have such a talent for our very own. My mother used to say that he had as good a voice as Lambert Murphy or John McCormack, and could have gone just as far, if only he’d had any gumption, and maybe she was right. But what is true is that life in our community, both public and private, would have been very different if Ray Verne had not been there.

His name was Raoul de la Vergne and it really was his name, but he was always spoken of and even thought of as Ray Verne. Only in the paper and on programs of commencement exercises and church doings was the fancier name used, like:

“La Donna E Mobile … Raoul de la Vergne”

and then people would say (but never with surprise, for it was always expected), “Look, Ray Verne’s in it,” or “Ray Verne’s singing tonight.” His importance in the town was such that he worked for both the Episcopal and Methodist churches (he played the organ in our church and directed the choir for the Methodists) and nobody thought anything of it. He was prominent in the Masons, too, and led all their musical activities. He sang at funerals and weddings; was popular with the Italians on the other side of the canal, with whom he used to meet on Saturday nights and drink wine and sing; and of course he had a good part in every home-talent show that came along, and, if it was a musical show, he played the lead. When our high school put on Pinafore, Mr. Verne sang the role of Ralph Rackstraw inevitably, though he was old enough to be our father. But that didn’t matter: he sang beautifully and he didn’t look old. Though he must have been forty at the time, he never looked it. Indeed, it is a curious fact about Mr. Verne that he never seemed to grow a day older. From my earliest childhood until the time I last saw him about five years ago, he had changed very little. He had grown a little fatter, maybe, but not really older; he was still handsome, still possessed of an amiable and youthful personality, and always the master of that incredible voice. But what struck me most, on that visit home, was that his reputation in the town was just as secure on the one hand, and just as notorious on the other, as it had always been. It taught me something about the small-town mind.

“Well, Ted went into the city on Saturday a couple of weeks ago—on the bus, as he intended from the beginning—and bought his precious sailcloth. His mother was in a stew all day long and called me an inhuman monster, no less, for letting a little boy of fourteen undertake such a thing. She said he never could carry thirty-six yards of sailcloth all by himself any more than I could, and that I was a brute to even let him try.… See what I have to put up with for your sake, Ted?”

When I was fourteen I sang in our church choir, and my brother too. He was twelve then and we had been in the choir since we were small boys, with Ray Verne as the organist and director of the singing. And this one year, because I had a pretty good voice, Mr. Verne picked me out of the rest of the boys to sing a solo on Palm Sunday, during the Offertory. The hymn was “The Palms,” which was sung every year in our church by somebody or other, and this year it fell to me. It was a nice hymn, all about Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, the Sunday before he was crucified, and everybody throwing down palms in his path; and the music, I had always thought, was very beautiful. It was simple, easy to learn, and well within my voice range, but Mr. Verne thought I needed a lot of private rehearsing. So afternoons after school I’d go to the church and meet him and he’d play the music for me over and over and I’d sing. We were up in the chancel alone, there was nobody else in the church, and once as I finished he put his arms around me and hugged me. I was sitting on the bench beside him, and though I thought he hugged me only because I had sung well and he was pleased, I got up and stood at the end of the bench. “No, stand here where you can see the music,” he said, “and we’ll try again”; and he pulled me in between the bench and the organ, facing the music rack. He began playing the music with one hand, and put his left arm around my stomach and held me close to him, his fingers just inside my belt. I remember I couldn’t sing for a moment, and all at once he stopped playing, turned me around toward him, and started to undo the buckle.

“So along about the middle of the afternoon, Ted steps off the bus right in front of the house with a package under his arm no bigger than the Sunday paper, and without so much as a by-your-leave or a ‘Nuts-to-you-Father,’ disappears into the cellar. Was my face pink. After a decent interval, during which I took time to compose myself, I came down to the cellar and found Ted with his sailcloth all spread out on the floor like a circus tent at midnight, and there was, so help me, thirty-six yards of it.”

That was two days before Palm Sunday. I suppose I should say that after it was over I suffered all the tortures of the damned, but I don’t think you do at fourteen, and I didn’t, at least not then. I was too scared and excited to do anything about it and anyway it was all over in a minute. My chief reaction was confusion and a consequent resentment, but not against Mr. Verne. It was directed chiefly against myself, was very intense for a little while, and then was easily forgotten. I left the church a few minutes later, very anxious to be alone, and at once dismissed it from my mind. When I thought about it later, that night alone in my bed, my resentment and confusion were gone, and my imagination was held by exciting but vague pictures of the future, in which, curiously enough, Ray Verne did not figure.

The next day, Saturday, Mr. Verne was to hear me sing for one last rehearsal, but this time it was to be in the Methodist Church where he was working that day. I arrived shortly after noon and let myself in at one of the big front doors. I had never been in that church before and it seemed to me, as I walked slowly down the aisle, the vastest space I had ever seen indoors. Mr. Verne was up at the organ, improvising, and when he saw me, he stopped at once, turned on the bench, and said, “How’d you like to go up into the steeple?”

I said I would, and I would. The Methodist steeple had always been a thing of awe to me, and still was, at fourteen. I had a paper route before school mornings that took me by the Methodist Church every day, and almost every morning I’d have to stand there a moment or two, directly in front of the church, on the lawn, or even close up to the steps, and stare straight up into the sky along the length of the steeple. I had to do this, I say, because of the thrilling sensation of dizziness it gave me. My neck hurt and my head swam, maybe I even tottered a step or two, but high overhead the steeple pierced the blue sky; and if it was a day with clouds, the spire rushed forward along them, bending farther and farther, leaning and leaning, until it seemed certain the whole far-reaching structure would topple down upon me and crash across the town. That was how the steeple was from below. I knew it well that way. But to know it from above—to be up there and look out and down—my heart rose at the thought, and I was a little scared, too.

“Shamefaced as I was, I apologized—didn’t I, Ted? But he, like a good son, pretended not to know what I was talking about and then went on to explain that for sailcloth he was supposed to get Egyptian cotton but found he didn’t have enough money. So he bought thirty-six yards of feather-proof ticking instead. Smart, wasn’t he? How he knew about feather-proof ticking, nobody knows, but when I told his mother she said why of course, that’s just what she would have gotten. So you see? Ted and his mother are the smart ones of the family. Me, I didn’t even know that ticking was feather-proofed! Or is it ‘proven’? You’re a scholar.” My brother smiled, but I could see he wasn’t really paying attention, hearing instead that music coming down into the cellar from the room above us, the sickish music of “The Palms.”

Going up the last stairway, my heart was pounding. The stair was very narrow and looked unfinished, with walls sloping in on us so that we kept having to lean sideways to go ahead. Mr. Verne went on up in front of me. I could see his kind of fat, womanish bottom as he bent over to duck the rafters that jutted out from the sloping wall toward the center post around which we were slowly climbing. The air was dry and dusty, and it was quite dark most of the way, but at each turn you could see it was lighter up ahead. I was honestly interested in seeing the steeple and the town from there but I pretended to be even more so. My heart pounded and I kept swallowing. I think I knew what was going to happen, but at the same time I didn’t dare think of it either or I would have run away. Then we came up into the light onto a small platform about eight feet square and Mr. Verne said this was it, this was as far as we could go.

I stood up, and sure enough the sloping circular walls met all together just a few feet over our heads. There were some old ropes lying in a corner, and a pile of old papers, and near the floor were four small round windows, looking out to four different directions. I knew those windows well, though I had always thought they were openings to a dovecote, and here they were as big as our bathroom window at home! I leaned down and looked out, and stayed there a long time looking. This was when I pretended the most, because I was too scared to think of myself or of where I was and why. Sticking up over the trees, looking much nearer than it was to walk it, I could see the schoolhouse and the schoolhouse clock. And all around, sprinkled with more trees than you would have believed, spread the town—but not far, not far at all; for only a block or two away, it seemed, the houses stopped and country began: farms and hills and long fields. I got my nose right to the glass and looked down at the post office across the street from the church, and a car drove up in front and a man got out and ran up the steps, and it was Mr. Miller. I could tell it was, because of the yellow corduroy jacket that he always wore on weekdays, and I was surprised that I could see it was Mr. Miller from here. I don’t know what Mr. Verne was doing all this time, and I don’t think he said anything, till finally he said, “Come here a minute. Stand over here.” Then what I was scared would happen happened; but right in the middle of everything, when my fear had turned into something else just as frightening, Mr. Verne stopped what he was doing and I heard him say, “Gosh you’re good.” He gave a low laugh and looked up at me and said, “You’re almost as good as your brother.”

Only a couple of times in my life have I been sick and that was one of them, but it was not a sickness of the body or anything organic, it was the sickness of rage and shock and a dozen other things which to this day I have never been able to account for or explain, because I have never experienced such a feeling since. On my way down the steps out of the steeple I knew, or thought I knew, it was the last time I would ever be inside the Methodist Church. But it wasn’t. I had to go there again, once, years later, and again it was to see Mr. Verne, whom I was old enough by that time to call “Ray,” but wouldn’t.

I sang “The Palms” the next morning in our own church, all right, but I didn’t do it very well. I hated that song. All I wanted to do was go far away by myself somewhere, outdoors, but I sat there in the choir pew up in the chancel, with the wonderful yellowish-green light coming in through the stained-glass windows and making everything look as if it were under water; and I kept trying hard to think how much nicer our Episcopal Church was than the Methodists’, which it was, and then Mr. Verne nodded to me from behind the music rack and I got up. It was during the Offertory and everybody was sitting back, looking up at the chancel, waiting for the solo. I didn’t dare look at anybody but I knew I was trembling, because my brother had whispered to me just before I got up, “Don’t be scared—you know you’ll be all right.” And afterwards, everybody said I was all right, and the minister gave me two palm-crosses to wear instead of one because he said I deserved it, and Mr. Verne asked Mother if she wasn’t proud of me.

This morning, standing in that sunless cellar with my brother and my wife and Ted and his father, and hearing “The Palms” being played in the house above us, I knew that at last this music was powerless to disturb me, and I knew why, and why it never would again. There was something to be said for going over these things, dragging them up, as it were, and looking at them. Too long, without reason, I had hated that song, bitterly, actively, even after I had forgotten its association with Mr. Verne, church, the room in the Methodist steeple, and my brother. Now I could look upon the music for what it was: a simple anthem-like melody in stately measures, easy to sing, pleasant to listen to, not unpleasant, now, to remember. But my aversion to “The Palms” was so strong when I was fourteen that I left the church and choir the following winter, a good two or three months before Palm Sunday was to roll around again, and I never took part in our choir activities further. I won this victory only after a long quarrel with my mother, in which I argued that I was too old to sing in the choir any more; that I was old enough to have my own ideas on religion and go to church when and where I pleased; and chiefly that I hated the wine that I was forced to drink at Communion whether I liked it or not—and how could it possibly mean the body and blood of Christ anyway, this wine that was made by some wops somewhere like any other wine and this little sliver of a wafer that was no different from the fish food we bought at the five-and-ten for our goldfish at home? Very radically I argued all this, and my bewildered mother, saddened and hurt, gave in.

A year or so later I discovered music—specifically, the voice of Caruso on my mother’s Red Seal records that she kept in a special mahogany cabinet in the parlor and not all in a heap under the Sonora the way my brother and I kept our own records, like “A Hunt in the Black Forest” and “Cohen on the Telephone” and “In a Clock Store” and all our yodeling and whistling and Hawaiian records. I had found Caruso; and passionately, hours together, I sat enthralled before the voice that issued from between the slats of the sound box. And one day I went over to the house of a neighbor lady to hear her records, as my mother had told me that she owned a lot more Caruso records than we did. The lady very kindly gave me the freedom of her parlor and phonograph and left me to amuse myself for the afternoon. Almost the first record I selected was one called “Les Rameaux.” It sounded promising because unknown. I put it on, released the catch, and set the needle in the groove—prepared in advance, in my idolatrous way, to be shaken into new and irrational raptures. What I heard affected me deeply, but I did not interrupt the hated song. On the contrary, I allowed it to go on to the end, listening to the strange language of the familiar tune; and before it was finished I achieved an acceptance of the thing that was like a release. The song I had known existed no longer. Henceforth, I would call it, as it was here called, “Les Rameaux.” If I must go on having “The Palms” turn up in my life every so often, as it seemed bound to do, I would defeat it by recalling Caruso and thinking of it in French.

“When we launch this thing, I’m going to get out a bottle of my best Chateau What-have-you, vintage 1066 and all that, and Ted’s mother is going to smash it over the prow with her own hands and say, ‘I christen thee Theodore the First!’—Look at him, fellows. The old sourpuss, he thinks I’m making fun of him.” My brother laughed. Then, in the pause, he glanced at me, and again his smile was one of recognition, telling me plainer than any words that he remembered the time I sang the solo in our church choir, the song we heard coming down to us from above. I was touched by his remembering, not the less so because I expected him to and he did; but for me there remained one or two more things to remember, things that he didn’t know of.

I was in the bathroom one morning, lying in a full tub; soaking, enjoying the luxury of a long, warm, Sunday morning bath. The bathroom door was open, as it always was in our house, and I could hear Mother moving about downstairs. Then the telephone rang. I heard Mother leave the kitchen and walk into the living room to answer it. I stopped swishing the washrag around and listened. I heard Mother say, “Oh, hello, Ray,” and then, “No, he isn’t here.” Then there was a pause, and I heard her say, “What do you want him for, Ray?” My heart beat so I could count it. Then after another pause I heard Mother say, “No, he won’t be home all day, but I’ll tell him you called,” and then, “All right, Ray, goodbye.” I sat up in the tub, listening hard, my mouth open, my heart sounding against my ribs. Then I heard Mother leave the living room, come out into the hall, and start up the stairs. I got up on my knees in the tub, leaned over, and shut the bathroom door very quietly. Then I sat back and began to whistle, not too loudly, and busied myself with water and soap. I heard Mother’s footsteps coming down the hall, and then a rap on the door. I stopped my sloshing around and said, “Yes?” … Mother said, “What’s Ray Verne calling you up for?” I said, “What do you mean? Who?” … Mother said, “Ray Verne just called you up. What does he want you for?”—accenting the “you”—and again, “Why should he be calling you up?” … I said, “Why, I don’t know! How should I know?” … Then she said, “Why should Ray Verne be calling? Do you know anything about it?” … I said, “For heaven’s sake, Mother, I don’t know what you’re talking about! What did he say he wanted? You answered the phone!” Mother was silent a moment and then said, “He said he wanted you to go riding with him this afternoon.” … “Well, then he wanted me to go riding with him this afternoon,” I said huffily.… Mother was quiet for a minute and then she said, “Listen. I don’t want Ray Verne calling you. Do you understand?” … I said, “My gosh, what are you talking about! I don’t know what you’re talking about!” … “Yes you do,” Mother said, “you know very well what I’m talking about. And I don’t want Ray Verne calling you again, do you hear?” Before I could say anything more, Mother was gone. I heard her go back down the hall and then downstairs, and that was the last word ever said about it between us.

As I grew older, I heard Mr. Verne spoken of several times by others in a way that made me uncomfortable, and I began to realize that my experience with him had not been unique. People in general, however, avoided the gossip about him, and his standing as a singer and artist in our community was as strong as ever. He had taken to wearing pince-nez with a long black ribbon, which everyone thought made him look very distinguished, and he sang as often as before at church benefits, at affairs of the Masonic Temple and other lodges, and in every home-talent show during the winter. At Commencement, the night I graduated, he sat on the same platform with us, as he was to sing “Pale Hands I Love,” and did, to the usual great applause. Yet everybody in the town knew about him, including other women besides my mother, as I was to find out to my embarrassment.

During my last year in high school I had a job on Saturday nights taking tickets at the movie house, the only night of the week when the theatre ran two shows. It was on this night, too, when they always had a couple of vaudeville acts between shows, put on by some vaudeville people who came down Saturdays from the city. I loved the job, because I enjoyed seeing the movies and the acrobats, as well as all the farmer people who came to town Saturday nights; and also, of course, I had free passes, and my girl Bettina, the girl I went with all through high school, always came and sat in the last row where we could talk once in a while, and then waited for me till after the last show was over.… One night, just after the first show went on, the theatre manager came to me, rather excited, and said the vaudeville people hadn’t arrived and would I go and get Ray Verne to come down and fill in with a song or two in case the act didn’t turn up before intermission. I said I would and he said Mr. Verne was probably at choir practice in the Methodist Church; so I went up there. The church was mostly dark, but the tall windows down near where I knew the organ was were lighted up, so I went in at the side door and came into the church. As I came in, the people stopped singing and looked down at me. Nobody said anything. They looked funny standing there in their everyday clothes, with hymn books in their hands, the women with their different hats on, some of the men in overcoats or with scarves around their necks. Mr. Verne heard the singing stop and turned around on the bench. I was standing below, in the half-dark, and my voice sounded funny and embarrassed as I spoke. I said, “Mr. Verne, may I speak to you a minute,” and he left the organ and came down the steps toward me, away from the others. Everybody looked at me in silence as though they didn’t know me or had never seen me before, though I knew them, all right, and they knew me, and one of them, even, was my girl’s mother. Well, I said what I had to say, quietly, so as not to interrupt the choir rehearsal too much, and Mr. Verne said yes, he’d come down to the theatre as soon as he was finished. I said thanks and started to leave, and then Mr. Verne, on his way up to the choir loft again, called back, “I’ll be there in half an hour,” and then I kind of nodded to the others but none of them nodded or spoke at all, not even Bettina’s mother. And though I knew they didn’t hear the reason for my errand, it never dawned on me what they were thinking till, a few nights later, when Bettina and I were walking around the bandstand, Bettina said she had something queer to tell me. I said what, and then she said that her mother told her she didn’t want Bettina to go around with me any more if I was a friend of, or had anything to do with, Ray Verne.

“Okay, Ted, I guess we’re all properly impressed—aren’t we, folks? Let’s go out now and get some fresh air.” Overhead, as we turned away from Ted’s shining boat, the song had ended, that simple melody that I would no longer need to think of as “Les Rameaux”; and as we emerged from the cellar into the bright sunlight of midmorning, I was a little surprised, at first, that the day looked no different from when we had left it. We stood on the damp soft earth and said our goodbyes and see-you-laters to Ted and his father, and promised of course to be present at the big “launching” of Theodore the First next weekend. Then my wife and brother and I walked back along the lake toward our friend’s house, and dinner.

We passed the tennis court and started down the lake path single file, my wife first and then my brother and I, ducking now and again to avoid being swiped by the occasional low-hanging branches of the willows. And then my brother turned and said, while my wife walked on ahead, “You were thinking of the time you sang the solo in church, weren’t you?” He was smiling, and I said, “Yes, I was.” … “I knew you were,” he said; and I said, “I knew you were, too.”

The waves spilled against the tiny beach, washing up bits of green and frothy scum, and the lake bottom, where it was not too deep, was mahogany-colored from the roots of the cedar trees. Above the sound of the wind and the lapping waves, you could hear the constant hum of the Sunday traffic on the state road, a mile away.

“Say!” My brother turned again. “Do you remember that old, old lady that lived up on the corner of Dalton Street? My God, she was old when we were little kids!”

“Yes—the one that was supposed to have the first waffle iron in town? Mrs. van Benschoten.”

“That’s the one! Mrs. Williams worked for her as a companion, for awhile.”

“I remember,” I said. “Why?”

“Well,” my brother went on, “did you ever know that when she died, a couple of years ago, she left all her money to Ray Verne? Can you beat it?”

“Well, can you beat that!” I said. But my brother’s words had told me all too plainly that “The Palms” had recalled to him his experience with Mr. Verne too, as clearly as if we had discussed the matter between us.

“About forty thousand, they say—Harry Jenkins told me when I saw him in New York last year,” my brother said. “Mrs. Williams was so mad that she ripped up all the bed linen in the house.”

I laughed. “Fat lot of good that did her.… But can you beat that about Ray Verne! What’s he doing with it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably drinking himself to death with the Italians on the other side of the canal. He can’t be much of a singer any more. Anyway, it was enough to take care of him for the rest of his life.… I suppose the old lady had always loved his voice.”

“I suppose,” I said.

Again the waves of the little lake made me think of that other lake in the past—our Ontario—and how the big waves there rumbled upon the beach and blew spray at us as we raced along the shore, shouting to each other in order to be heard above the surf, a kind of joyful panic spurring us on, faster and faster, down the hard white sand to where the pier to the lighthouse began. And having reached the lighthouse pier, we’d rest there, hanging on the iron bars of the railing, catching our breath and wiping the tears from our eyes—to stare out over the rolling windy lake which we knew to be as vast and awful as the ocean.

My brother stopped and tossed a stone into the water. “Isn’t it funny how far away all that seems,” he said, “how unimportant.”

“Yes,” I said. I felt good, and I knew my brother did too, and I was hungry and had a good appetite. The day was warm and lovely now and we could have stayed out longer, but I was anxious to get back to our friend’s house, where I knew the dinner that awaited us would be a good one.

Tenting Tonight

When I came home at suppertime with the news that Clyde Blanchard had asked Eddie Richmond and me to go on a camping trip, Mother was a little upset at first. From the casual way we three boys had talked it over, she had no way of knowing whether or not it meant a formal invitation or even if it were true. If true and therefore “formal,” she would be obliged to write a proper note of thanks to Mrs. Blanchard and what should Don take along? On the other hand it may have been merely one of Clyde’s whims of the moment and she didn’t want to ask. I could have told her it might just as well have been formal, official, or whatever you wanted to call it; for when Clyde Blanchard had a whim of this kind, his whole family fell in with the idea, including all the servants, and carried it out on a scale impossible in any other house in town.

Camping, to us, meant dragging the tired old tepee out from under the potato bin, hauling it up the cellar stairs, draping the filthy canvas around its warped poles in the rear of the backyard well beyond the clotheslines, squatting inside for hours in an airless, stultifying heat, eating curling peanut butter sandwiches that Mother had prepared for us as food for our “camp,” remaining silent during the bitter complaints of our father who had to mow around us when he mowed the lawn, and sometimes bravely dragging out an old blanket or mattress to sleep there for the night, only to give up, shamefaced, and make for our comfortable, familiar, well-lighted house as soon as it got dark. When the tepee was taken down or fell down, Father complained again about the circular yellow stain that the tepee had left on his good lawn. But to the Blanchards, as I was shortly to learn, camping meant a sizable tent with equipment beyond my wildest dreams and a real floor and real beds, though these were only a minor feature of the whole spectacular setup. It so happened that we never did sleep in the beds, but I was impressed, nonetheless, and remember that expensive outfit to this day.

Though the Blanchards lived only two streets away, our families inhabited different worlds. They moved in circles quite different from our own, except that as Episcopalians we met often in church, and I was at their house almost every afternoon after school. Mr. and Mrs. Blanchard were my Uncle Bob and Aunt Meda in the way that people in your hometown whom you have known ever since you were a baby, and whose house you were always running in and out of, were naturally your “aunt” and “uncle” even though they were no relation. From the age of six or seven I was almost as much a member of the Blanchard household as if I had been a cousin of their children, Bennett, Anson, and Clyde, who, at the time of the great camping trip, were fourteen, twelve, and ten, respectively.

Bennett, the eldest, was always going around reciting lines that went:

My good blade carves the casques of men,

My tough lance thrusteth sure,

My strength is as the strength of ten,

Because my heart is pure.…

He had picked it up in a book somewhere and had to go around showing off, just as I would have done. I asked him one day what “casques” meant and he didn’t know, any more than I did; but of course that’s the way it often is with poetry.

Anson, the middle one, was a big boy, too old (he thought) for short pants, too young (his parents thought) for long ones; in those days, regardless of your height, you didn’t wear long pants till you were about sixteen and shaved. Anson solved the problem in a very individual and sophisticated way and, in so doing, introduced a local fashion several years ahead of its time. He wore tweed knickers (different from our corduroy pants in that they lapped down over his knees) and the first golf stockings ever seen in Arcadia, which everyone thought very British- or Scotch-looking.

Clyde, my friend and Eddie’s, was a short, good-looking boy who was the idol of his parents. He was shrewd and clever, had a fine sense of humor, and was most always wonderful fun. I liked him; but what meant a good deal more to me at that time, apart from my liking for him, was that Clyde was the one boy of my age whom I could lick in a wrestling match, simply because he was smaller than me.

When the Blanchards came home from Germany, one year, with a great variety of helmets, including the full-dress Uhlan helmet with a chin strap and white horsehair plume (all this was before 1914, of course), Clyde made a deal with me. I had an American flag on a pole with a gilded point and, to set it off properly, a white cord like a bathrobe cord, with tassels. Just as I coveted his helmets, Clyde coveted this flag that I had bought myself at the Emporium for sixty-nine cents with the first earnings I had ever made, carrying washings; and Clyde would let me wear the Uhlan helmet if I would let him carry the flag. It was a good bargain and we were both satisfied. We would stand back to back in front of the front porch, he with my flag, I with his helmet, and then charge, racing around the house in opposite directions. We’d meet briefly at the back of the house, racing past one another, and again at the front, and at the back again, his flag flying with the white cord streaming out behind it, and my horsehair plume streaming out too and almost pulling the helmet off my head, except that I was careful to keep a tight hold on the chin strap between my chin and lower lip (it wasn’t long enough to reach below the chin and Clyde said it wasn’t supposed to, so I hung onto it with my hands). Once, as we rounded a corner, we crashed head on and fell to the ground. We got to our feet, hurt but hiding it, threw down the flag and the helmet, repaired solemnly to the big front hall of their house to settle our difference as always with a wrestling match under the big moose head; and though we did not know it, these wrestlings soon turned into a kind of affectionate fond tussle as much as anything else.

When I told the family about the proposed camping trip, Mother, with a worried regard for the rules of etiquette as laid down in a daily column of the Syracuse Post-Standard, was in a dilemma. If she had had a proper note of invitation from Clyde’s mother, she would have run through her old clippings and known exactly what to do. I told her this was silly. Clyde’s asking me to go camping with him and Eddie seemed no more or no less important than if he had invited me to go to the Chautauqua one afternoon or to the current episode of “The Million Dollar Mystery” on Friday after school. Certain that she was transgressing the rules of politeness, if not etiquette, Mother settled the issue by running over next door and telephoning Mrs. Blanchard that Don would love to come and how long would he be away? Mrs. Blanchard told her that the boys expected to be gone three weeks and she hoped that Mother could spare me for that period. Three weeks!—why, it was an eternity to a boy of ten.

By our standards, the Blanchards were very rich. They lived in the biggest house in Arcadia; and to me, it was endlessly fascinating. They maintained a style of living that was unusual in Arcadia between the years of 1910 and 1917 and, for that matter, still is. There was a sophistication about the house, the household, and the Blanchards themselves that seemed to me quite wonderful in every way; and I can best illustrate this by describing some of the things about the family and their house that made such an impression on me when I was a child.

For example, instead of having an ordinary house and lot the way everybody else had, they lived in an enormous mansion set amid grounds that were almost as big as a park. Everybody else had a house on either side of them, about one hundred feet away at the most; but not the Blanchards. To the right of their big white house with the high stone porch stretched a lawn that was the equivalent of several village lots, and it was the same on the other side. Red maple trees, three or four weeping willows, and a fascinating umbrella tree shielded them from the inquisitive glances of their neighbors, so that the Blanchards were not obliged to pull down their shades at night; though this would not have been necessary in any case, on account of the distance that separated them from the O’Dwyers on one side and the Grants on the other. The driveway was sprinkled with the finest gravel, not just a dirt road like other people’s, and it curved in a beautiful arc to a high-gabled stable of yellow brick several hundred feet to the rear of the house. The stable is now used as a garage for the Blanchards’ four autos, which they call “motors,” but in those days they had only two cars, Mrs. Blanchard’s electric and a big Cadillac with a tonneau that flapped and shuddered when a certain speed was reached, leather straps that stretched from the mudguards to the windshield, and a shining, brass band around the radiator. There was a cement sidewalk leading from the kitchen all the way to the stable, just like the sidewalks that were public property in front of other people’s houses; and to the south, near the boundary that separated the Blanchard grounds from the O’Dwyers’ backyard, was a summerhouse made of very thin logs with the bark left on. This summerhouse was octagonal in design, with fancy diamond-shaped windows and a great wooden table in the middle, while overhead, so that it could only be reached by climbing one of the red maple trees, was a small roofed cupola in which we used to love to hide—that is, until about the age of thirteen or fourteen, when we were too big to squeeze between the small log columns that supported the octagonal-shaped roof. The initials of dozens of neighborhood children were carved on the surface of the wooden table below. Far from deploring this practice, the Blanchards encouraged it; and Mr. Blanchard had even had Pulver, the chauffeur, carve his and Mrs. Blanchard’s initials in the center of the table. Pulver had added his own initials, too, and it was all right with the Blanchards.

Pulver was a huge man who had once been a policeman in New York City. We boys thought of him as a bully because he was always tossing us up in the air or playing dirty tricks on us. I will never forget a trick that he played on me, and indeed I have the scar to this day. Once, when a bunch of us kids were playing near the stable, Pulver came up to us, picked me out of the group, and asked if I’d like to see smoke come out of his eyes. The other kids immediately got very silent. I had seen smoke come out of men’s noses, of course, but never out of their eyes. Pulver told me to hold my arms at my sides with my hands clasped upon my stomach, stand very close to him, and look closely into his eyes—and not once take my eyes off his face, he said. I did all this. He took a long drag of his cigarette, lowered his hands, and looked into my eyes hypnotically, as I looked into his. All the other kids were absolutely quiet; either they knew what was up and had already had it done to them, or they were as interested and intent on the success of the trick as I was. Anyway, as Pulver and I stared closely at each other, suddenly I jumped; I had felt a sharp painful burn on the back of my hand. I stepped quickly back, but painful as it was, I didn’t cry at all, because all the kids were laughing heartily by now, and so was Pulver. What he had done was to jab the burning end of his cigarette tight against my hand while he held the attention of my eyes with his. It was a rotten trick to play on a gullible kid, but I didn’t think so at all at the time; this kind of thing was standard in Arcadia and I suppose still is; we all went through it, took it, and didn’t tell the possible next candidate anything about it because he had to get it too, as we did: not unlike, I suppose, the regulation ritual of torture that growing boys in primitive tribes are said to have to go through inevitably, as part of their growing up.

Pulver wasn’t all bad, though. We were fascinated by his rooms in the stable. On the walls were photographs of prize fighters and also of women in tights; and one day he performed for us a most spectacular feat. It was just after a heavy rainfall and the ruts of the driveway near the stable were filled with water. He asked us if we had ever seen water burn; did we know that water could burn? We were all embarrassed because when Pulver was up to one of his tricks, we never knew what to do or where to look: I suppose we stood around, grinning foolishly, waiting for some practical joke of his. Then Pulver lighted a match on the seat of his pants and casually dropped it into one of the ruts. Instantly the water flared up in flame a good six or eight inches high, and the fire raced like a streak all the way to the cement ramp that led to the stable. Only then did we realize that Pulver had poured gasoline beforehand into the muddy water of the ruts.

As the Blanchard boys grew older, the house was added on to, every few years, till it got longer and longer and eventually looked like a sanitarium. Each of the boys not only had his own bedroom (we at home slept two in a bed) but also his own “study,” as they called it, and bathroom. If you didn’t know your way around upstairs, you could easily get lost, what with the several corridors and the many rooms leading from the great central hall to the rear of the house. I remember this upstairs hall as clearly as I do our own small living room at home. There was a table piled with the latest books, and on the floor lay the largest polar-bear skin I have ever seen before or since. When pressed, Mr. Blanchard admitted to having shot it, but at the same time he winked. On one wall was a photograph of a picture that Clyde Blanchard said was a very famous Italian painting, called Primavera, the central figure of which was a pretty girl in a flowered dress; Mrs. Blanchard once explained that “primavera” meant springtime. Through a large arched doorway could be seen Mrs. Blanchard’s “study,” with her bedroom beyond; and on the opposite side of the hall, through another archway, was Mr. Blanchard’s “study.” Apparently everybody in the Blanchard house studied, or maybe it was just their way of being able to have privacy when they wanted it. In our house, when one of us wanted to be by himself, he went to the bathroom.

The third floor was divided into a spacious attic and four bedrooms for the servants; and I think one of the things that impressed me most of all about the Blanchards’ house was that their attic was “finished”; that is, it wasn’t just an open space with rafters showing the underside of the shingles above. At the sides, where normally you could see the clapboards covering the outside wall of the house, was solid beaverboard reaching about eight feet high, with a real ceiling. There was also a spare room in the attic where we used to play; to this room we lugged great armfuls of cattails from the swamp just outside of town (Ump Swamp, we called it, thinking it was an Indian name) with which we made arrows, and heaps of twigs from the red willow trees that grew there, the bark of which we scraped off with a knife, thus making “tobacco.” The whole attic reeked of the wonderful smell of these shavings, and sometimes the servants used to complain; they said they could smell it in their rooms all night long, even with the windows open.

The downstairs of the Blanchard house was a kind of indoor wonderland. The outside door had a large window of thick plate glass, with a cut-glass doorknob (in fact there were glass doorknobs throughout the entire house, on every single door), and inside was another door of leaded glass; between these two doors was the vestibule with a tile floor in a black-and-white design and an umbrella stand with a lion’s head holding a brass ring in its teeth. The central hall, almost as big as our whole house, was carpeted with an Oriental rug that must have been thirty feet long. It was here that Clyde and I used to wrestle every afternoon and as I said, I was always able to put him down. To the rear of the hall, next to the corridor that led to the boys’ playroom, the pantries, and the kitchen, stood a gigantic clock about ten feet tall. Mr. Blanchard had brought it over from Germany. It struck the hours, half-hours, and quarter-hours; and at twelve noon a tiny pageant took place at the top of the clock as a fully equipped German band of eight figures moved woodenly out of a Bavarian chalet at the rear, lined up in front stiffly, played “The Watch on the Rhine,” and then staggered back again. (I used to wonder if the same thing happened at twelve midnight but I never knew.) On the left wall, near the ceiling, was a great moose head with frightening amber eyes and huge antlers, which Mr. Blanchard had shot in the Canadian northwoods; it also had a tail hanging from its neck (but it wasn’t a tail either; Mr. Blanchard said it was called a “dewlap”). To the right was a golden oak staircase that always shone as if freshly varnished, and in the curve below was a long shiny bench that was also a chest for the boys’ roller skates, ice skates, snowshoes, baseball bats and gloves, and the assortment of elegant helmets worn by Kaiser Wilhelm’s army during full-dress parades but which, nowadays, you never see outside of an operetta like The Student Prince or The Merry Widow. Next to the chest was the downstairs toilet (the Blanchards called it the lavatory) with a stained-glass window and a golden oak toilet seat. Nobody we knew of had a toilet downstairs; in most of the houses I’d been in, it was upstairs in the bathroom where it belonged, or, in a few others, downstairs in the cellar or even out back.

The dining room off the vast central hall had a shelf running around all four walls on which was displayed a collection of German steins; at the end of the room was a windowed alcove abloom with plants and flowers and furnished with a couple of chairs, a sofa, and a series of nested tables—Mrs. Blanchard called this her “conservatory.” On the dining-room table was a circular tray supported by a small shaft. We were told that this was a “Lazy Susan,” and I remember once, during a masquerade party that the Blanchards gave for the neighborhood children, the Lazy Susan, during supper, was repeatedly spun around so fast that most of the things fell off with a clatter, including the bowl of powdered sugar. All the kids stuck their fingers in it and licked them. (It was the first powdered sugar I had ever seen; in our house we had granulated sugar, and so did everybody else.) In this connection, I should add that, while most of the costumes at the masquerade were the conventional clowns, witches, and pirates, Clyde was dressed as Jack Frost. His suit of white flannel was covered from his cap to his feet with the kind of white shiny particles—flakes of mica, probably—that you sprinkle on Christmas trees.

Another thing that was different about their table was that while we had shredded wheat for breakfast and Sunday night supper, the Blanchard boys had something called triscuit, with real cream. I know this because I had many a Sunday night supper at their house; and I was always terribly embarrassed and couldn’t say a word, for the moment, when Bertha came into the dining room to serve us. The idea of a servant waiting on us boys made me very uncomfortable; I kept my eyes glued to my plate every time she came into the dining room.

On either side of the downstairs hall were two wide arches leading to the music room on the one hand, and, on the other, the living room—or drawing room. A music room seemed to me as much of a luxury as the conservatory, but in the Blanchard house such a room was necessary. There was a long pitch-black grand piano, the biggest Victrola I have ever seen, with gold fittings inside and a gold key, and two or three mahogany cabinets containing sheet music and records. The records were what was known as Red Seal, with the recording on one side only, and Mother said they cost three or four dollars apiece and sometimes more. The singers consisted of such artists as Caruso and a bunch of other people singing the Sextette from Lucia, the Quartet from Rigoletto, and so on (these records cost seven dollars each). Many opera stars whose names are now but a dim memory sang to us through the slats of that imposing machine, on those rainy afternoons when we dared to lift the lid and set the heavy gold arm with its steel needle on the edge of a record: Louise Homer, Gad-ski, Galli-Curci, Scotti, de Reszke, Calvé, Geraldine Farrar, Alma Gluck (we pronounced it to rhyme with duck, of course), Marcel Journet, Melba, and a man by the name of Plançon whose picture I had seen in the Victor Book of the Opera in the costume of the Devil, with a goatee and bristling mustaches, peaked cap, tights, and a long pointed tail that he carried over one arm because the other arm was holding a pitchfork. The walls of the music room were hung with pictures that the Blanchards had brought back from Europe, photographs of famous works of art, we were told. Two of them I will never forget. One was the statue of David, a tall naked youth with the longest right arm and biggest fist I ever saw; he wore no fig leaf, and when Mrs. Blanchard was in the room with us we never dared raise our eyes. The other was a picture, in pale colors, showing God touching the finger of the outstretched hand of another oversized muscular man, also naked. The photograph seemed to have been cracked; there were fine irregular streaks running all through it. The man had an enormous head, huge arms and trunk, and great thick thighs and legs; but in spite of his size, where the fig leaf should have been he was no bigger than my little brother. Mrs. Blanchard told us this was Adam.

We seldom played in the living room, but I remember it well. The green tiled fireplace, with a green-and-brown marble mantel, had artificial logs that looked almost real. Above the mantel hung a painting of the Blanchards’ yacht, the Meda III, named for the boys’ mother who had been Meda Scofield, of Scranton, Pennsylvania. In one corner of the room was a dilapidated Morris chair upholstered in maroon leather cracked in several places; this was Mr. Blanchard’s, and nobody else ever sat in it. Next to the chair stood a floor lamp with a small fringed shade that could be raised and lowered to suit his wishes. On the desk and on every table, big and little, were photographs of friends and relatives in gold or silver frames. One of them, in particular, was always pointed out with great pride: it showed Mr. Blanchard standing very erect beside a man in uniform who was even bigger than he was, and though it meant nothing to me at the time, I was told that this man was a general and his name was von Hindenburg.

But my favorite room in the house was the boys’ playroom, just off the corridor on the way to the pantries. It was lined with bookshelves, and there were some of the most wonderful books I had ever seen, with beautiful colored illustrations: The Last of the Mohicans, Treasure Island, David Balfour, Kidnapped, The Black Arrow, The Mysterious Island, and so on. One of the fascinating features of this room was the three small tables of golden oak, each of a different height, with matching chairs, to suit the various ages of the growing Blanchard boys—exactly like the children’s section of our Public Library. Off this room was another toilet (or lavatory); and one day, when we were foraging in the kitchen, I discovered still another in the back part of the house—which meant three downstairs!

I have already digressed so much from my story about the camping trip that I think I might as well digress a little further to mention something that ought to be told about those illustrated books I had admired so much, and the terrible thing that my admiration, or covetousness, led me to do. It’s the only thing in the entire history of my relationship with the Blanchard family that I regret, that I wish I could “undo,” but of course it has long since been far too late for that. One afternoon, when I was about thirteen and the Blanchard boys were then away at prep school, I called on Mrs. Blanchard. She received me in the living room, luckily we were alone together, and after sparring for an opening, I brought up the awful question. The boys were older now, I said, they were away at school, they had outgrown David Balfour, The Black Arrow, The Mysterious Island and the others, they’d probably never open the books again when they came home, and, well, could I buy them? I meant this sincerely, was prepared to pay as much as a dollar apiece for the books, and had even brought the money along with me, but the moment the words were out of my mouth, I was suddenly thunderstruck by the implication of what I had said; in effect, of course, I was asking for the books outright, as a gift. As this horrible idea occurred to me, I was so appalled at the thought of what Mrs. Blanchard must be thinking—and thinking of me!—that I didn’t hear (or, if I did hear, register) her answer. In a paroxysm of shame and confusion I tried to withdraw. With her usual gracious smile Mrs. Blanchard politely saw me to the door and urged me to call again, saying she was alone now and missed all of us boys; but for many years after, I could not get it out of my head that Mrs. Blanchard changed her opinion of me very drastically that afternoon, and I never went to the house again unless the boys were home, except once. That was about seven years ago, when, during a visit in Arcadia with my wife and daughter Sarah, we called on the Blanchards. Again she was alone that day, and again I had an almost intolerable feeling of discomfort and uneasiness in her presence. She seemed so cold, aloof, and formal that I could only think that she had not forgotten my dreadful faux pas of the past and indeed would never forget it. She was polite to my wife but, it seemed to me, not cordial; she made a few appropriate remarks about our little girl (which disappointed me deeply), and then rose to dismiss us. I was crushed, and keenly embarrassed as well, the more so because I had often told my wife how fond I had been of Mrs. Blanchard and how nice she always was to us boys, almost as if we were part of her family. Only a few days later did I learn that Mrs. Blanchard was seriously ill at the time, with a fatal illness of which she herself was aware; and when, later that year, she died, I was ashamed that I had thought, even for an instant, that she had been petty enough to hold my childish foible against me, and deeply grateful to her for seeing us at all.

Mr. Blanchard was a large heavy-set man who always wore a coat and vest as if he were about to go out somewhere; but he seldom did, except to go to the Red Cross once a month. During the time when they were not at the lake or in Europe, Mr. Blanchard seemed to do nothing but sit in his old Morris chair and smoke a long curving pipe and drink beer. He had a florid complexion, bushy eyebrows, and a prominent mustache, German-style, which, till we entered the war in 1917, he kept trimmed and waxed in the shape of the Kaiser’s. Most people have a favorite country besides their own, and the Blanchards’ was Germany, probably because Mr. Blanchard had gone to Heidelberg in his youth. Though I didn’t know much about these things at the time and only heard about them from my elders, Mr. Blanchard was very Germanic in his tastes and dress, but he had been born in Vermont of Vermont parents and was just as American as you and I. Even so, the stigma of Germany and German ways never left him. He was very strict with the boys (just like a German, people said), and when he said good night to them, he didn’t kiss them, as our father did us, but shook hands instead. I will never forget the first time I saw Mr. Blanchard shake hands with his sons; it seemed to me not only strange but cold, unfriendly—really German. Most everybody in town disapproved of this kind of foreign discipline and was suspicious of his patriotism. In fact, after we went into the war, unkind neighbors spoke of Mr. Blanchard as pro-German, and some of them went as far as to say that he was a German spy. Look at the way he had gone to Germany to school, people said, and the way he drank beer all the time; and that clock, that outrageous German clock, that actually played “The Watch on the Rhine”! But it should be said for Mr. Blanchard that, during the war, he cut off that part of the clock which set in motion the little German band with its offending tune; and every season when the Red Cross drive was on, Mr. Blanchard waited until all the local contributions were in before making his own; then he would match the subscription of the whole town. To this day, I believe, Mr. Blanchard is chairman of the Red Cross, not only for the town but for the county; yet people at home, doubtless envious of his wealth and distinction, still speak of him as pro-German.

Mrs. Blanchard had been my Sunday-school teacher for as long as I could remember; one year, at Christmastime, she gave me a copy of Plain Tales from the Hills (and I was terribly surprised to discover that one of the stories was about divorce!). It was generally acknowledged that she was a person of real refinement; when people spoke to her on the street they always said, “How do you do?” instead of “Hello” as they did to each other. She seemed more remote from her children than our mother did from us, but this may have been because the governess was in some ways closer to the boys than their mother was. She drove a small electric that looked almost the same from the back as it did from the front; she sat in it dignified and erect, and the sight of her driving down Main Street to go to one of her charity meetings was a real treat for Arcadia. She had few close friends, but several times during the year she gave an afternoon party for some thirty or forty ladies. They played whist, and later had cakes and tea, served by Bertha. Mrs. Blanchard was very kind to us boys, but it was her husband’s mother who was even nicer to us, and, in my opinion, a much grander lady.

Madame Blanchard, as she was called, was a small white-haired woman whom I find myself thinking of now as being like the little old lady who figures so prominently in my own children’s Babar books. For all her dignity, she was no taller than Clyde or me. She always wore white dresses, to the floor, and a black-velvet ribbon around her throat with a cameo in front. In spite of her age, Madame Blanchard was forever going off on some tour somewhere—to Europe, the Orient, South America, the North Cape, the Hawaiian Islands, the Canadian Rockies—and from these junkets she brought back fabulous souvenirs which, after a few weeks, were given to the Public Library, where they were admired for years by townspeople who were not so fortunate as to have such well-traveled grandmothers: an alabaster model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a grizzly bear carved out of a California redwood tree, a slab of petrified wood that reflected the light like quartz, a miniature totem pole, a grass skirt, an Orinoco Indian masque, and a whole procession of ivory elephants in diminishing sizes. Madame Blanchard had a courtesy of speech that other people never bothered to use with children. Every time I saw her she said, “Good afternoon, Don. How is your sweet mother?” And when I left to go home for supper she would say, “Please say I send my compliments.”

The Blanchard children were the only ones in town who had a governess, and the family was somewhat criticized because of this (wasn’t the Public School good enough for the boys? was the general talk). Her name was Miss Craddock. She wore a shirtwaist and skirt, and her hair was piled high in a pompadour. She had a low musical voice, so musical that she sounded like one of the lady elocutionists that I had heard one afternoon, at the Chautauqua, doing selections from Shakespeare, Longfellow, and Whittier. The reading hour at the Blanchards’ was from four to five every afternoon, and I nearly always managed to be in on this. The three Blanchard boys and myself seated ourselves comfortably in a row on the long sofa in the living room, while Miss Craddock sat very erect on a straight chair facing us, not touching the back, like Queen Mary. I remember once she was reading us an Indian story, and she came to a part that described how Red Bear jumped up onto the pinto pony’s back while Brave Heart sat on the pony’s rump. I didn’t know what a rump was, and so I asked—and I will never forget the severe tone in which Miss Craddock replied, as though I had asked something not nice, “The hindquarters.” That afternoon I left for home earlier than usual.

I was very envious of the fact that the Blanchard boys had a governess because it meant that they didn’t have to go to school; but to my surprise I learned that Clyde envied me because I did go to school. He envied me for the many things he never learned at all—songs, for example—so when, along about the fourth grade, I learned “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Marching Through Georgia,” “Just Before the Battle Mother,” and “Tenting Tonight,” I would run straight to the Blanchard house after school to teach the new songs to Clyde. We would go out to the stable, go upstairs, and sit in the open doorway of the hayloft with our feet hanging out, hoping that Pulver wouldn’t come around to chase us away. Then I would sing one of the songs over and over till Clyde had learned it:

We’re tenting tonight on the old camp ground,

Give us a song to cheer

Our weary hearts, a song of home,

And friends we love so dear.…

and down below, on the Blanchards’ vast lawn, we would see the two rival camps set out, the small pyramid-shaped tents of the Blues on one side, the Confederate or rebel tents on the other, a hundred feet apart, separated by the canna beds and the cement walk to the kitchen; the men would be lying about their campfires (as we ourselves would be lying, on our camping trip), and some were dead and some were dying, and many were in tears:

Many are the hearts that are weary tonight,

Wishing for the war to cease,

Many are the hearts that are looking for the right,

To see the dawn of peace …

Tenting tonight, tenting tonight,

Tenting on the old camp ground.…

Every two or three years, Mr. Blanchard took his family abroad for as long as seven or eight months at a time; once they went to the south of France, but all their other visits were to Germany. It was always a great day for us when the Blanchards returned, usually in late May or early June, in time for them to spend the summer months at their big place at the lake. We all looked forward to their return because the Blanchards brought back wonderful presents for every boy and girl in the neighborhood, thirty or forty at least, and it was as good as Christmas. I remember the afternoon, one spring, when they were due home from Europe and New York City, on the 4:45 train. From the time that school let out at three-thirty, it seemed we could hardly wait for Pulver to drive them home from the station; and so, to pass the time till about five o’clock when they would reach home, we ran at a slow trot around the area known as the Mile Square, counting our steps as we trotted along, vying with each other to see which one of us could do it in the greatest number of steps, not the fewest; but when we got back and found the Cadillac already in the drive, we forgot our count in our mad scramble up the stone steps of the porch. That year the Blanchards brought me from Germany a set of oil paints, the first I had ever seen. Each color—over twenty in all—was in a small shiny tube. They were labeled in German, and I remember the lighter colors were signified, to my embarrassment, by the word hell.

The day we were to start on the camping trip, there was much ado in our house. I don’t know how Eddie Richmond felt about it, but I—and Mother too—was excited; before the Blanchards’ car arrived, I kept having to run upstairs to the bathroom. The Cadillac drove up in front of the house at ten o’clock sharp. Clyde was as calm as you please; you would think he went on an excursion like this every week of his life. Bennett was away at the time, visiting somewhere, and so was Anson. Mr. Blanchard rode in front with Pulver; Mrs. Blanchard sat in back with us and made Clyde use one of the side seats, so that his guests could ride in comfort. Eddie Richmond was very quiet and probably embarrassed during the drive, and I was too. Mr. and Mrs. Blanchard were going to their summer place for the whole season, while we went off on our camping trip. The only incident of the drive to the lake—a matter of thirty miles or so which, in those days, was quite a trip—was when the auto went over a big bump and we were all jarred almost out of our seats; and I remember Mrs. Blanchard looked around as if she didn’t really know we were there and said, “Boys, are you still with us?” It wasn’t a very funny remark but we were all feeling good and so pretended it was and laughed heartily.

Looking back on it now, I suppose that my reactions of politeness at this time, the kind of politeness that made me supply the laugh that Mrs. Blanchard may or may not have been expecting, were the beginnings of a consciousness of the social life and its demands on one’s responses. For example, if such a remark had been made by my mother it would have passed unnoticed, but when uttered by Mrs. Blanchard it could seem hilariously funny—just as, in someone else’s house, it was actually fun to help wash the dishes, but at home it was never anything but the most dismal chore, the chore most to be avoided, the dreaded regular evening duty which, looming up after supper, made you keep your eyes glued to your book with such intense concentration that you were not able to read, consumed as you were by the silent passionate prayer that maybe, if you sat there with your book long enough, you would be overlooked, forgotten, and not summoned to the kitchen after all. Whether Mrs. Blanchard’s sally was comic or not didn’t matter; it was nice of her, I thought, to have made the effort even to pretend to be funny; the mere pretending spoke of leisure and graciousness and a world of ease and wealth where one had time to be witty, or at least make a remark that could pass for wittiness. Thus Mrs. Blanchard immediately became, in my eyes, a person who could say things that I knew in advance would all but convulse me, so that I would be ready to laugh when she had barely opened her mouth, not because these remarks were funny in themselves but merely because she took the trouble to say them at all. My own mother was always too busy to bother to joke with us, even when there was something to joke about.

At Parson’s Point, Jones, their boatman, met us at the pier and unloaded the car. First Mr. Blanchard bought us three boys ice-cream cones and then we piled into their magnificent launch, called the Wawautosa, which Clyde explained was Indian for whippoorwill. In a minute we were speeding over the bay, Mrs. Blanchard holding her hat, and the Wawautosa spreading behind us an ever-widening wake of foam. When we passed the racing sloops that were anchored off the Yacht Club during weekdays, the strong wake of the launch rocked them back and forth as if in a small gale; the masts dipped and plunged, and sometimes the caretaker aboard came up on deck to see what was going on.

We put in at one of the several slips in the Blanchard boathouse before noon, in time for lunch; and there on the veranda was some of the paraphernalia for our camping trip.

The Blanchards’ “cottage” was called Nokomis, which even I knew meant Hiawatha’s grandmother. It was about three miles across the bay from Parson’s Point and the mainland and rested on little more than a sandbar, so that the Blanchards had the bay in front of them and Lake Ontario in back; all night long one heard the waves breaking on the sand, and it was the pleasantest sound to go to sleep by. The sandbar stretched from Bickerton Point (called Bick Point for short, or just Bick) to Lake Bluff, and for half of this distance of several miles it was lined with summer cottages. The rest of it, near the Bluff, was a desolate sandy waste with sparse cottonwood trees and land so narrow that it could support no cottage. From year to year, this part of the sandbar changed, or was sometimes washed away entirely by the November storms on Lake Ontario. It was in this remote spot—remote from the Blanchard cottage by a good two miles, that is—that we were to set up our camp.

But there was no setting up of the camp required at all, we discovered. When Jones took Clyde, Eddie, and me, and all the paraphernalia, down to the site of our camp, we were dumfounded to discover that the enormous tent, as large as an army tent, had already been set up. But this wasn’t the least of the wonders. The tent had a wooden floor; there was an American flag flying from a tall steel pole; there was an icebox; there was a cookstove with four griddles and a pipe about ten feet tall, curved at the top to take advantage of the wind; and, most marvelous and depressing of all (for we had wanted to be on our own), a pier had been built reaching some thirty feet into the bay, so that the Wawautosa could put in from time to time to see how we were getting on. More, a canoe and a rowboat had been detailed for our use, tied up on the other side of the pier.

Jones then left us, with the ribald admonition not to have any girls in for the night (I wondered what Mr. Blanchard would have said if he had heard this, for we were only ten at the time), and we got out of our good clothes and into our camping outfits. I tried the beds, and they were better than my own bed at home. Clyde appointed himself captain or boss, which was only natural. Eddie was ordered to fetch water for supper, but all he had to do was press the tap of the tank that had been set up for our use in advance. The whole fantastic equipment represented an outlay such as I have only seen since in an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue.

I remember there was a magnificent sunset over the lake that evening, pale green and pink, with a sun the color of a poppy which got bigger and bigger the lower it sank, and duller in color and light, till, when it rested on the horizon of the lake, you could look directly at it without hurting your eyes, as if it were no more than a round patch of bright-red paper stuck on a wall. I turned from the lake and looked around the bay. Lamps were coming on in the cottages on the Bluff and on the islands, and I thought of my mother and brothers and wondered what they were doing. I could see them sitting around the familiar cluttered supper table at home, less crowded now because I wasn’t there, and I wondered if they missed me or noticed my empty place at all. I wondered, too, what my fellow-campers were thinking, and looked at them to see if I could find out. But Eddie was occupied for the moment at the water tank and Clyde, as boss, was busy being the cook.

Our supper was to consist of scrambled eggs. My one duty was to set the table. It had been set up outside by Jones; and there, in a small chest, was an assortment of proper knives and forks, plates and glasses, and a real tablecloth. I concentrated now on doing as neat a job as I could, as my mother had taught me. Clyde was busy at the stove, stirring the eggs. He called for us to be seated; and then the cataclysm came.

As he turned away from the stove to dish out the eggs, the wooden handle of the frying pan must have been loose, because suddenly the pan turned upside down in his hand and the eggs all spilled with a small sickening plop in the sand. Without a word, he gave us one awful look and suddenly burst into tears. He darted like a streak into the tent, and Eddie and I sat there in dreadful embarrassment listening to his bawling. But not for long.

Jones must have been lurking within a hundred feet or so of our camp the whole time, somewhere in the bushes, with orders to keep an eye on us, because two minutes hadn’t gone by when, as casually as you please, he just sort of slid noiselessly up to the pier in the Wawautosa, ready to take us back to the cottage. He acted very sober and never cracked a smile the whole time. Eddie Richmond and I took this as a matter of course. Indeed, what else could we do? Clyde, though his outburst of tears had abated, wasn’t speaking to us, but somehow we knew that by the time we got back to the cottage, everything would be all right. Clyde wouldn’t dare carry on in a sulky fashion in the presence of his parents; if he did, his father would exercise that strong German discipline of his that we all knew too well and send Clyde to bed not only without his supper but also with a good warming of his bottom.

That was the end of the camping trip, but it is not quite the end of the story. Eddie Richmond and I moved in with the Blanchards, and for the rest of the three weeks we lived like millionaires. Mornings we swam in the bay, leaping off the boathouse dock; afternoons we swam in Lake Ontario—or waded out into the cold water and pretended to swim until the breakers knocked us down. Every day after lunch Jones took us over to the Point and bought us ice-cream cones and hot dogs; and then, while Jones visited his cronies and usually “had more than was good for him,” as Mrs. Blanchard said later, we three boys hung around and watched the train come in to see who would be on it. There was almost always somebody we knew getting off, but much more fun was the way the puffing of the engine sent the branches of the willow trees way up in the air, as if they were being tossed about by a high wind. The Wawautosa was tied up at the Yacht Club pier, and to me it was exciting hanging around the Yacht Club waiting for Jones to show up. We watched the members of the Club in their white-flannel pants and blue coats with brass buttons and white caps on their heads, lingering about the bar and not going sailing at all. On the pier was a small cannon of solid brass, very shiny and beautiful to see, which Clyde said was fired only on Decoration Day and Labor Day, when the Yacht Club races were held; the cannon gave the signal for the races to start.

With Bennett and Anson away, Clyde, Eddie, and I (except for the Blanchards and Mr. Blanchard’s mother) had the place pretty much to ourselves. I never knew days to go so fast; it almost seemed that no sooner did we get up in the morning than the day was gone and we had to go to bed. Mr. Blanchard must have had a phobia about noise because he was always yelling at us to be quiet. It was one of the rules of Camp Nokomis that we were not allowed to shout or yell while at play; he said that screaming children meant possible danger—one of us might have fallen in; and how was he to tell, from our hollering, whether we were in trouble or not? It was like crying “wolf,” he said. Consequently our play, no matter what we were doing, was carried on practically in pantomime. At the table, too, silence was the rule. In our house we had to raise our voices almost to the highest pitch in order to be heard; but during the meals at Camp Nokomis, Mr. Blanchard was always speaking to me very sharply. “Don,” he would say, “I am sitting only four feet away from you and you don’t need to shout! Now,” he would bellow, “lower your voice please!”

Mrs. Blanchard spent most of the afternoon playing whist with other ladies on the lake porch. Mr. Blanchard sat in an easy chair on the bay porch drinking beer; and I was a little shocked that he did it so publicly, without regard for the opinion of the adjoining cottagers. He didn’t seem to give a darn, and I should have admired him for it, but at that age I didn’t. Madame Blanchard, with her long white dress that trailed the floor and the black-velvet ribbon around her throat, showed a constant and courteous interest in our play as if she were our only hostess. I remember one afternoon she was standing at the railing of the bay porch, with her hands folded around her tiny waist in a ladylike way, when suddenly the Wawautosa shot out from the boathouse and headed across the bay. Curious, I asked, “Who’s that going over to the Point?” and I have never forgotten how Madame Blanchard murmured quietly, without a trace of expression, “The domestics.”

Finally the day came when the three weeks were up and it was time for me to go home, but I only realized this after my mother had written me a letter reminding me that I was due to leave on Monday. She said in her letter to be sure and thank Mrs. Blanchard for a wonderful time. After my suitcase had been put in the boat and Jones had started the motor to take Eddie and me across the bay to the train, I went looking for Mrs. Blanchard to do the polite thing as Mother had advised.

I found her on the lake porch playing whist with her ladies. It was a terrifying experience to approach and speak to her, as there must have been twenty women in all. They stared at me over their cards as if they had never seen a boy before. I kept wondering if there was anything the matter with me; were my stockings wrinkled, was my shirttail hanging out? and so on. But I went up to Mrs. Blanchard just the same, and with the greatest difficulty I said my speech: “I’ve had a wonderful time and thank you very much.” Mrs. Blanchard gave me a warm smile and said, “I’m very glad you did, Don. I hope you will come again next year.”

I had been prepared for my speech, but not for her reply. It threw me off, and I heard myself answering, “I will if I’m asked.” And all those terrible ladies, except Mrs. Blanchard, tittered and giggled and kind of ducked behind their cards as if I had said something outrageous. I guess I did, too, because the story got around town in no time, and Mother was so ashamed that she swore she would never let me go anywhere again, not even on a camping trip.

A Night Visitor

Mother said later, and smiled when she said it (but she could only say this, and smile, years after), that it couldn’t have happened on a worse night. The Bartles were over, and Mother never had the Bartles over. They lived across the street; and though we had always known them as neighbors—with a bowing acquaintance—they were different from us and from most of the other people of the street: aloof, haughty, and (as I would have put it when I was old enough to know the expression) holier-than-thou. How they happened to be there this one night, I don’t remember. If only it had been the Clarks, Mother said afterward, or the Kellers, or the Farrells, or indeed almost anybody else, she wouldn’t have minded so much. Not that she did mind, really, any more than she minded the whole difficult ordeal; but it just gave the Bartles one more opportunity to be patronizing of the neighbors, and smile superiorly, and retire to their correct unhuman household where such an irregular and upsetting thing could never have happened.

Mr. Bartle was known as a nature-lover, a bird-lover, and a music-lover. He wore glasses with a black ribbon attached, and we never saw him without his coat on, even when he was walking around his extensive backyard with his hands clasped pompously behind him, inspecting the peonies and the hydrangeas and the birdbaths. It was said that Mr. Bartle knew every flower and plant and every bird by its name in the book; and it was always Mr. Bartle, each spring, who of all the residents in Arcadia was inevitably the one who saw the first robin. On summer nights his player piano resounded throughout the neighborhood, treating us all to “The Erl-King” and “Poet and Peasant” and “William Tell”; and on Saturday evenings when the band concerts were given in the village park, three streets away, he sat on his front porch nodding his head to the music and waving an imaginary baton—for the benefit, of course, of the neighbors whose idea of music was “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Mrs. Bartle was a frail small woman who never ventured an opinion when her husband was present and whose infrequent remarks were interspersed with phrases like “It appears” and “It would seem” and “As a matter of fact.” To our way of thinking the Bartles were cultivated and well-educated people and we kids were always a little in awe of them. Consequently, the night they were over, we were only too glad to stay in our own rooms upstairs. Mother was just as well pleased too, as she knew that Mr. and Mrs. Bartle didn’t like noisy children and it was hard not to raise our voices occasionally when we three boys were together.

I was in my bedroom reading The Skeleton in Armour and at the same time trying to listen to what was going on downstairs. The doors to the living room and parlor were closed but I could hear the conversation once in a while and the Galli-Curci records that Mother was playing to entertain the Bartles. About nine-thirty they were to have cake and ice cream, and Mother said she would send some up to us when it was ready. It was a warm night in early June, the front door was open, and there was no sound from the street except maybe once in a while during the evening when an automobile went by and when the schoolhouse clock chimed eight o’clock and then again, later, nine o’clock. A few minutes after that, there was a sudden knocking on the screen door.

I was surprised because nobody ever knocked at our house—they just opened the door and came in; and also because I hadn’t heard anybody come up on the porch. There was a long pause—I guess Mother didn’t hear it right away—and then the knock came again: a loud rapping on the wood of the screen.

The parlor door opened, then, and I heard Mother come out into the hall and switch on the porch light. “Hello—who is it?” she said. I heard a voice mumble something, and Mother asked again, “Who?” Then, “Oh,” she said in a funny way, and again “Oh,” as if she were trying to think of something to say. The voice mumbled once more for a second or two and then Mother called out, “Gerald! Don! Will one of you come down here a minute?”

I didn’t move. After all, she had said Gerald first; and besides, Gerald was supposed to be the man of the family now that he was fifteen and Father had gone. I heard Gerald get up from a chair in his room and come out into the hall, and at the same time my little brother Warwick ran out into the hall, too. “What is it, Mother?” Gerald said.

“Come downstairs a moment? Will you, son?” Mother said. “And Warwick, you go into Don’s room, like a good boy. Don,” Mother called to me, “keep Warwick with you. I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

All these directions were given without fuss or excitement, but just the same the Bartles had stopped talking in the parlor and were listening to what was going on in the hall—and I listened too. Then my older brother started down the stairs; and just as he reached the bottom, I heard Mother ask whoever it was to come in.

There was whispering in the hall, then, and after about a minute my brother Gerald started upstairs again, followed by heavy slow footsteps. Mother waited until they had reached the top and then she returned to the parlor. I heard her say, “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Bartle, but I’ll have to ask you to excuse me for this evening. We have a visitor”; and just then Gerald came into my room with this man.

I had never seen anybody like him before, not even among the five or six tramps who turned up at our back door during the summer, which is what he reminded me of first. I wasn’t scared because Mother had always said there was nothing to be scared of in tramps and we must always be nice to them; but I was uneasy and uncomfortable, I think mostly because he smelled so bad. The minute he came through the door I smelled him, and it got worse the longer he stood there. He smelled like the ashes down by the furnace after we kids had peed in them, especially the day afterward, after the heat of the furnace had made them smell worse. He stood in the doorway twisting his cap in his hands. He was tall and thin, with a broad high forehead but a very thin face. His mouth hung open in an embarrassed grin, he seemed to have no cheeks at all, and his teeth were long, crooked, and yellow-looking. He was dressed in a heavy gray sweater fastened at the front with a safety pin, blue denim pants, and heavy worn shoes. Warwick and I sat there staring at him; and then Gerald said, very coldly, “These are my two brothers.”

The man grinned and nodded and fumbled with his cap. “How de-doo.” His voice was deep, but not deep in a good way or manly way—just hollow, like a clown pretending to be an idiot.

“What do you want here?” Gerald said sharply. “Who are you, anyway?”

The man turned, looked at Gerald for a moment and then giggled. He shifted uncomfortably, as if he was suspicious of us, and looked down at the floor. “Where’s Gerald?” he said, and it was as if his voice came through a funnel or something.

“I’m Gerald,” my brother said, “but if you mean my father, he isn’t here any more.”

The man was evidently very surprised at this. He stood up straight and peered at Gerald as if he didn’t believe him. “You aren’t married to Ellen—I know that much,” he said stupidly. “I’m no fool!”

Mother was in the hall now, saying good night to the Bartles and apologizing for dismissing them so early. The man heard her, and immediately he turned and went out to the top of the stairs and looked down. “What’s the matter, Ellen?” he said. “You ashamed of me?” There was a terrible pause. “Don’t worry,” he said over the banister, “your fine friends can stay. I ain’t going to come down.”

He said all this as gentle as a child, but I was scared now. Then I heard Mr. Bartle speak up. “Ellen, who is this man!”

“Come down, Henry, if you want to,” Mother said.

The man went down a couple of steps to the landing, then stood there, hesitating.

Mrs. Bartle gave a little muffled cry and pushed open the screen door. “Ned,” she whimpered, “don’t you think we’d better—”

“It’s all right,” Mother said. “Mrs. Bartle, this is my brother Henry.… Henry, this is Mr. and Mrs. Bartle, who live across the street.”

From the landing, he nodded and said in his sepulchral voice, “Pleased to meet you.”

“And now,” I heard Mother say, “maybe you’d better go. I’ll try to come over and see you in the morning, Mrs. Bartle.”

They were gone—shocked by the fact (no less than we were) that this terrible man was a relative of ours. Mother stood there a moment more, then switched off the porch light, hooked the screen door, and came upstairs.

“Boys,” Mother said, “this is your Uncle Henry. You didn’t know you had an Uncle Henry, did you?” She put her hand on his shoulder. “They’ve never seen you before, Henry—that’s why they looked so surprised.”

“Mother!” protested Gerald.

But Mother paid no attention to Gerald’s anger, even though I’m sure, now, that her sympathies were with him at the time. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you too,” Mother went on. “I’d almost forgotten how—Tell me, Henry, how are you? Have you seen Mama and Papa lately?”

At that moment he looked as though he was going to cry. “I was there last week,” he said, and then he did begin to blubber. He took out a big blue handkerchief and wiped his nose.

“Oh yes? How are they?”

“Good,” he said.

“That’s fine, Henry. And did Mama and Papa tell you where we live?”

Suddenly he became very secretive and sly. “I found out,” he said.

“I’m very glad you did.” Then Mother turned to us. “Boys,” she said, “Uncle Henry is going to spend the night with us. We must find a place for him to sleep, mustn’t we.”

“I don’t want to put you out,” he said. He was really crying now.

“Why, what an idea—you won’t put us out! We’ve got plenty of room, haven’t we, boys?” We didn’t say a thing. My brother Gerald gave Mother a look and walked out of the room. Mother pretended not to notice this. “You’re tired,” she went on. “A nice bath and a good bed—” She bit her lip and looked at us frowningly, as if thinking. Suddenly she seemed to brighten. “I’ve got an idea! Warwick, you sleep with Don tonight, and we’ll give Uncle Henry your bed—how will that be? Then Gerald can sleep downstairs in my room and I’ll sleep upstairs in his. That way I’ll be up here with you in case Uncle Henry—well, wants anything. Isn’t that all right?”

So it was arranged. I was sent down to the kitchen to light the gas heater so my mother’s brother (like the others, I couldn’t bring myself to call him Uncle Henry) could take a bath. Gerald stayed in his room with the door closed and refused to come out till Mother went in and asked him to take his night things and go down and sleep in her room; which he did, and we didn’t see him again till morning. Then Mother went up into the attic to look for an old nightshirt of my father’s. When she came down she also had with her one of my father’s suits, some shoes, underwear, and several clean shirts that were still good. These she laid out on Warwick’s bed, which for tonight was Henry’s. She handed him the nightshirt, and took him down the hall to show him where the bathroom was. She started the water for him and then came back to us.

“Now you boys get to bed just as quickly and quietly as you can,” she said. “I’ll be upstairs here with you so you needn’t be frightened. There’s nothing to be frightened of, anyway, is there? Warwick, have you got your pajamas?”

Warwick ran into his room while Henry was in the bathroom and got his pajamas and ran back. He undressed quickly and got into bed. I began to undress too, and Mother went downstairs to get her own things and turn off the gas heater. I was in bed by the time she came back. Our room still smelled something awful, and Mother walked in and said, “You must be sure to open your windows wide. After all, there are two of you in here tonight and you’ll need all the fresh air you can get.” She pushed the windows up as far as they would go and turned out our light. She leaned over and kissed us both good night. “I’ll come back in a few minutes and see you after Uncle Henry’s had his bath,” she said, “if you’re still awake. But do try to go to sleep, won’t you?” Then she left and tiptoed down the hall, to listen outside the bathroom door. Finally she called through the door. “You all right, Henry?” He said something I couldn’t hear, and Mother answered, “All right, then; get to bed as soon as you can—it’s getting late.”

After a while he came down the hall in his bare feet and looked in at Warwick and me. He stood there in the doorway, looking very big in the nightshirt that was too small for him, and then he snickered. At the same moment, Mother came into the hall and stood beside him.

“I tell you, Ellen,” he said, giggling, “why don’t I just sleep in here with the little fellows? Be kind of fun and not so lonely like.”

“Why, Henry,” Mother said, “that’s a silly idea. There’s a perfectly good bed in Warwick’s room, all for you. Now you just come on and have a good night’s sleep, all by yourself.” She took his arm. “Besides, I want to have a good visit with you first, and we mustn’t keep the boys up any longer.” Whereupon she led him into Warwick’s room and closed the door—I suppose so we couldn’t hear.

Warwick and I lay in bed talking in whispers of the visitor.

“Do you suppose he really is our uncle?” Warwick said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Mother says so, and she ought to know.”

“Just the same, he can’t be our uncle,” Warwick said. “Our uncle” meant Uncle Fred, that busy, noisy man who was a doctor in the city; and when you thought of him you couldn’t imagine, then, that Henry was our uncle, too. Uncle Fred was always very clean and very businesslike; he spoke in a rapid, loud voice, did things quickly, and smelled as clean as he looked. If what Mother said was true, this man was Uncle Fred’s brother—which was almost harder to believe than that he was Mother’s.

I hadn’t gone to the bathroom before going to bed, so I got up now and went down the hall. On my way back, coming along in the half-dark in my bare feet, I stopped outside Warwick’s room and listened. I heard Mother say, “But of course you understand that you can’t stay here, don’t you, Henry? There are the boys. You do understand that, don’t you—and why?” There was no answer. “They come first,” Mother said, “and I have to think of them. This is their home—you saw yourself how Gerald acted tonight. Henry, I’m glad you’re here, and we’ll take care of you for the night, but tomorrow—” He muttered something, and then suddenly Mother said, “Oh dear! If only Papa had been the kind of father he should have been!”

I crept back to bed, and Warwick whispered, “What are they talking about?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “how should I know!”

“You were listening,” he whispered, “I know you were. What did they say?”

“They didn’t say anything. Shut up and go to sleep.”

“No,” Warwick said. “I’m going to get up and listen too.” But at this moment we heard Mother open the door and come out. She closed the door behind her and came into our room.

“Asleep yet?” We kept still, making believe we were, but Mother said, “I know you’re only fooling.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Listen, boys.” She took Warwick’s hand, who was nearest her. “There are a lot of things in this world that you boys don’t know. The way it is with you, and with us here, isn’t the way it is with everybody. We’re lucky enough to be a family, but lots of people are alone, with nobody to care for them or love them.” She was sitting there beside us on the bed, out of the light that came in from the hall; and though I couldn’t see her eyes, I knew she wasn’t looking at us as she talked, but straight at the wall.

“I think I should tell you something about Henry so that you will understand, and not act the way Gerald did tonight, though heaven knows, poor boy, he isn’t to blame,” she said. “My mother died when I was seven years old. That was your grandmother, the real one. There were three of us children and I was the oldest of the three. Then came your Uncle Fred, and then Henry. He was only a little baby when my mother died—just a few months old. Papa had a hard time with three little children on his hands and no mother for them; and so, in about a year, he married Mama, my stepmother, the grandmother you know. She was a German woman whose husband had died. Mama was very hard on us in those days, though it was not entirely her fault: she couldn’t be expected to take an interest in children who were not her own. She was often very cruel to us, but I never said anything to Papa about it because he wouldn’t believe it. Then, a little over a year after they were married, Papa and Mama had a child of their own, your Uncle Otto whom you’ve never met.”

“Mother,” Warwick whispered tensely in the dark, “what was the matter with Gerald tonight?”

“Listen, Warwick, and please don’t interrupt. Uncle Henry is my little brother, just as you are Don’s and Gerald’s little brother. But different—oh, a lot different, though I didn’t realize it for a long time, or how serious it was. On account of Mama, I only stayed home till I was fourteen. By that time it was too hard for me. I couldn’t get along with Mama no matter how hard I tried, and I did try—for Papa’s sake as much as for my own. So I left and went to Buffalo and got a job as—well, just a plain hired girl, taking care of other people’s children. You never knew that, did you, that your mother was a hired girl? Well, I was. Then only a couple of years later I met your father and we got married almost at once. That’s probably one of the reasons why I married so young: I was anxious to have a home of my own and belong somewhere. But here was the terrible thing. As your Uncle Henry grew up, we began to notice that he wasn’t like other children—that he wasn’t quite right at all. He couldn’t learn properly, he couldn’t take care of himself in any way, not even in the smallest things, like dressing or going to the bathroom; and it was this that always made your grandfather furious, all the more so because his and Mama’s own son Otto, even though he was younger than Henry, was so much brighter. Grandpa was—he was ashamed of Henry, and shouted at him for not being able to do the simplest things. But no matter how much he was shouted at, or punished, poor Henry couldn’t understand and couldn’t have corrected his habits if he had understood. Otto, of course, made fun of Henry all the time, and so did Uncle Fred in a way—it was only natural, they were just children, and maybe I’d have done the same thing if I hadn’t been older.”

“Mother,” Warwick said, “is Gerald mad at something?”

“Warwick,” Mother said, “I’m trying to tell you something about your Uncle Henry. People like that—What I’m trying to say is that punishment does them no good and ridicule is even worse. He may have been hurt when he was born, but we didn’t know anything was wrong till he was about four or five. What he needed was a good mother to love him and take time and patience with him, but of course Mama couldn’t be expected to do that when she had a son of her own, even younger. Henry used to cry, I remember, when Mama would take Otto up in her lap and rock him—he cried, then, more than when he was punished, and would run out into the backyard and hide in the shed. I’m only telling you this because I want you to know how, from the very beginning, some people never have a chance. Almost every family has somebody that they’d rather not have around, and it’s too bad that you boys had to find out about it in this way. On the other hand, there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t know, either.”

At this point Mother stopped and lifted her head and I saw that she was listening. “Just a minute,” she said, and she got up and went out into the hall. I knew that she was listening at the door to Warwick’s room where Uncle Henry was sleeping, but in a few minutes she was back and sat on the bed again.

“You’re still awake, aren’t you, Don?” Mother said.

“Yes, Mother,” I said, and Warwick said “Yes, Mother,” too.

“When I left home,” Mother said, “Henry was about seven or eight. I didn’t see much of him then for a long time because I was working in Buffalo, but Papa had promised he would take care of Henry after I left. After your father and I were married, I saw them even less, till you children began to come and then Papa would visit us once in a while. He didn’t talk about Henry much. I understood why he didn’t, and I felt sorry for him. He was always so ashamed, poor man, though he had no reason to be. It wasn’t his fault or anyone’s, but I knew he hated having a son like that. His shame made him try to ignore Henry and Henry’s trouble, he paid attention to him less and less, and instead of trying to find a good place for Henry to stay, in some special kind of school or even some good home, he shirked his responsibilities more and more and just let Henry get worse. Papa didn’t speak of these things when he visited us, but I knew Henry hadn’t gotten any better and was still a little boy—worse than a little boy, in some ways. Then, when he was about fifteen, he disappeared. Exactly where he went nobody knows, but we learned later that he bummed around the country like a tramp, turning up at Papa’s house about once a year, but only for a day or two, and then he’d be off again. How he got along I can’t imagine, because he isn’t as bright as other people and I don’t know how he could manage to live by his wits. I guess somebody always looked out for him; at least I used to pray that they would. I only saw him once after he left, and that was at Papa’s house about ten years ago. Your father and I were there for the day, and Henry had shown up the night before. I didn’t know him at first and had to be told who he was—imagine, my own brother.”

“Where did he come from tonight?” I asked. “How did he happen to come here?”

“He told me he was at Mama’s this week and she must have told him how to get here,” Mother said. “I asked him about his life and how he got along, and he said he just goes around, riding the trains all over the country, and every year he usually spends the winter in jail somewhere. Then, when spring comes, he’s out again and travels around some more. Your Uncle Fred tells me he comes there sometimes, because your Uncle always gives him money and buys him a railroad ticket to some place. He loves to ride in the passenger coaches.”

“Mother,” Warwick said, “why does he smell so bad?”

“Why, Warwick,” Mother said, “he hasn’t any other clothes! He’s probably slept in the same clothes for a long time—he doesn’t have the opportunities to bathe and change the way we do. You’ll see, he won’t be like that in the morning. He’ll be all bathed and dressed in clean clothes, and be just like you and me, or Uncle Fred.”

“Mother,” Warwick said again, “what was the matter with Gerald tonight? Why wasn’t he nice?”

“Gerald doesn’t understand, that’s all,” Mother said, “but he will. I know what he was thinking. He’s afraid of what people around town will say, our neighbors and his friends at school, if they should find out. He feels ashamed and doesn’t want anyone to know. I know how it is; my own father was the same. They can’t help it. We mustn’t blame Gerald, Warwick—but still, we mustn’t blame Henry, either.”

Mother got up from the bed. “You boys must get some sleep now. Everything will be all right in the morning, and maybe Gerald will understand by then, too. We’ll get Uncle Henry a ticket on the train and let him go where he wants to.” Mother sighed deeply, then spoke as if thinking aloud. “Heaven only knows what the Bartles are thinking.” Then she added, “But we don’t care, do we?” She leaned over and kissed Warwick and then me. “Good night, Warwick. Good night, Don. Sleep well.”

“Good night, Mother,” we said; and she was gone. She put the light out in the hall, stood by the door to Warwick’s room for a moment, and then I heard her quietly turn the key in the lock.

I did not fall asleep for a long time, partly because through the hall I could see that Mother still had the light on in Gerald’s room, and partly because of the things she had told us. I knew, now, why Mother always fed tramps who came to the back door, and gave them clothes and sometimes a little money. Ours was the only house on the whole street where they ever stopped, and the neighbors used to remark about this. Maybe there was some truth to the popular notion that tramps always marked the places where they had been treated well, so that other tramps would know; but always, after a tramp had been at our house and had had a meal at the back door, Warwick and I used to go over every inch of the back porch and steps and every inch of the sidewalk, looking for some mark or sign that the tramp had left. We never found any, but we did not doubt that it was so. In fact, our failure to find the mysterious mark only added to the glamor of the idea: the tramps had a way of communicating with each other that we ordinary people wouldn’t understand.

I fell asleep then, but after a while woke in what seemed the middle of the night, though it may have been only an hour or a half-hour later. I didn’t know what it was that had awakened me at first until I realized it was the light shining into the hall from Gerald’s bedroom. After a moment I remembered that Mother was in there, and I wondered if she had fallen asleep with the light on. I got out of bed quietly so as not to wake Warwick, and tiptoed into the hall. But I did not go into Gerald’s room. From the door I saw Mother lying in bed. She had a handkerchief over her face and was pressing it against her eyes with the fingers of both hands. She breathed deeply, and I could see—I could even hear—that she was crying softly, and trying not to cry out loud.

In the morning, when we came down, Gerald was already at breakfast and Mother was talking to him. I guess Uncle Henry was still asleep because his door was closed as we came through the hall. Gerald was quiet at breakfast; he didn’t talk at all. He wouldn’t look at Mother or even at us.

When we had finished eating, Mother said, “Don, you and Warwick run along to school now. You needn’t wait for Gerald. He’s going to stay home for awhile and then take Uncle Henry to the station after everybody else is in school. Aren’t you, Gerald? And then this noon, when you come home for dinner, it’ll be just the same as it’s always been. Your Uncle Henry will be gone, the Bartles will be the only ones who’ll know anything, and we’ll all try to forget about it. I mean by that,” she said, “that it’s been—well, a little unpleasant perhaps, for some of us, and I’m sure your Uncle Henry is the last person in the world who would want to cause any difficulty for Gerald or anybody else. Isn’t that so, Gerald?”

Gerald didn’t say a word.

“I’m sorry to have to ask you to do this,” Mother said, “but you’re the man of the house now, Gerald, and the only one to do it.… Go on, Don. You and Warwick run along now. Gerald won’t be in school until later.”

At noon, as Warwick and I came down the street and turned in at our house, we saw a strange sight on the back porch: the mattress from Warwick’s bed where Uncle Henry had slept was spread over the railing, showing a big dark stain; and on the clothesline in the backyard were hanging the sheets from the bed and even the blankets.

Gerald came home a few minutes later and we sat down to dinner, all of us acutely embarrassed. After a while Mother said, “Well, are you going to tell me about it, Gerald? I’d like to know, if you feel like telling me.”

“Why, yes,” Gerald said evasively, “why not? We just walked over to the station, the back way, and I bought him a ticket to Chicago as you told me to. That’s all.”

“Did you wait for the train to come in,” Mother asked, “and put him on?”

“Yes, I did,” Gerald said, without looking at any of us. “He piled on and I handed him up that old suitcase you gave him, and then he waved and I waved and that’s all there was to it.… I didn’t meet anyone we know,” he added sarcastically, “if that’s what you mean.”

“Never mind, Gerald,” Mother said, “you know very well that isn’t what I meant.”

The meal went on in silence, then, until the telephone rang. Gerald got up to answer it. In a moment he came back and said, “Mother, it’s for you. It’s Father Dillon.”

“Why, of all things,” Mother said, getting up, “what would the Catholic priest be calling me for?”

“How should I know?” Gerald said. “He said he wanted you.”

Mother went into the living room to the telephone. We heard her say, “Yes, Father Dillon? … Yes … Oh! … Oh, I’m terribly sorry … Yes, he is … That’s right, he is, Father Dillon … Well—please let me call you back, may I? I’ll have to think first … Thank you, Father Dillon. I’ll telephone you within a few minutes.”

Mother came back into the dining room. She leaned on the table with both hands, looked at Gerald, and said, “Gerald, you lied to me! Why did you lie to me!”

“What do you mean,” Gerald cried, “what’s the matter?”

“Why didn’t you do what I told you with your Uncle Henry?”

“I took him to the station!”

“You said that you waited and saw him on the train! Oh, Gerald, you fool,” Mother said, and sat down in her chair. “Oh, you should have waited! You should have put him on the train!”

“Mother!” Gerald was almost shouting now. “I couldn’t! I hated it there, I couldn’t stand it! I didn’t know who we might run into! And Mr. Jenner looking out at us from the ticket window and wondering who this awful bum—Mother, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t wait! After I bought the ticket I left him—you would have, too, or Don, or anyone! How did I know he wouldn’t go?”

Warwick began to cry. “Shut up, Wick,” Gerald snapped. “Where is he now?”

“Father Dillon said that a man, a very strange man,” Mother said, “turned up at the Parish House a half hour ago and said he was my brother. Father Dillon didn’t believe it at first but the man kept insisting and so he phoned to ask me if it was true. Now he wants to know what I’d like him to do about it. He said he’d keep him there until I called back. What can I tell him?” Mother got up from the table and walked back and forth. “Oh, Gerald, don’t you see? It would all have been so easy if you had only—For you and for everybody, even for poor Henry! Now—now you’ve only got it all to do over again.”

Gerald suddenly thumped the table a terrific whack. “Damn it to hell, I won’t do it again! The cops are going to take care of him this time, not me!” He sprang up from the table and ran into the hall. “That filthy bum’s going to be out of this town in another hour or I’ll never set foot in this house again!”

“Gerald!” Mother ran into the hall. “Don’t be a fool, Gerald—you’re only making things worse!”

“I know what I’m doing!” he shouted.

“Don’t you see, Gerald,” Mother cried, “you’re only doing the very thing you wanted to prevent! You’ll have everybody in town—Gerald! Gerald!”

The screen door slammed and we heard Gerald run down the steps and on up the street.

Warwick and I stared at each other across the table. We were too frightened to move. We listened, but Mother didn’t make a sound. After a long time she came back into the dining room and sat down at her place at the table. She was crying now, but she noticed us sitting there not eating, and said, “Please eat your dinner, boys, it’s almost time to go back to school.” Even as we were eating, then, the school bell began to ring and Mother started to cry again. “Poor Gerald,” she sobbed, leaning over her plate, “oh, poor Gerald …”

The Break

The news of the escape first got around on Sunday night. It threw the oldest son into a state of agitation, almost panic, possibly because he was old enough to know what it meant. The youngest was indifferent: he was too young. Mrs. Birnam—an unimaginative mother, easy-going, preoccupied with family matters—seemed to take the attitude that if danger was involved, it was danger to somebody else besides themselves; she was one of those comfortably insular persons who believe that catastrophes like consumption, “infantile,” automobile accidents and lightning can only strike, if they strike at all, the other fellow. Don’s reaction, the middle son, was romantic: what a pity that it had happened forty miles away, and thus the consequent exciting danger or threat would never reach as far as their town of Arcadia. He was twelve at the time.

There had been a break at the state prison in Auburn. Six desperate convicts had shot their way out and were even now—so everybody said—terrorizing the countryside, though no one had seen hide nor hair of them since their rush to freedom after a wounded guard, at gunpoint, had raised the outer gate for their escape. They might equally have vanished off the face of the earth or taken refuge in somebody’s abandoned barn, too frightened to stir from their hideout for weeks to come.

The news came to the Birnams inevitably from one of their neighbors over the telephone. There was no radio in those days but Mrs. Kirtle was just as good. By some mysterious gift she always managed to hear things before anybody else and immediately got on the phone or rushed across the backyards, ducking under clotheslines and rapping on kitchen doors. “Pauline Revere,” the boys called her, and their mother suppressed a smile and scolded them for disrespect.

The thing to do, people said then, was to stay close to home, go out as little as possible, keep off the streets after dark, lock up at night, and more than anything else, avoid the open country. For the next few days they observed these pleasant restrictions—and for Don it was exciting, going to school mornings and coming home again after school, to think that maybe an escaped convict or two might very possibly be watching his progress along the homely familiar streets while he kept his face straight ahead, pretending he did not know that furtive eyes spied on him through the horizontal slats of the cupola on top of Mr. Newton’s stable or the vertical slats underneath Mrs. van Benschoten’s broad piazza. But within a few days the excitement had subsided, people began to forget it, and on the following Saturday, he made the usual preparations for his regular Saturday afternoon hike into the country.

This hike had become as inevitable a part of his week as the Saturday night bath or Sunday school on Sunday morning. From Monday to Friday, during school hours, Don Birnam dreamed about it over his history or algebra book, planning what he would take along and the things he would do, mostly planning what role he would play, this time. He always went alone, of course; only alone could he fully realize the character of Kit Carson or Father Marquette or a reconnoitering scout for General Custer’s raiders. South and east of Arcadia the countryside was dotted with occasional farms and cultivated fields and open pastures, but once he had started out, it immediately became unexplored country, enemy country. The farms were lone outposts, the familiar brook was an upper reach of the Mississippi, the single-track railroad was the path of the Iron Horse that had been laid across the western plains (he knew exactly where the golden spike had been hammered in), the horses that grazed in the pastures were mustangs and the cows were bison.… He stowed the peanut butter sandwiches in his knapsack, slung it upon his back, hollered goodbye to his mother, and cut across the back lots toward Indian territory.

His last contact with civilization was the asylum on the hill south of town, alongside the railroad. This was a home for feeble-minded women and girls, and it interested him to linger there for awhile, watching the inmates in their endless parade around the parklike grounds, wondering who they were, where they came from, what had brought them here, and what strange worlds they lived in. In long skirts that looked like mattress ticking, they marched along two by two, shepherded by stout matrons in white, with pompadours, rimless eyeglasses, and short blue capes. He leaned against the high wire fence and waved at them, and they would wave back and giggle in tremendous chorus. Sometimes one of them suddenly quit the ranks, darted forward, and shouted at him a word that not even boys used. Calmly, as if nothing had happened, the nearest matron would get her back into line, paying no attention whatever to the bad word or to the shrieks of laughter that split the air. Then the procession moved on; but all the while, the girls would keep looking back, ducking their heads and squealing hysterically, poking at one another and pointing at him. When they disappeared around the corner of the main building, he turned away and headed out along the high bank of the railroad.

Don loved walking along the tracks, stepping from tie to tie and automatically counting as he went, yet not keeping count, either. Sometimes he tried walking along the rails like a tightrope walker, seeing how far he could go before he fell off; but it was never very far, not more than ten or twelve steps, the last few of them very short and fast, with his arms flailing wildly and the soles of his sneaks squeaking on the iron surface of the track till he lost his balance and was forced to step down to the ties or the cinder path. From where he had turned off at the asylum, the railroad stretched in a straight line for more than a mile across the countryside that he knew so well, raised slightly above the rolling fields, till it disappeared around a bend in the distance. He used to stand between the tracks and watch how the rails met and merged together far up ahead, like an immensely long, tapering ladder laid flat, and how, if it was a warm day, the rails blurred and shimmered in the heat waves that played over the roadbed.… But best of all was when a train came along, taking shape and sound from out of the distance, growing bigger and louder, till, after he had hurried down the bank and climbed on the fence to wave at the engineer, it rumbled slowly past with a hiss of steam, a terrible grinding of rods and monstrous wheels, and then the long rattle and clatter of the twenty or thirty freight cars that wobbled along behind, brought up at the rear by the swaying caboose where, as the engine began to slow down for Arcadia, a couple of men in faded blue workclothes sometimes appeared at the window with a fan of cards in their hands.

Don knew the engineer. It was Mr. Colvin who lived a few doors from the Birnams, and his daily run, the only train of the afternoon, was from Binghamton in the southern part of the state to Parsons Point on Lake Ontario. And one day when Mr. Colvin saw him sitting there on the fence waiting to wave at him, he slowed the train down and brought it to a hissing shuddering stop—it was easily the high point of Don’s life. He hollered from the cab, “Hi, boy!—want to ride into town?” Would he! Don jumped down, clambered up the steep bank, Mr. Colvin leaned out to give him a hand, and Don climbed in. It was hot and smelly inside and wonderful. Mr. Colvin said to watch out for all the grease and coal dust, he didn’t want to have Don’s mother get after him; but Don didn’t care. He gave the engineer one of his peanut butter sandwiches, took one himself, and the two of them rode on into Arcadia, where Don climbed down at the station, to the astonishment of Mr. Brink the stationmaster and the envy of his friends at school when they heard about it later. Ever since then, he had wanted Mr. Colvin to pick him up again. He knew he had only to ask or to signal to him, but somehow Don never did.

About a mile along the embankment there was a culvert that ran under the railroad, carrying through it a shallow little stream if it was springtime, the barest trickle if it was summer. The culvert was a round tile pipe, so big that he could stand upright in it if he took off his Scout hat. It was one of Don’s favorite places along his weekly hike. He always descended the bank here and walked through; and sometimes, to get the most out of it, he stopped and sat down for awhile, squarely in the middle, midway between the two open ends. It was nearly dark in the culvert, but grew lighter toward the openings. As he crouched inside, the ends presented round pictures in miniature of the great landscape outside, all the more brilliantly sunlit because of the dark center from which Don looked out. Looking one way, he could see the rolling pastures of Mr. Price’s well-kept farm and Bailey’s Hill in the background, framed in a round formal frame, like a Japanese window or a view seen through a great telescope; looking the other way, he saw, similarly framed, the cattails and small red willows of the swamp that he had named Ump Swamp, an Indian name he had invented. Amid the solitude and secrecy of his hideout, and the absolute stillness, it was fun, then, to shatter the silence by suddenly giving a great shout—his ears rang as the curving tile walls magnified the shout and sent its reverberations back and forth along the tunnel; and a mighty sound like a thunderclap could be produced by taking two rocks and banging them hard together. And when, as it sometimes happened, the afternoon train passed along the tracks overhead while he sat inside, the deafening tumult of noise and vibration gave Don the thrilling sensation of resting, deliciously safe and snug, in the calm dead center of the whirlwind. It was as though all of nature were suffering a violent convulsion, a vast upheaval in which he alone was untouched.

Before scrambling down to go through the culvert, Don stood on the high embankment and surveyed the countryside—a last look around, so to speak, to see that all was well. Scout-fashion, he shaded his eyes with his hand and scanned the familiar scene from horizon to horizon. All was not well, of course. The landscape was as quiet and serene as ever—deceptively so, he told himself with satisfaction; for he well knew that the old dangers lurked as usual where he least (and at the same time most) expected them. This was as it should be, and his pleasure was acute in the certain knowledge that if he should turn aside his glance for even a second, an ambush would collect in the grove of beeches half a mile away or a war-bonnet would suddenly move forward in the tall grasses. It was a thrilling moment: the thrill lay equally in the realization that the very calmness of the countryside concealed the threat of danger and in the confidence he felt within himself that the enemy did not know that he knew they were there. With a show of nonchalance, for the benefit of any watching spy, he descended the bank and turned to go through the culvert.

As he left the bright sunlight behind and moved forward into the dark, Don wondered what he would find inside this time; the culvert always yielded a surprise or two, showing that others besides himself knew of and used his hideaway. Once it had been a dead cat, and for a couple of weeks, thereafter, he had had to avoid the place; once he found a tobacco pouch, half full of mouldy stuff that wasn’t nearly as tobacco-looking as the Indian tobacco he himself made by scraping the bark from red willow twigs; another time he picked up a blue bandana that he took home and was going to keep, but his mother said it probably belonged to some filthy tramp and threw it into the kitchen stove. Stepping from stone to flat stone, his eyes on the damp ground or peering into the tiny shallows beneath his feet, he moved slowly forward in a crouching position toward the vivid round window at the other end of the culvert. Suddenly he realized that he was not alone.

Midway between the two openings, a man sat watching his approach. His knees were up to his chin, his hands clasped round his legs, as if he were merely resting there idly, passing the time of day; but at the same instant, Don got the impression that the man was intensely alert—far more alert than he himself had been, not to have seen the man the moment he had entered the culvert, silhouetted so plainly against the sunlight of the farther end. The man gazed at him intently; and for what may have been half a minute or more, Don gazed back. The man did not speak; neither did Don.

During that first long silent moment, he knew that he had run into one of the convicts. He knew too, somehow, that he must not let on that he knew—he must pretend that their meeting was nothing out of the way at all. Instinct told him also that he must not turn tail and run; had he done so, it was possible that he would not have escaped the culvert alive. But more than anything else, Don instantly knew or believed that if he acted very matter-of-fact and clever—if he forgot that he was only a boy of twelve and at the same time acted the part to the hilt—this encounter might well turn into the great moment of his life, the chance to be a hero. “Hello,” he finally said, and sat down.

He sat down against the curving tile wall opposite the man and put his knees up and his arms around his legs in the same way. “Isn’t this a dandy place?” he said. The man did not answer; his eyes watched Don narrowly, as if trying to make out what game he was playing. Outwardly, of course, he must not look as if he was playing any game; and in a sense, he wasn’t. How could it be a game when he was only being himself—his best, his most unreal self—the self that other people, his mother and others, didn’t even know existed?

Under any circumstances—in church, in school, in the public library—Don was never able to keep silent for long; in the presence of someone who refused to talk, Don simply ignored this silence, overruled it, and talked for them both. Now he lost himself, as it were, in a kind of social impulse that, under different conditions, and certainly with a different partner, his mother would have approved: he wanted to “visit” with the man, to be nice to him—in short, to “entertain” him and thus be liked in return. When the man did not answer about what a fine place this was, Don thought of something else. He reached back, pulled the knapsack off his shoulders, and opened it. He said, “Would you like a sandwich?” The man stared back in silence. “I’ve got plenty,” Don said, “and they’re peanut butter.” No answer. “See? Three of them,” he went on. “You can have two and I’ll have the other one.” No answer again. He busied himself with the wax paper wrappings and opened them before the man’s hungry gaze.

But the man did not look at the sandwiches, he looked at Don. Don picked up one of the sandwiches, took a bite, and then said: “Are you a tramp?” Don knew he wasn’t, but he thought it would make the man feel more at ease with him.

“I like tramps,” he went on, after another bite. “My uncle is a tramp.” He said this in the same wishful romantic spirit in which he used to say that his uncle was an Indian, and once, after he had come across the exotic word in a book, that his uncle was a rabbi. But the man was not interested; though he never took his eyes off Don, he did not even seem to hear. Finally, very slowly, as if with extreme caution, he half-rose from his crouching position, stretched out a long arm, and took the two sandwiches in his hand. Before he sat back again, Don caught a glimpse of a short thick knife like a bowie knife lying in the dirt beside where the man’s bottom had been. When he was seated again, it was again out of sight; but it was there, all right, within easy reach all the time, just beneath the man’s right elbow.

As he ate, Don looked him over. He seemed to be about as old as Don’s father, which would be about forty. He wore heavy work shoes and coarse cotton pants of no color at all, sort of iron-colored if anything. Don had never seen a shirt and pants of that color, and except that they were very dirty, and torn in several places, they might have been a uniform. He was not a big man, but he looked strong, even powerful, especially in the shoulders and arms. He had thick black hair cut very close, a low forehead, small half-closed peering eyes, and in the middle of his chin, a very deep cleft or dimple. He was badly in need of a shave, and Don found himself wondering how it was possible to shave the whiskers in so deep a hollow as that cleft in his chin. He looked tired out, as if he hadn’t slept for days, yet keenly alert and watchful too, almost jumpy. Besides all this, though Don couldn’t say why, he looked sad. Don knew that he was a hunted man, but even so, no hunt lasting only a week or even a month could ever have made him look that sad and lonely, as if he was the only man left in the world or as if the whole world was against him and he was the only one on his side. Don couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, the more so because the man shut Don out from his company as if he wasn’t even there.

“If you’re a tramp,” he said, “I wish you’d let me join up with you.” The man said nothing. “I’d love to—it must be a wonderful life.” The thing to do was to keep on talking, to make the man believe that Don had nothing against him. “No school,” Don said, “nobody to order you around all the time. Nothing to do but just what you wanted to do, all day long—and go everywhere, all over the country, and see new places, new people, things like that.…”

The man ate in silence, watching Don closely but at the same time aloof, as if Don were a creature from another planet with whom there couldn’t possibly be a common language or even any understanding whatever.

“Aren’t they good?” Don said, as the man finished the first sandwich and started on the second. “Of course they aren’t as good as when I started out, when they were just made, and fresh. But anyway they’re a lot better now than they would be later, all dry and curled up. You know—the way sandwiches get, on a picnic?”

Finally the man spoke—and Don had grown so used to the idea that he wasn’t going to speak or maybe even couldn’t speak at all, that he was surprised. He looked Don straight in the eye and said in a low husky voice: “Where does this railroad go?”

“This railroad?” Don pointed above. “Why, it goes down to Binghamton and then on into Pennsylvania somewhere.”

“The other way, I mean.”

“Oh, that way,” Don said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder. “It goes on to Parson’s Point.”

“Where’s that?”

“The end of the line.”

“How far?”

“About twenty miles, I guess. Little more, maybe.”

“What’s there?”

“At Parson’s Point? Why, nothing. Nothing but the coal yards—and oh yes,” he said, and suddenly felt the acute excitement of an idea, “the freighters that carry the coal across the lake.”

“Lake?”

“Lake Ontario.”

“Where to?”

“Cobourg.”

“What’s Cobourg?”

“Place in Canada.” And as he said Canada he knew, though he did not change his expression by even a flicker, that he had uttered a kind of magic word. It meant, if the man could get there, freedom.

The man was silent for a long moment again, as he appeared to be weighing some idea, or maybe testing Don in his mind. Don tried to look friendly and helpful.

“Is there a train along here?” the man asked.

“Oh yes,” Don said. “There’s one every afternoon.”

“What kind of train? Passenger?”

“A kind of freight. I happen to know the engineer,” Don added proudly. “Friend of mine.”

“What time is it due?”

“I don’t know for sure, but gee, it ought to be coming by any minute now. Sometime in the early afternoon, I mean.”

“A fast freight?”

“No, not fast at all, along here. Because it slows down for Arcadia, you see, the next stop.—Why, Mister? You want to catch a ride?”

The man gave him a look. “None of your business. Understand?”

Don nodded obligingly. He understood, all right, but was careful not to let the man know how well. Privately, he thought it was very foolish or careless for the man to get cross, because really, he was playing as much of a game as Don was. The man was playing that he wasn’t a convict and Don was playing that he was getting away with it.

“I know it’s none of my business,” Don said, “but I just thought of something. Look, Mister, if you really want to catch a ride on that freight, maybe I could stop it for you—or at least make it slow down.”

The man eyed him with menacing suspicion. “How?”

“Well, I told you I knew the engineer.…”

“What’s that to me?”

“Well, if I didn’t know him, how could I stop the train?”

The man stared him through and through, searchingly. “Listen, kid. Are you on the level?”

“Of course I’m on the level,” Don said, deeply shocked. “I cross my heart and hope to die! Gee, didn’t I give you my peanut butter sandwiches? Didn’t I tell you I like tramps? Isn’t my uncle one, my own uncle? Besides, I’m a Boy Scout, and the creed of every Scout is to do at least one good turn every day. Don’t you know that? It’s our sacred creed”—and with that, Don put up his hand in the sign of the oath and swore on his honor as a Boy Scout of America that he would be able to stop the train long enough for the man to climb onto one of the freight cars and get a ride. And Don privately reassured his troubling conscience that he was telling the truth, except that he hadn’t told the man the rest of what he had in mind. But was that lying, was that violating the oath? No, it was just keeping some of it to himself, and after all, he had only sworn on the train part.

And then, while the man sat there turning it over in his mind and the two of them looked at each other—at that very moment Don began to feel the approaching train. At first it was so slight that it could scarcely be noticed, merely the first faint jarrings and vibrations of the approaching freight, but it was Mr. Colvin’s train, all right. It must have been still a mile off, because Don couldn’t hear it yet, but he could certainly feel it; and after another second, he noticed that the man could, too. He looked at Don quickly, and there was an odd expression in his eyes, like fear or excitement or maybe just indecision. He frowned, his mouth worked, and he half got to his feet. Then he sat back again, his hand close beside his hip in the dirt, and fixed his eyes on Don.

Don sprang up. “Come on!” he said, as the vibration began to jar the whole tunnel. “There’s the train now! Hurry up!”

“Don’t you leave!” the man suddenly snarled. “Sit down!”

But Don was already ten or twelve feet off, on the run to the mouth of the culvert, and the curving tile walls of the tunnel were ringing with the rumble and grind of the oncoming locomotive. Just as he ran out into the sunlight, he yelled back, “Don’t forget your knife!” and beat it up the bank.

When he got to the top, he ran like a deer down the tracks ahead of the train, in the same direction, far enough ahead so that the man in the culvert could climb onto the freight somewhere along about the middle. Then he stopped, turned, and began to wave his arms off at Mr. Colvin in his cab.…

“Now look here, boy,” Mr. Colvin said sternly as he helped him up, “you shouldn’t have done that. For me to stop and pick you up is one thing, but when you ask for it, in playlike, it’s a horse of a different color.” But when he heard the news—when he learned how, at that very moment, the convict would be climbing on and hiding himself away in a coal- or boxcar—Mr. Colvin got as excited as Don had been.

On the right, the park and grounds of the asylum flowed by as the train began to slow down for Arcadia, and there were the girls again, in long procession, moving slowly along the walks—now merely part of the world seen from the cab window of an engine, yet living in their own world, too. And Don couldn’t help thinking that no matter what dreams stirred in their crazy minds, they couldn’t be any crazier than what was happening to him—to him and to the man riding the rods or hiding in a boxcar farther back.…

At the thought of this, his heart sank. As they got closer and closer to Arcadia, he began unaccountably to feel funny inside, almost sorry, though he knew it was silly of him, silly and ungrownup. He tried to think of the news item in the paper, and his picture, maybe, and maybe even a medal from the Chamber of Commerce or the Rotary or his own Boy Scouts of America, but somehow he wished it hadn’t happened, he couldn’t help thinking of that sad face back in the culvert—their culvert, now—the sad lonely look that showed that the man didn’t have a friend in the world; and he hoped like anything that he wouldn’t have to face the man at the station. He couldn’t have done that, not for anything; all the pictures in the paper and all the medals in the world couldn’t have made him look the man in the eye again.…

Mr. Colvin was out of the cab before he was and rushing across the platform. Mr. Brink, the stationmaster, got on the phone at once, and without even giving a number, just told central, in a voice that was like a kind of happy muffled scream: “Say, Betty! Get me Chief LaPointe, quick!” And in less than three minutes Chief LaPointe drove up with Mr. Driscoll and Mr. Scofield who sometimes helped out and called themselves sergeants. Chief LaPointe and the others got out their guns and handcuffs, and, cautious as grizzly bears treading on thin ice, started back along the train toward the caboose, pounding on each sliding door and hollering, “Come on out there, you, or we’ll shoot!”

Don stayed in the station, where a small crowd had begun to gather. In the center of the room was a pot-bellied stove, and Don studied it with great concentration, examining the little isinglass window and the wider opening at the bottom for clinkers; it was stone-cold now, and some kids had written their names on it with chalk stolen, probably, from school. Then Chief LaPointe and the others came in, beaming from ear to ear, and in their midst, handcuffed to Mr. Driscoll on one side and Mr. Scofield on the other, his mouth clamped so tight that the lips showed grey, his small eyes staring straight ahead in lonely hatred, was Don’s friend of the culvert.

“Well, boy,” Mr. Colvin said, “it’s a great day for you, all right all right,” and Chief LaPointe grinned at him and then at the others and said in a loud voice, “Guess I’ll have to put Don on the force,” and everybody laughed.

Helplessly, Don stole a glance at the prisoner, but the man didn’t look at him at all; it was almost as though he was not surprised, expected nothing different, had never believed Don in the first place. Don looked hard at the engineer, then, and tried to smile. If he kept his eyes on Mr. Colvin, he wouldn’t have to look at anybody else; and at that moment he didn’t feel like looking at Chief LaPointe any more than at the man in handcuffs.

Well, the thing to do was to try to pretend that it was all right. It was the first time in his life that he had ever played anybody a dirty trick, it was a break with all that he had ever been or believed before, but the odd thing was that it seemed to be the right thing to do. Everybody thought it was great, and maybe, in time, he’d think so too. Given a little more time, maybe he’d look at it like the others; maybe he’d learn to feel happy about it, and not mind it, like the men were doing now. Anyhow, he tried to look it and to feel it, because it seemed the grownup thing to do. After all, hadn’t he caught a dangerous man, a desperate convict—a menace to society, as Chief LaPointe was saying right this minute? And at the thought of this, dim feelings of pride stirred in his breast, and he began to look forward to the papers.

The Benighted Savage

The stage was set, the shades were drawn, there were two pillows under his head, the bright afternoon sun penetrated the bedroom just enough at the sills to let him appreciate things, he was a million miles away, shuddering in transports of familiar ecstasy, familiar but always thrillingly new as if it had never happened before (Japan it was, this time, and he lay on a great satin-covered hassock in the exact center of a paper room, surrounded by twittering geishas who ducked behind their painted fans with little birdlike sounds and drew aside the folds of their bright kimonos to reveal the gleaming legs and thighs and oh the wonderful little bellies that were his dream to play with), when suddenly, silently, the door dreadfully opened and in walked his father.

“Georgie, I’ve been meaning to ask you—”

He got no further. His face tightened with shock, his mouth fell open speechless. Grey with rage, he stared down at the frightened figure on the bed, now suddenly still. When the thundering words came, they shook not only father and son but the room itself.

“George! A boy of your age—But any boy!” He struck the back of his hand to his forehead as if warding off some unseen blow. “Don’t you know what you’re doing to yourself! You’ll be stunted, finished, an idiot in the crazy house, with ruined health, dead! Feeble-minded, with tuberculosis of the spine or paresis or something! Oh, I’m ashamed! Such kid-stuff, idiot-stuff—and you want to be a man! You’re not a child any longer, you’re entering high school this fall, you don’t want to be a raving idiot do you? Don’t you know what’ll happen to you if you go on like this? If you do that twenty times you’ll go crazy, you’ll lose your mind, you’ll die!”

And now it was the boy who recovered his voice. He pulled his clothes together and said, “I—I’m sorry, Dad, I don’t know what to say, I—I couldn’t help it, I won’t do it again, I—I promise.…”

“Who taught you this filthy trick!”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody?” The father stared down at the boy as if he had never seen him before. “You mean you learned it by yourself? Oh,” he groaned, “then you are depraved!”

Feebly the boy murmured, “I won’t do it again.…”

“That’s not good enough! You’ve got to do something about it! Your mother and I will not have a degenerate in the house, do you hear? Take up an interest, go out for sports! Hasn’t Reverend Brittain ever told you about What Every Young Boy Should Know—or your Scoutmaster? I’m surprised they haven’t made you read it! I tell you if you do that filthy thing twenty times more you’ll die, you’ll go out of your mind!” He turned, slammed the door behind him, and was gone.

Minutes after his father had left, the boy on the bed began to breathe normally again. But he did not forget it and he knew he never would forget it. He got up, straightened his clothes, raised the shades, combed his hair, and went downstairs the back way, very anxious to avoid his father.

All the rest of that day he did not forget it, and he did not forget it that night when he went to bed. He remembered it word for word. He lay in bed waiting. After his father and mother had come upstairs and gone to their room, he got up, tiptoed to the door, closed it quietly, turned on the light, reached to the bookshelf for The Dare Boys of ’76, got a pencil, opened the book at the back, and there, on the blank page at the end, wrote down:

1. ______

2. ______

3. ______

4. ______

5. ______

6. ______

and so on till he had numbered 20. He stuck the pencil between the pages of the book, set the book on the night table where it would be handy, turned out the light, luckily remembered to open the door again (what might his father not think if it were discovered that he was in his bedroom and in his bed behind closed doors?), got back into bed, and abandoned himself as usual to his favorite—or a new variation of his favorite—dream.

After which he fell at once into a sound, an exhausted sleep. And the first thing on waking in the morning, before he was out of bed, he reached for the book on the night table, opened it to the page at the back, and checked off No. 1 with the pencil.

Twenty times is a lot to a boy of thirteen—it’s like the future, unlimited, prodigal as the grains of rice in China—and during the next two weeks or so he could afford to toss them off freely and at will, almost without thought or care. But not without count. His father had taught him always to be sure of how much he had to spend, always to know exactly how much he had in the savings bank. After each time he remembered to check it off at the back of the book. But suddenly, unexpectedly, much sooner than he would have believed, he realized one morning that he had reached No. 16, with only four more to go. Still, four more is four more; and that afternoon, as he quietly closed the door and pulled down the shades, he decided that No. 17 would be a good one, and the last.…

He stood proud and erect in the exact center of the igloo, surrounded by dark-skinned, smiling, Mongolian-looking women; half a dozen Eskimo men crouched at the narrow opening of the hut, peeping in to watch, wide-eyed with awe and envy; from far over the frozen tundra came the deep bark of polar bears calling to one another among the ice floes, and just outside, the huskies whined and whimpered in the howling Arctic blizzard; the ceiling of ice overhead reflected the flickering of the brightly burning wick in the soapstone lamp; there was the smell of cold snow and warm fur, caribou meat, whale oil, blubber, and fish; the great, grinning, slant-eyed women threw off their parkas and dropped their pants of reindeer hide and, while their men crouched watching at the entrance, advanced, one by one to be warmed and taken care of by him and him alone.… Less than a minute after he had entered the igloo, No. 18 was next.

Take up an interest, his father had said; go out for sports. But most of the fellows he knew were away for summer vacation or had jobs, and there wouldn’t be any basketball till school opened. Surely after school opened and he could play basketball—go out for the freshman team and all that—everything would be all right, he wouldn’t need to worry any more by that time, and neither would his father. But if he didn’t watch out, No. 20 would be up sooner than he knew, the spendthrift way he was going.

His father’s discovery had scared him enough to make him be very cautious now, but more than that, it had made him feel more alone in the world than he had ever dreamed it possible to be. He felt awful after each time—never before, only after; and he knew that he was the victim of a solitary and secret vice unlike anything that anyone he knew had ever had. There was no one to whom he could turn for help because they would only be as shocked as his father had been, and look on him as the same kind of outcast. After each time (except those times, usually at night, when he fell asleep at once), he promised himself and he promised God, he promised his father and mother and Scoutmaster and the flag of the United States, that he would never do it again. He knew he wouldn’t, either; because at that moment, just afterwards, that was absolutely the last thing in the world that he felt like doing. The second it was over, he couldn’t imagine how he could have done it, couldn’t imagine wanting to do it again, ever. He had only disgust and contempt for what he had just done, he was free of it completely, and he sprang from the bed whole and clean again, full of wonderful ideas about everything under the sun.

After No. 18 he had an idea. He went over to the Arcadia Public Library. The single room of the Library was divided into two parts, one side for children, one for grownups, with the Librarian’s desk strategically in the middle. After idling around the children’s side for awhile, long enough so that Miss Merriman wouldn’t get ideas in her head, he sauntered as casually as possible over to the adults’ side and began looking over the titles, trying to act as if it were less because of a serious desire to find a certain book than because of a kind of disinterested wonder as to the sort of stuff that was read by grownups. At length he found, among Nonfiction, the book his father had mentioned. He took it down from the shelf (he could see that it had several times been soberly rebound) and retired to a table in the far corner. As nonchalantly as he was able, he opened the book.

It is not enough to justify such a depraved course of action by merely saying that it is “natural.” It is natural to devour one’s food as an animal or a savage. It is natural greedily to seize a bone or a woman.

Alarmed, he glanced up from the book. But no one was near. The nearest was old Mrs. van Benschoten at the next table. Luckily she seemed unaware of his presence. With chin up and head tilted far back, she was reading the National Geographic through the lower half of her bifocals. He returned to the page.

But surely the long and dearly bought progress of man has been accomplished by restraining base instincts in the interest of health, social welfare, and the higher reaches of the intellectual, the esthetic, and the spiritual. To cast away all this, to sell one’s spiritual birthright for a mess of material pottage, is to reduce oneself to the benighted savage, turning in upon himself in his dark cave. Not for nothing is it called self-abuse.

He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. The benighted savage in his dark cave.… Somehow the words seemed to be doing the opposite of what they were supposed to be doing—certainly the opposite of what that fine man who wrote the book intended—so he ruled out the bad thoughts and made an effort to concentrate on, to search for, the practical help he felt sure he would find.

Fill your life with healthy, objective interests. Do not let your mind remain a vacuum, but crowd out the vicious, unwonted and unwanted thing by healthy preoccupations. Seek to find wholesome outlets in all that objectifies life, in big interests that usurp the self-centered and erotic, in music, in art.

From her circular desk in the center of the room he saw Miss Merriman looking his way. Suddenly he had never felt so self-conscious or conspicuous in his life. Her head was tilted down and her chin rested on her white dickey as she stared at him through the upper half of her bifocals. He turned his head and tried to gaze nonchalantly out the window. His eye fell on the big slab of California redwood that rested on a bookshelf, one of a dozen souvenirs of travel prized by the Library. Under Miss Merriman’s stare he got up casually, walked over to it, and then bent slightly forward to examine attentively the card attached to its base:

Presented to the Arcadia Public Library by Madame Charlotte

Blanchard, after her Tour of the Far West in September 1908

When he turned around, he saw that Miss Merriman’s attention was now being directed with menace at some kids exploding in convulsive giggles on the other side of the room. He went back to his book.

To waste the life force is not only truant but criminal. The vital fluid must not be wantonly frittered away while the body is shaping into manhood. That way madness lies. The Spartan warriors mastered their emotions and so may you.

Suddenly an idea struck him; and as he thought it over, he wondered why it had not occurred to him before. Was it possible, by some scheme magic or divine, that this good man who wrote the book had been appointed, years before, to write this particular book just so that he, George Havens, stumbling upon it years later, would be helped? But of course it wasn’t! Certainly not! What of the dozens of other readers—maybe even hundreds, who knows?—who at one time or another had turned to this book for the same reason that he was now turning to it? Why had the book been written at all if there had not already existed some such—well, not universal problem, maybe, but certainly a problem big enough to include not just one single solitary boy in a single small town? The author seemed to know a good deal about it—his father seemed to know, too. With renewed interest, he picked up the book again.

In this whole matter we are facing elemental nature and its most vicious demands. Do not handicap yourself in the struggle by lax habits. The habits of laziness and gluttony turn a potential victory into defeat. It will be imperative to avoid gratuitous sex stimulants such as suggestive or erotic pictures and stories. Such things not only insure defeat in advance, they are defeat.

His eyebrows went up. He had never heard of erotic pictures and stories, and he did not know anyone who had such a thing; but maybe it was just as well.

Cold baths and keeping the effort-making capacity alive in you by wholesome exertion every day are a help. It may be more than a negligible detail to sleep in a cool, well-aired room under light clothing, and rise immediately upon waking in the morning. The bed is no place to be idling in; it was not made to lounge or lie around on; get out of it unless you intend to sleep. Join in all games and sports that promote vigour. Develop an absorbing hobby such as collecting autumn leaves or birds’ eggs, take long walks, chop wood, avoid solitude, brooding, and moping, and go to sleep immediately on getting into bed.

He turned to the Contents to see what other subjects were covered, but he had scanned the list only halfway down when he closed the book quickly. No, not now. For some reason he felt very tired, almost exhausted. Funny about chopping wood—and could that be the reason why Kaiser Wilhelm was always being photographed chopping wood, all these months, in exile in Holland? It was a darn shame he couldn’t take the book home and really study it, but he would rather die than present it at the desk and have Miss Merriman know the kind of book he wanted to read. She probably wouldn’t let him take it out, anyway; might even call up his mother and tell on him. Maybe he could ask his Scoutmaster to get it for him sometime; still, he wouldn’t want him to know, either. But it didn’t matter; he would concentrate on remembering, and remember.

At supper when his mother urged upon him a second helping of mashed potatoes and roast beef he remembered gluttony and refused; and when he went up to bed he opened wide the three windows to cool off the room and air it out well. When he turned to his bed, he found himself looking at it in a way he had never looked at it before. A bed could almost seem not nice, when you stopped to think about it; he closed his eyes as he stripped the quilt off so that he would only be sleeping under a sheet and not be too hot, reached for and turned off the light, climbed in, and not many minutes later he was standing proud and straight in the exact center of the large thatched hut that was the pygmies’ council chamber.…

Old men squatted on their haunches in the dark corners, and slapped the hides of small drums with the flat of their hands; other men, husbands and fathers—but small, all of them—were lined up at two ends of the chamber, their faces streaked with white paint, their arms bound with metal bands; the small women, shiny black like ebony, circled slowly around him in a wide dancing circle, swaying their hips and their grass skirts; there was intense heat and the smell of the cooked meat of wild pig; in all that room he was the tallest person present; he gave a signal and the drums stopped, there was silence, the only sounds that could be heard in the heat were the distant rumble and belch of a volcano far off beyond the veldt, the rustling of the grass skirts and clink of copper anklets, and the scuttle of a lizard in the stiff thatch above; he raised his arms and beckoned, one by one the little pygmy women advanced—and suddenly in no time at all, though now he was ready for sleep and almost too tired and sleepy to care, he knew that death and insanity loomed over him in No. 20, and tuberculosis of the spine, and whatever paresis was.

After breakfast he asked his mother if she wanted any wood chopped. She looked at him as if he was crazy (maybe it was already starting, even before 20), and laughed. “Wood chopped? At this time of year?” Instantly his father gave him his close attention, studied him with narrowed eyes for a long silent minute, and then said, “Why not? Might as well be ready for winter, isn’t that right, son? ‘Be Prepared’ is the Scout motto, isn’t that right? Most certainly you can chop wood! All you like! And if you use up what’s left in the cellar, I’ll order some more right away. Now you shouldn’t discourage the boy, Mother, when he’s trying to, uh, to, uh, get a little wholesome exercise. Isn’t that right, son?”

It was too late in the season for birds’ eggs, too early for autumn leaves, but in the afternoon he took a long hike into the country and plunged bare-naked into a chilling brook. After supper he walked briskly around the Mile Square and back. Home again, he repaired to the front parlor and thumbed through the big portfolio of Scenes from the Bible Depicted by Famous Artists, then spent a good hour before bedtime listening to his mother’s best records on the Victor Victrola, like Elsie Baker and Olive Kline singing “At Dawning,” “I Know a Bank,” “The Violet,” “Whispering Hope,” “Stars with Little Feet,” and “My Love Is an Arbutus.” When he went up to bed he filled the bathtub with cold water and was just about to climb in when his mother came and pounded on the door.

“Georgie, are you out of your mind?” she called. “You forgot to light the gas heater!”

“I don’t want it!” he hollered back. “I just sort of feel like a cold bath for a change!”

“A cold bath? Are you insane? Listen here, young man, I’m going to speak to your father!”

But it must have been all right with his father, because after she left the door and went downstairs, she didn’t come back again.

During the next few days he neither brooded nor moped, but avoiding solitude was something of a problem. All that the neighborhood had to offer in August was a pair of fourteen-year-old twin girls that he wouldn’t be seen dead with. Hanging around his mother wasn’t much good either (surely the man hadn’t meant that); and even though his father was home at five every day, there wasn’t much help there. If he tagged after his father he’d only bother him; or worse, start his father asking a lot of nutty questions.

But the hardest thing of all was going to sleep immediately on getting into bed. He tried everything. He lay stretched out, completely relaxed, his arms and legs thrown wide, trying to feel as if he had been flung down upon the bed from some great height. He turned on his side, curled up in a knot, put his hands under his cheek, buried his face in the pillow, and willed himself, grunting in the effort, into a sound sleep. It did no good. And soon came the night when he didn’t try at all.

He opened his eyes in the dark, lay flat on his back, pressed his palms together and raised them to his chin, and murmured aloud, “Dear God, I’ll never do it again if only You’ll let me make the freshman team, Amen,” and a few minutes later, “Dear God, I’ll never do it again if You’ll only let me be an Eagle before I’m fifteen, Amen.” Then he lay for a long time in the dark listening and waiting. Nothing happened. Nothing happened but the thing he didn’t want to happen, he felt it begin inside him, somewhere below the pit of his stomach, spreading and spreading, till finally he knew the game was up.

The only thing to do was face it. Take it. They would come in and find him a babbling idiot in the morning but he couldn’t help it now, all those Spartans might have mastered it like the book said but it was beyond him, it had got the better of him, he was helpless and what’s more, he didn’t even care. He got up, put on the light, sat down at his desk, tore a sheet from the tablet, and wrote:

Dear Mom and Dad,

I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it. Goodbye.

Your loving son,
George P. Havens, Jr.

He folded the note and stuck it in an envelope, licked and sealed the flap, stepped to the bedroom door, looked out, saw that the coast was clear, tiptoed across the hall, and slid the envelope under the door of his father’s and mother’s bedroom.

He came back in, quietly closed his door, turned out the light, got back into bed, and gradually, luxuriously, taking plenty of time, slipped into his dream of abandon, abandoned too long—and well lost were the world and himself.

He awakened to bright sunlight. It was a glorious morning, cool, clear, almost like fall. He felt wonderful, and with his arms under his head he lay there on the pillow for long pleasant minutes planning what to do today. Nothing to do, really, but there was that new load of wood his father had ordered—and suddenly he sprang out of bed. Hot panic swept over him as he remembered the note.

He stepped to the door and looked out into the hall. The door of his parents’ room was still closed. Beneath the door, at the very edge of the sill, showing only the tiniest bit, he could just see the corner of the envelope. His heart pounded as he stepped across the hall, squatted down, and reached for the note with forefinger and thumb.

His thumb was too thick to get between the door and the door sill, so he tried with his finger alone. It didn’t work. Short of opening the door and reaching down openly for it—but the very thought terrified him. Breathing hard, he stepped back into his room and tried to think it out.

A pin, of course. The very thing. He took a pin out of the picture of Christy Mathewson pinned to the wall above his desk, went back into the hall, got down on his hands and knees, worked the pin underneath the door, pricked the corner of the envelope, then slowly, cautiously, drew it toward him. In another second he had the whole thing in his hand. He went to the bathroom, tore the note and the envelope into tiny bits, threw them into the toilet, and flushed.

When he was dressed and combing his hair, he remembered something else. He took up The Dare Boys of ’76, opened it to the page at the back, and ticked off No. 20. Then he replaced the book in the bookshelf and went down to breakfast, hungry as a bear.

How War Came to Arcadia, N.Y.

I suppose I was more aware of the war than most boys of my age because of my morning paper route, and certainly we few boys who peddled papers before school were in on the war news before anyone else in town, even our boss Mr. Rogers. When the motorman of the trolley on the RS&E dumped off the fat bundles of papers as it went through Arcadia at seven-ten, we lugged them into Rogers’ store, cut the cords, and there were the big black headlines. GERMANY INVADES BELGIUM or GERMANS DEFEAT RUSSIANS AT TANNENBERG. We counted out our papers, got them quickly sorted in the right order, the Heralds for those who took the Herald, the Democrat & Chronicle for the others, laid them flat in the broad canvas bags slung at our hips, and started out on our routes, feeling a sense of importance because of the news we carried. Everybody would be waiting on their doorsteps or at the door of their shops to see what we had to offer. I don’t know about the other boys, but I couldn’t help adding to the importance, a little, by holding back just long enough to announce the news myself, before I handed over the paper to Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so.

In the curious way in which such things fall into place in small towns—apparently without design, for they just seem to happen of themselves—there had come to be a rather sharply defined caste system among the boys who carried papers in Arcadia. For example, those who did it for the fun of it or because their rich but democratic fathers thought it was good for them, had morning routes exclusively. On the other hand, those boys who really needed the sixty cents, the seventy-five cents, or the dollar that the job paid a week (according to the length of the route and the number of papers carried), peddled papers only in the afternoon. Thus the former group was composed of the three Blanchard boys who everybody knew were the richest boys in town, the two Compton boys whose father owned several canning factories and employed two hired girls in the house and a gardener, George Wakefield, whose father had the nursery business, and my older brother Gerald and myself; while in the latter group were boys who lived on the other side of the canal, mostly, and who had to help out their families by earning some money of their own. Economically my brother and I fell somewhere between these two, but socially we belonged in the morning group, largely because we lived in the same neighborhood as the Blanchards and the Comptons and the Wakefields and they were the boys I played with.

I have often wondered since what was the basis for this distinction between the morning paper routes and the afternoon, and I can think of only two possible reasons. One may have been that the richer families liked to have their boys free to play, after school; and the other was that the afternoon boys not only delivered papers to the houses of regular customers, as we did in the morning, but also carried along extra papers to sell on the street downtown. In Arcadia it wasn’t considered “nice” to sell papers; to peddle them was another matter. If you sold papers, why, you were nothing but a paperboy; but if you delivered them, you had a paper route—or “rout,” as it was called.

By some curious twist or refinement of the social scheme, there was another category including a few boys who couldn’t “afford” to peddle papers, either morning or afternoon. Steve Danvers, for example, whose father owned the new furniture factory and who had become rich within our memory, and Winston Bartle, whose family had lost its money during the same period and were now genteel poor—why, it wouldn’t have done at all for either one of them to have had a paper route. The Danverses hadn’t been rich long enough for Steve to peddle papers—people might actually think that Steve needed the money and that would be awful; and it would be just as awful if they thought the same of Winston Bartle, who did need it. My brother and I needed it too, for our spending money, but the curse was taken off it, somewhat, by our belonging socially in the morning group.

My own paper route was considered a grim one by the other boys, but I liked it because it took me every morning into a part of town that I didn’t know very well—where, indeed, I had never known any of my customers until I began bringing them the morning paper. It paid sixty cents a week and took me over the canal bridge (the Main Street one), down along the canal bank to the Corinth Hotel, the blacksmith shop and the livery stables between the canal and the railroad, then across the tracks, up to the top of Blackmar Street (which I loved because of the view from there and because it was always windy at the top, so that, on bitter cold winter mornings, when the wind blew the snow along the fields in small swirling clouds one after the other, I was reminded with a thrill of the charge of the Ku Klux Klan that I had recently seen in The Birth of a Nation), then down past the sewage disposal plant (which in summer looked like a garden of many little fountains laid out in orderly rows), around behind Baxter Brothers Box Factory and lumber mill, across the canal again (the East Avenue bridge, this time), and home, to put away my paper bag till tomorrow, eat my shredded wheat, and get to school before the second bell.

The moment I liked best during my whole morning route was when I delivered the paper at the blacksmith shop run by Heinrich and Karl Schmidt. Everybody called Heinrich “Heinie,” and behind their backs the two brothers were spoken of as “Hans and Fritz” and even “the Katzenjammers.” I think they were the only Germans in Arcadia. They were middle-aged men, bald and heavy-set, and they looked exactly alike except that Heinrich was taller than Karl and Karl wore steel-rimmed glasses. They wore long black leather aprons and dark gray workshirts. They took off their celluloid collars when they came to work in the morning, which must have been a good hour before I delivered their paper at seven-thirty; the collars and ties hung on a hook just inside the door, and in the narrow neckbands of their shirts you could see the ends of their collar buttons sticking through.

I loved the Schmidts’ blacksmith shop. Every morning—that is, until the day came when I was too embarrassed to do so—I managed to linger there for five or six minutes even at the risk of being late for school. After I had crossed the bridge and well before I reached the shop, I could hear the wonderful noise of the place—the clang of hammer and anvil, sometimes the whinny or stomp of a horse, and, when the door was open, the hiss of steam and the small rumble of the forge. Often I would be able to come through the door and even stand right beside one of the two Schmidts before they knew I was there, because of all that noise going on. Mr. Schmidt (I never called either one of them anything else and it doesn’t matter which one I mean, they were so much alike anyway) would be holding a horseshoe at the end of a pair of iron tongs, pressing it down into the pink coals of the forge, while the other Mr. Schmidt, bent over almost double, turned the crank that was connected below with the bellows; then the air would rush up through the forge with a low roar and the pink of the coals would go completely white and after a minute Mr. Schmidt would draw the tongs away and the horseshoe would be white, too. Then he would lay it on the anvil and batter it into shape with the hammer—though the thing was so soft and pliable by that time, he could probably have done it with the back of a spoon.

The forge and the hot iron filled the shop with a wonderful pungent smell, but somewhat acrid too, quite unlike anything I have ever smelled since. And I can still smell the other smells of the place—that odd smell when the sizzling shoe was applied to the hoof of the horse, while the other Mr. Schmidt supported the horse’s bent leg over his knee; the smell of steam when a horseshoe was plunged into the bucket of water to cool it off; the smell of harness and reins, charcoal and coke, and the black leather aprons of the Schmidt brothers.

One of my reasons for lingering here in the morning was to kid the Schmidts about Germany. I was pro-Ally because everybody else was and because my father was born in England, but it didn’t mean anything in those earlier years and it was more of a lark to me than anything else to argue with the Schmidts about the war. It was fun to see their slow, serious, growing anger, and when I talked back to one of their scolding challenges (“You vill see, you vill see!”), it made me feel like a contemporary of theirs, a good deal older than my twelve or thirteen years at the time.

Already I can see that it will be most unsuitable to try dialect here. The Schmidts were quiet kindly men with deep sober voices; they were not comedians. Hans and Fritz they may have been called behind their backs, but they were by no means the kind of stock German characters once so popular in fiction and on the stage. They did say “I vill” and “I von’t,” of course; but to reproduce it like that seems to me, I can hardly say why, a betrayal of two men I was fond of, and false besides.

I would come in and shout out the headlines above the noise of the forge, and the two Schmidts would snatch the paper from me to examine it themselves. Then they would look up with a kind of grim satisfaction, shake their heads slowly up and down, and one of them would say, always speaking for them both, “So! You see what happens? Our U-boats have begun the blockade—total blockade, it says,” and he would throw the paper down, as if it were of no more interest. I scoffed. “It doesn’t mean anything,” I said; “they haven’t got a chance against Great Britain. Everybody knows that Great Britain has the greatest navy in the world!” (I called it Great Britain because the paper did, but at home we always said England.) And a month or two later, after they had snatched the paper from me again, scanned it briefly, and then taunted me with the news that the Dardanelles was lost, I found it strangely exciting, even though the fact meant defeat for our side. The word “Dardanelles”—to talk about “the Dardanelles” and “the failure of the campaign against Turkey”—why, it was like being a grownup, and an “authority” besides.

This was only the beginning of the feeling, general throughout Arcadia, that the war was a kind of holiday for us all—almost a festival feeling, that was to last for years. It began to affect everything we thought and did and said, our friendships and our play, at home and in school. I remember how, in Manual Training Class—when Mr. Palmer had sneaked out of the room, as he did so often, to keep company for a few minutes with the Domestic Science teacher in the alley back of the gym—we boys would gather around one of the work benches and compete with each other in thinking up ways of torturing the Kaiser. “I know,” Johnny Compton said, “boil him in oil.” He was shouted down. “String him up by his thumbs,” said Wilcox Peech, “and hang him over a slow fire.” He was shouted down too. “Put tacks on the sidewalks,” Steve Danvers said, “and make him walk around the Mile Square in his bare feet.” Another shout of derision. Nothing was good enough. But finally the slow-thinking but always thorough Seward Schuyler came up with an idea that put us all to shame. “Just lay him out on one of these Manual Training benches,” he said quietly (and already, by the tone of his voice, we knew it was going to be wonderful), “pull down his britches, get a small block of wood about so big”—he measured it with his hands—“set it carefully under his balls”—except for Seward’s quiet voice, there was an almost holy silence; we were awe-struck—“take a small wooden mallet, not too big, not too little, and then slowly, gently, for maybe twenty minutes or so, just tap, tap, tap.…” You couldn’t beat it, and our game was ended for good and all.

One morning when I came into the blacksmith shop, the Schmidt brothers had hung a German flag on the wall. I thought it was beautiful, with its three simple bands of red, white, and black, but I pretended to sneer. “Bushwah,” I said, “you call that a flag? Why it hasn’t even got any stars or anything!” The Schmidts said nothing; they pretended not to be interested in the paper, which I still held back; but they were poor dissemblers, and I could see that they were anxious to get at the news. “If you’re so proud of it, why don’t you hang it out in front,” I said, “where people can see it?” “We know better,” one of them said; “you people here are stupid, you are all on the wrong side, you’ll see, you’ll see!” I handed them the paper, but folded so they couldn’t see the front page. “We are? Just look at that,” and I let them look themselves. The headlines announced the battle of Jutland. The Schmidt brothers pored over the paper in silence, then one of them threw it aside and said, “I guess you don’t read far enough. Our fleet escaped.” But they had already turned back to their work, and would have no more to do with me. When I left I had the feeling, as I had every morning, that the minute the door was closed behind my back, they picked up the paper and gave it a thorough reading.

We boys knew nothing about naval tactics, but in our war games in Bailey’s vacant lot we did imitate the land battles that we read about in the papers. Some of the girls joined in these games too, Bettina and a few of her friends, as war nurses on the battlefield. It was often difficult to find boys who would play Germans, but I didn’t mind which side I was on so long as I could be the first one to be wounded. It was wonderful being wounded. I always managed to get myself wounded almost the first minute that action began. I would fall down in a realistic awkward position and lie there heaving and groaning till Bettina came rushing up. The battle raged on around us, but I lay on the ground with my head in her lap and my eyes closed, while she pretended to bathe my forehead, stanch my many bleeding wounds, and hold an imaginary canteen up to my parched lips. Sometimes she would have to keep this up long after there were other wounded men lying about us unattended, moaning and groaning, because I wouldn’t come-to for minutes. Once, as I came-to and slowly opened my eyes and turned them upward in a sickly fashion, I saw Mr. Brinkerhoff, the principal of the high school, standing on the sidewalk only a few feet away, watching us with a smile on his silly face.

As I came into the blacksmith shop one morning I said, “Sorry, Mr. Schmidt,” and “Sorry, Mr. Schmidt,” I said to the other. “Look at this. ‘Germans Turned Back at Verdun.’ Sorry.” One of them stopped turning the crank of the bellows; the other looked up from the forge, and said in a quiet voice, as the roar of the forced air died down, “What you sorry for? You people are the ones who are going to be sorry. Just let your foolish Mr. Wilson keep on sending more of those foolish notes, and you will be very sorry.” He turned to his brother and added sadly, “I—my brother and I—we will be sorry to see it. Sorry for you all …”

I didn’t know much about the President’s notes to Germany because they never made as good reading as the victories or defeats, but the following spring I began to be very much interested in news that did not pertain to the battlefield at all, at least not yet. This was the news that Congress would go into special session to decide whether or not we would declare war on Germany. The session began on April 2, and that night—I will never forget my passionate seriousness at the time—I got down on my knees beside my bed and prayed to God. All along, the war had been exciting to read about, but now that it was a possibility—now that we might be in it—I was afraid. I prayed God to keep us out of the war, prayed with all my might, promising Him everything I could think of if only He’d make Congress vote no; then I said “Amen” and got into bed.

The next day Congress was still in session. I don’t remember being very tense about it, waiting for the verdict, and I have no idea of knowing now whether the anxiety was general throughout Arcadia, but that night I got down on my knees and prayed again, harder than before. I did not want war to come, though I don’t know why. Maybe it was because my brother Gerald, now a freshman at the University of Rochester, was old enough to be in the war. But I doubt it, because I wasn’t especially fond of him or not fond of him, for that matter, and in fact had never given him much thought one way or the other. I only know that I was against our being in the war, and my prayers that night were more earnest than they had ever been before.

Again Congress was still in closed session, and again that night I prayed with all my heart. It was the same the next day and the next night again, and this time I closed the door so that nobody would hear me and then got down on my knees and prayed aloud.

In the morning, for what reason I shall never know, my heart leaped with joy when I read the headlines: CONGRESS DECLARES WAR. It was April 6, 1917, and it happened to be my fourteenth birthday, though this fact was only incidental and had nothing to do with the unaccountable thrill I felt in knowing that we were in the war at last.

I could hardly get the Heralds and Chronicles counted, sorted, and into my canvas bag quick enough. It was going to be an exciting morning, the whole way around my route, and I looked forward to being the bringer of such wonderful tidings. Of course most people had already heard it one way or another, but they would want to read the details. But as I crossed the canal bridge and headed left for the Corinth Hotel, suddenly I realized what was in store for me—in store for them—at my next stop or two. I slowed down. But it was no good. I had to go on, give them their paper just as if nothing had happened; and not only that, but would have to keep on doing so, through month after month that were bound to mean an acute strain for all three of us.

I went into the blacksmith shop the same as usual, and the first thing I noticed was that the German flag had been taken down. I said, “Good morning, Mr. Schmidt. Good morning, Mr. Schmidt,” dropped the paper on a bench inside the door, and left. I don’t even know whether they heard me; and since I myself didn’t look up, I don’t know if they saw me, either.

The festival was really on, now. Arcadia broke out in a rash of flags. Within a month, every car in Arcadia sported a bright little group of the flags of the Allies, in silk, fastened into a small iron fixture attached to the radiator cap; they made a little fluttering sound as the cars moved along Main Street, and they were pretty as a picture. But soon they had to be replaced with imitation flags of painted tin, after the wind had ripped the silk to shreds.

The enlistments began, and later came the draft. Mrs. Kirtle always thought it was more “polite” to call it “the conscription,” in the British way. “We mustn’t hurt their feelings,” she said, “by reminding them that they were drafted.” Service flags began to appear all over town, with one star or two stars, and in a rare case three stars, little banners hung vertically in the windows, and some had gold fringe along the bottom and were supported at the top by a gold cord. Each church, factory, and even the high school hung out its own flag, studded with rapidly increasing stars; and the enormous service flag suspended over Main Street, downtown, had to be lowered every few weeks to add ten or a dozen stars more.

The women came into their own, young and old alike. The Red Cross headquarters on South Main Street was like a continual garden party every afternoon, all summer, where the women rolled bandages and knitted socks, sweaters, and mufflers of olive drab, and exchanged the gossip of the town. A picked group of seven or eight younger married women—“attractive young matrons,” said the Arcadia Blade—led by the handsome Mrs. James Cowley, volunteered that fall to sit for three afternoons a week in the wide windows of the Blade office, on the street level, looking out on Main Street; and there, in a series of triweekly tableaux, they dramatized the work of the Red Cross, in an effort to enlist the help of other women. I would not be surprised if in reality it had quite the reverse effect, for few Arcadia women could have hoped to look as pretty as Mrs. Cowley and her friends who, as we passed along the sidewalk outside and looked into the brightly lighted window, presented such a charming picture. They wore their white Red Cross uniforms and white headcloths marked in front with little red crosses (Mrs. Cowley’s headcloth was white silk, and her red cross had been made of two bits of red silk ribbon). There they sat, at their little tables, quite apart from each other, yet prettily grouped together, facing the street; they knitted away, and stitched away, and rolled bandages; yet all the while, under the able direction of Mrs. Cowley, they loyally kept in mind what they were there for, and did not let their interest in the work absorb them to the exclusion of putting over the finer points. Thus, from time to time, we could see them from the street chatting gaily together, or tossing each other a look with smiling teeth, or laughing silently, with heads held up and back, like people on the stage.

The knitting craze swept the town. Women and girls knitted everywhere—at the movies, riding about with their husbands or friends, even walking along the street—and it was not uncommon to see a lady or two knitting absently in church, her needles clicking as she gazed up at the pulpit with the same rapt attention as of yore. Knitting even invaded our house, for not only did my mother knit but she encouraged us two younger boys to knit as well. We tried it, and found it was easy. I knitted a muffler, and then lost interest. My brother, however, who was eleven, got very good at it and kept it up for months, long after I thought he should have given it up. I was somewhat embarrassed by the fact that he knitted so much, but I must say that I had to admire the seven or eight sweaters and the dozen or so mufflers that he sent off to the Red Cross, his name and address carefully written inside each package, which is what everybody else did too, in the hope that the soldiers would write and thank them. That Christmas of 1917, among our other presents, my brother and I found khaki knitting bags with red crosses on them that Mother had made herself—basket-shaped, the kind you could sling over your arm. I was careful to keep my disgust to myself, so as not to hurt Mother’s feelings, but my little brother was delighted.

The weekly meetings of the Shakespeare Club, the Coterie Club, the Tuesday Club, and so on, were now given over to writing letters to the soldiers. This was done in concert, and later the finished letters were passed around the table for all to read. It was unanimously agreed that Mrs. Kirtle’s letters were the most entertaining. She had twenty-eight soldiers on her list of correspondents, and everybody envied and admired her way with the pen and her fund of anecdote. She regaled the boys with news of her garden, kept a witty story going for months about a mouse named Claude who lived in her kitchen somewhere (though she never saw him, she said, he was polite enough to leave his calling cards every morning), and told how she had been in light opera in her youth and had once sung the role of Pitti-Sing in a road company of The Mikado. “I wish I could be there in the trenches with you now,” she wrote, “and help cheer you a little by singing ‘Three Little Maids from School,’ but of course to do it properly I’d have to have my two other ‘little maids’ with me, Peep-Bo, and Yum-Yum, for it was a Trio, as you may remember. You might be interested to know that ‘Peep-Bo’ went on to grand opera and later died of cirrhosis of the liver in Naples, Italy, while ‘Yum-Yum’ is at present the proud wife of Mr. J. J. Waters, President of the Chamber of Commerce of Denver, Colorado.” At the end of the letter Mrs. Kirtle always asked (but tactfully, she said) if her correspondent had enlisted or had been conscripted. If the former, she was careful to write him extra nice letters thereafter, saving her lesser efforts for the draftees.

Just as the ladies’ clubs were now given over to the war, so were our weekly Scout meetings in the Sunday-school room of the Baptist Church. The Liberty Loan was on in full swing, and we had to deliver posters around town and put them in the store windows. We were also given small pamphlets to be peddled to every house in Arcadia, called “The Real Truth about the German Atrocities in Belgium.” The real truth consisted of realistic accounts, in thrilling detail, of how the invading Huns raped the Belgian women and then cut off their breasts. I had never seen such things in print before, and neither had the other boys. Before starting out on our rounds, we gathered outside the Sunday school and avidly pored over the atrocity stories, which became for us a kind of erotic literature, as I’m sure they did for others. The nearest we had ever come to this sort of thing was when, in the fifth grade, we had to buy small abridged dictionaries for school use. The afternoon they arrived at Rogers’ store, we bought our copies and then collected on the sidewalk outside, while Delmore Snyder, who knew the words to look up, looked them up. Most of them he couldn’t find, but I remember one. Under “W” he found “whore,” and it said: “A woman who sells her body for hire.” It was a wonderful moment. Somebody else found “bastard,” and I will never forget the awful impression it made on me when I read: “A child born out of wedlock”—the more awful because I didn’t know what wedlock meant.

The two Mr. Schmidts were speaking to me again, and I was lingering in the shop as before—but it was not as before, of course. We were polite, we made conversation, I tried to act as if nothing had happened, but it wasn’t much use. After the news that our first troops had landed in France in June of 1917, I guess they had decided to be nice to me, but somehow when they were being “nice” they weren’t nearly as nice as they had been before, when they were gruff and stern and themselves. The fascination of the blacksmith shop had gone; the Schmidt brothers were still my friends, but I couldn’t help feeling awkward in their presence and I was always glad to escape from the sad atmosphere of the shop to the other places along my route that were so much gayer, and gayer each day as the war news got better and better.

My brother Gerald was now a private in the Students’ Army Training Corps at Rochester University, and so was Bennett Blanchard; though they still attended classes, they were now in the army and wore uniforms and everything. One morning Mrs. Blanchard telephoned and invited Mother and my little brother and me to drive to Rochester with her on Saturday and see “the boys.” It was a real excursion for us and the nearest we ever came to seeing the war.

It seemed to me that Mother and Mrs. Blanchard were very solemn during the drive to the city. I could hear them talking in the back seat about everything but the thing they must have been thinking of most; and when they were gay, I believed their gaiety was only a mask for the sorrow in their hearts. I am sure, now, that they felt nothing of the kind—that this was mere dramatization on my part—but, like many others, I was enjoying the war, I was determined to get the most out of it, and that was the way it had to be. My brother and I rode in front with Pulver the chauffeur, and I felt a rising excitement as we approached the city. I was not disappointed by what we found.

In the center of that beautiful campus, several large army barracks had been built, two storeys high, with porch railings running along the sides upstairs. They were unpainted and smelled of new lumber; they shone in the sun brand-new and were far more attractive and lively looking than the deserted fraternity houses and dormitories that had been emptied to fill up the barracks. Here is where the boys lived now, just like soldiers.

Between classes, we found Gerald and Bennett. They were somewhat shy in our presence, but I was very impressed by their uniforms, and proud. As privates they wore a kind of modified sombrero, like our own Boy Scout hats, heavy uniforms of olive drab, and wool puttees wound round and round their legs. Mother and Mrs. Blanchard gave them their boxes of food, candies, and jars of marmalade, a bugle blew, and they were off at a trot, back to their classes and their drilling. For some reason that I didn’t understand, Gerald acted sheepish about the whole thing; and when he came home one weekend and found that Mother had hung a service flag in the front window, he hit the ceiling. “You’re not going to make a fool out of me,” he shouted, as he tore down the flag and fired it into the wastebasket. Mother protested. “Why, old Mrs. van Benschoten has a service flag in her window, and it’s only for her great-nephew in Miami University! And besides,” she added, “you’re on the service flag of the Episcopal Church!” “Well, I can’t do anything about that one, but I can about this,” he said, as he picked up the wastebasket and carried it out to the incinerator in the backyard.

By this time, we in Arcadia High School were drilling too. Each Monday afternoon, from four to five, we met in the gymnasium and were drilled by James Cowley, now Lieutenant James Cowley because he had spent his vacations at Plattsburg during the past couple of summers. He was very stern, and spick-and-span in his officer’s uniform, and he wore a wristwatch (the first I had ever seen; and privately we thought it very sissy of him, but since he was an officer, it must have been all right). He never spoke in a friendly way; and if he spoke to us at all, he didn’t call us by our first names, but acted as if he had never seen us before, though he was our neighbor of only two doors away and I had always called him Jim. I can hear him now, “One, two, three, hup, one, two, three, hup, squaaaaads right!”—and I can also hear his roar of outrage when one of us kids snickered in line or made the wrong turn.

A movie came to town, so spectacular and important that the old Opera House was opened for the occasion and it was shown there at what were called “regular theatre prices” for two nights, instead of at the small Crescent Theatre where movies were usually shown. It was called The Beast of Berlin, and for a week or two I had admired the poster, in bold red, black, and gray, advertising the picture. The poster was a stunning picture of the Kaiser, in a gray military cape with black crosses on his collar, and gray spiked helmet, turned semiprofile against a background of brilliant red. Of course I kept it to myself that I thought the picture was “stunning,” but it was; and every morning, as I stood in front of the Opera House waiting for the RS&E trolley to drop our Heralds and Chronicles on its way through, I admired and coveted the picture.

Though it was shown at night, my little brother and I were allowed to see the movie, I suppose because it was patriotic. Beyond a scene in which a leering German officer, twirling his mustache, advanced on a woman with her hair down, cowering in the corner of a Belgian cottage, I remember very little about the picture; but I will never forget something else that happened that night, or indeed the whole embarrassing two hours when my brother and I sat in the front row of the balcony of the Arcadia Opera House. It was a very cold night; we had bundled up warm before we started out, wearing our twin mackinaws and mufflers and woolen caps, and hurried along through the bitter cold streets toward downtown, early, as always, so that we could have a good twenty minutes sitting in the balcony watching others come in and seeing who was already there. We were bent almost double against the bitterness of the wind as we hurried down Main Street, and then, just as we reached the Arcadia bakery, only a few doors from the Opera House, my brother suddenly stopped still on the sidewalk and looked at me, half-defensive, half-defiant.

“Hurry up,” I shouted at him. “What’s the matter with you!”

“Now listen,” he said (and he sounded just like my mother as he said it, especially when Mother was cross). “Now I want to tell you something and I don’t want you to get mad!”

“Well what!”

“I’ve got my knitting with me, and—and that’s all.”

I blew up. “You’re not going to take your knitting with you, do you hear that!”

“I’ve got it already”—he produced the khaki knitting bag from under the folds of his mackinaw—“and you can’t do anything about it!”

“You’re not going to sit there in the front row of the balcony, not with me you aren’t,” I shouted, “and have the whole town see you knitting!”

“I am so!” he shouted back. “Everybody knows it’s for the soldiers and it’s perfectly all right!”

But we were freezing to death by this time, and so hurried on. Besides, I knew my stubborn little brother very well—he would have gone on and carried it through if it meant having to go alone—and he did, with me beside him sitting there in the front row, staring hard at the curtain that represented a kind of primitive scene of Main Street, and pretending to read the familiar signs at the side advertising Di Santos Cleaners & Dyers, Martin’s Garage, Hilton the Jeweler and so on, while my little brother knitted happily away at his war work.

The next day, the poster of the Kaiser that I had admired so much was gone. After school, I got up enough courage to call at Mr. Bickert’s office at the Crescent Theatre and ask if I could have the picture. “What do you want it for?” he asked; and I replied, “Why, we kids thought it would make a good target for our—well, target practice.” “It sure would,” he said, and he fished it out from a pile of other posters, rolled it up for me, and I carried it home under my arm. Where to put it, was the problem; but of course I had figured it out in advance and had the very place. I tacked it up on the inside back wall of my clothes closet; and then from time to time, when nobody else was around, I would open the closet door and admire it in secret. It wasn’t the Kaiser to me; it was a very striking example of the poster artist’s vivid art, and I wish I had it to this day.

One morning, as I came along the alley toward the blacksmith shop, I saw that a change had taken place. The old sign that had always hung out in front had been taken down and been replaced by a new one, reading, “Carl and Henry Smith, Blacksmiths.” I wondered why they felt they had to do this, and in fact I still wonder. True, Arcadia was in the grip of a virulent war fever and had been for over a year, but there had never been the slightest anti-German feeling against the Schmidts and never would be, no, no matter what happened. Why, the Schmidts were Arcadia people, had lived there for years, and everybody knew them and liked them! You could hate the Germans across the ocean all you wanted, but to hate people you knew and had always known—why, it wasn’t possible. I felt very sad for the Schmidts when I came in that morning. The three of us were excessively polite; and though I didn’t know it at the time, I realize now that regardless of the strain, we were just as fond of one another as we had always been. Only, there were certain things we couldn’t discuss any longer. I took a long time before I fished their paper out of my bag, and when I had done so, I left at once. It told of how the Allies had finally broken the Hindenburg line.

Finally came the two Armistice Days, each as glorious as the other, the fervor of the second not diminished one whit by the frenzy of exultation expended on the same thing only three days before. The first one happened on a Friday. We were sitting in our classrooms when, about one-thirty in the afternoon, the factory whistles and the fire siren began to blow. In no time at all, school was let out and everybody fled as if there had been an explosion in the basement boiler. As if by some prearranged signal, the whole of Arcadia flocked downtown, and from then, till long after dark when the news came that it had been a false alarm, we celebrated as if we were all one great happy family. It made you feel good to see Mayor Butler, who was always called “the Boy Mayor,” arm in arm with Tony Fumigalli, waving to us from the top of an improvised float depicting the hanging of the Kaiser in effigy. When the same thing happened again on Monday morning—early, before seven o’clock, as I remember—Arcadia broke loose as before; the Mayor rode the float arm in arm with whomever turned up, the Kaiser was hung and rehung all day long, no papers were delivered, school didn’t keep, the shops were closed, parents and children alike hung around downtown till late afternoon (I don’t remember where or how anybody ate, that day), and wandering about in the fringe of the crowd, the whole day, just like anybody else, were the Schmidt brothers, Karl and Heinrich, faintly smiling and tentatively waving small stiff American flags that Rogers’ store, the only store in town that remained open, sold by the hundreds again that day as they had on Friday.

Well, the great jamboree was over at last, not only the jamboree of the two Armistice Days (and really, we could have celebrated a dozen), but of the past several years. It was a letdown, of course. But there was a small sequel; exciting, at first, and then, as it went on and nobody seemed to know what to do about it, acutely embarrassing to the whole neighborhood.

The Hamilton family, who lived up Dalton Street a few doors from us, had a son who was killed in France. The Hamiltons’ service flag was the only one on our street that had a gold star in it, and everybody admired it immensely. One day, many months after the war was over, the Hamiltons received another telegram from the War Department, quite unlike the first.

It said that the body of their boy could now be transferred from the cemetery in France and shipped home to Arcadia, so that it could be buried in the family lot—if they wanted it. Mrs. Hamilton was perplexed by the whole thing; she consulted with some of the neighbors, my mother among them. It seemed ungrateful not to accept—in an odd way it seemed not quite nice not to want their son brought home to them; so Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton wired back their acceptance and thanks and that, for the time being, was all there was to it. Then, so many more months went by that people actually forgot all about it.

One day the freight office called up and said that a large box had arrived for the Hamiltons. It was awful. The Hamiltons were so embarrassed that for a day they literally did not stir out of doors. Finally they called back the freight office and asked for the box to be delivered. It was in the wintertime, and for two more days the box remained on the Hamiltons’ back porch. They were simply at a loss to know what to do, and so were the neighbors, and so, too, was Mr. Brittain the minister. It didn’t seem right, after more than a year and a half, to have a funeral, either at the church or the house, with friends and relatives, pallbearers, flowers—all that ordinarily accompanied a death in the family; it didn’t seem right because it had all happened so long ago and the family had already got used to it. On the other hand, it wasn’t right not to do something about it, either. The dilemma was finally settled quietly one afternoon when the box was taken to the family lot in the East Arcadia Cemetery, down below Asylum Hill, and just buried, without flowers or a service, only Mr. Brittain and the sexton present besides the family. Mr. Brittain read a few words and the thing was over; the Hamiltons drove back to Dalton Street and were glad to forget all about it again. To us, it had been a brief but grim reminder that something really had been going on, after all—something, at least, besides all that fun we’d been having in Arcadia.

Sophistication

At nine-thirty Don came along the street, deserted and silent tonight because of the game, and turned in at the Blade. With his own key he unlocked the door and let himself in. The office was on the ground floor with a plate-glass window looking out on Main Street. He reached up and pulled on the overhead light. Across the way was the Kandy Kitchen, the only other place downtown, besides the clock on the bank, that was lighted up after 9 p.m. He could see Nick standing in the window in his white apron staring moodily into the street, waiting for the game to be over and the high school crowd to come in. Till two months ago, Don and his girl Bettina had been a regular part of the group that gathered at Nick’s every Friday night after the basketball game, but since he had got the job on the Arcadia Blade—or “accepted the position,” as Marvin himself had printed in the paper—his interests had somehow shifted to other things, the kind of thing that occupied him now. Halfheartedly he waved to Nick, who did not wave back; then, as he turned away to take up the pleasant task that brought him back here tonight, long after hours, his eye fell on a woman’s purse lying on top of the high bookkeeper’s desk which divided the office in two, the office he shared only with Arlene Arthur and their boss Marvin Tyndall.

The purse, he knew, belonged to Arlene; he would have recognized it even without the initials A. A., embroidered in green wool on the bright-pink envelope just below the clasp. He picked up the purse and held it in his hand. She must have forgotten it, left it behind when she quit at five-thirty, and he wondered vaguely if she would be needing tonight whatever money might be in it for whatever she might be doing. But these thoughts at once gave way to another idea, one which struck him as uncannily apropos and right. Coming upon something of Arlene Arthur’s at a moment like this, just when he had been trying to express to himself his emotions about her, could really be thought of as a kind of Poetic Justice. He was not exactly sure what the phrase meant but it delighted him all the same. Here was a sign, a happy augury forecasting the success of the next hour or two, the fulfillment of the undertaking he was embarked upon and which had already been stalled far too long. Eager to get going again, he opened the cash drawer and dropped the purse inside, then took the unfinished notes from his pocket and went to the typewriter.

Since suppertime, after his mother and brothers and practically everybody else in town had gone off to the gym, he had been trying to write a poem. But for some reason that he couldn’t fathom it had given him a lot of trouble, he simply did not understand what the matter was or why he could not get beyond the three opening lines, dramatic indeed but still no more than a beginning. Ordinarily he wrote a poem in an hour or an hour and a quarter—an hour and a half at the most; tonight he had sat at the kitchen table for more than two hours, writing down these three lines very neatly, then gazing into space for minutes at a time till he discovered that he was staring into the morose eyes of the moose featured on the calendar of the Baxter Brothers Box Factory, then ripping the scribbled sheet from the pad and copying the lines over again on a fresh page. Finally, he decided that what was lacking was the typewriter—he had learned that there was nothing like seeing your words in print, even the print of a typewriter ribbon, to stimulate your waning inspiration—and the only typewriter he had access to was the one at the office. From the beginning, this had been one of the greatest delights of his job at the office and of having his own key.

On his way downtown he had looked in at the gym. He had stood just inside the door and scanned the sea of flushed, happy, and tense faces that concentrated such feverish attention upon the basketball court, the boys hollering and cursing and whistling, the girls biting their nails and fidgeting in their seats as if they all had to go to the bathroom, the grownups hardly less noisy or agitated than the school kids. He saw Ruth, the wife of his beloved boss Marvin, and their three little girls; he saw his mother and brothers; he saw Bettina and her small clique of girl friends; he saw his English teacher and his Science and French and Math and Latin teachers—he saw all these people and was unseen by them, unnoticed as if he had not been present, and this seemed to him right and fitting, because lately he had abandoned their world for a world of his own and, in a sense, the world of Marvin Tyndall which none of them would ever really know or understand. He glanced again in the direction of Ruth and the little Tyndall girls and wondered where Marvin was. The whistle blew for the quarter and instantly the floor was flooded with dozens of little boys. On an impulse he started forward, pushing his way through the melee to where Ruth sat with her daughters in the first tier at the edge of the court. “Hello, Ruth,” he said, “where’s Marvin?” She looked up at him with the wan sweet smile that he knew so well and that his mother often spoke of with a shake of the head and an exasperated click of the tongue. “Marvin? He didn’t stay.” “Have you got the car?” he asked; “otherwise I’ll wait and walk home with you.” “Oh, Marvin’s coming back—he said he’d pick us up after the game.” The whistle blew for the next quarter and he hurried to be out of the way. At the door again, he turned for a moment to regard the scene once more, nostalgically, but with no regret, a scene so long familiar and now so strange; and then he left.

After the bedlam of the gym, the office was wonderfully peaceful and still. He loved this place; since he had begun working here, after school and Saturdays, he had come to regard it as his own haven and second home, though he was careful to suppress this fond idea when he discussed his work with his family. His mother was always terribly annoyed with him when he found excuses for coming down to the office nights after supper or on Sundays, and he knew why. It was because of Arlene Arthur. Not that she thought for a minute that there was anything between Arlene and him (Arlene was probably twice his age); nobody thought that, because everyone in town knew only too well whom Arlene was in love with—without really understanding the first thing about it, he emphasized to himself, or even trying to understand—and who was in love with her. But, from their standpoint, that was putting it wrong. Nobody who talked about them ever for a minute spoke or thought of it as love; they all said it was just a cheap nasty affair of the shabbiest kind; then, after a pause, they would add, “Poor Ruth.” It was because of this state of things that his mother didn’t want him hanging around the office—having anything to do with That Woman, coming under her Influence, absorbing her Bold Ideas—any more than was necessary to hold down his job. She had even gone so far as to say, “They’re using you as a blind, don’t you know that? They’re using you! And I will not have you going out with them, as you’ve been doing lately, or going any place with them away from the office! Do you hear?”

Once or twice he had tried to discuss it with his mother. In the vain hope that she would believe that he, of all people, was in a position to know, he had pretended there was nothing to it. “If it’s true,” he had said, “then why doesn’t somebody do something about it?” “Because in this town,” she had answered, “nobody ever does anything about anything.” “What should they do?” he had asked superiorly, and she had replied, “Well, I don’t know, but they just let things slide!” “And isn’t that as good a way as any,” he had said, feeling himself growing older by the minute, “of resolving things?” “Oh, you and your modern ideas!” “The trouble with you, Mother, is you don’t know anything about tolerance. Didn’t God say ‘Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone’?” “He also said ‘Go and sin no more’ if you’ll remember. It’s sordid, a brazen hussy like that breaking up a fine home like Ruth and Marvin’s!”

Of course, being his mother, she could not be expected to understand what the affair had done to him and for him; how, sharing in that love, he had been touched by life. Doors had opened, horizons broadened; he felt himself already a man, sensing some of the limitless possibilities of the future. Overnight he had grown up, with a taste of the knowledge of what passion can do to a man, no matter how fine and good, and to a woman. Yes, to a woman, too; for it had been one of the unexpected and thrilling qualities of the experience that he had been able really to know what she was feeling as truly as if it were happening to himself. He marveled at this new power that had awakened in him, like the power of the poet to be all things at will, to place yourself in the souls and bodies of others and think with their minds, feel with their hearts, whether they be men or women; thus when he talked with Marvin Tyndall of Arlene, he was passionately in love with the idea of Arlene himself, just as when he talked with her in a similar vein, he knew that he was more than a little in love with Marvin. In him alone, he felt, their love came into its fullest understanding, perhaps more, even, than it ever did in each other, since lovers are selfish and see only themselves even in their lover’s eyes; and he rejoiced in the knowledge that he was necessary to them, like a kind of other-spirit, an androgynous twin to each, though neither of them had ever told him, directly, that they were in love. There had been no need to. He knew, by indirections plainer and sweeter than any declaration; he knew, as well, by that tender compulsion of lovers to give themselves away, if only once, and to one person only. That he was their unwitting confidant, that it was he they had chosen, filled him with a tingling sense of living that was not only awareness but affirmation, an acceptance of life as it is, as it cannot otherwise be! It enriched him beyond his years.

Romance! How his ideas had changed, he reflected happily, of what is romantic and what is not! Only a year ago his ideal of love had been the tender poetic story of Lancelot and Elaine. It had seemed to him inexpressibly beautiful, moving, and oh, how true! that the Lily Maid could pine and sicken and die for love of the one-day-seen Sir Lancelot, loved of the loveliest, the darling of the court. He knew better now. Now, in the light of experience, Elaine’s unrequited infatuation showed itself for what it was, less romantic than insipid, less tragic than inane. Now, at fifteen, his ideal shifted a generation of maturity upward to the high adulterous love, the responsible, fully aware, self-knowing passion, of Lancelot and Guinevere. To whom if not to Marvin and Arlene (oh, far more than pretty storybooks!) did he owe this sense of life, the realization that he was alive at last? He was profoundly grateful; he would never forget; he passionately hoped that he could one day repay.

None of this could he have communicated to his mother. It would have been just so much breath wasted, and heinous immorality besides. But there were other things at the Blade which held him quite as much as the affair of Marvin Tyndall and Arlene, and which drew him back to the office on those rare evenings and Sundays when there was not too much opposition put up at home. Tonight, of course, it didn’t matter; his mother didn’t even know where he was. But if she could ever be made to realize what the office meant to him—the office alone—she could not then honestly have objected, Arlene Arthur or no Arlene, to his coming down here after supper to be with himself and his typewriter. He loved the place at any time. Coming in afternoons from school, he was able to belong as if he had been here since morning, falling at once into what he loved to think of as the rhythm and tempo of a newspaper. True, it was only a country weekly, but it was the town’s only one! And it gave them all here a sense of importance, a standing and position in the community, different from the standing of men who did other things, vastly different from the picayune chores that occupied many of the other boys in their hours after school, giving them pocket money and, pathetically, nothing else. Here, the rewards were many; the least of them far exceeded, in a truer value than money, the ten dollars that made up his Saturday pay.

The very sounds of the place were wonderful. Beyond the glass partition that separated the office from the rest of the plant came the noises of the shop, humming pleasantly like a minor foundry: the occasional low grind of the proof press; the small thunder of slugs of pied type being dumped into the barrel; the clank and banging as Bert the compositor hammered in a finished form and locked it up, or the sudden quick rush and tromp of feet as he carried the heavy loaded form, weighing a good eighty pounds, back to the roller press; and the musical clinkle-clink of old Nellie at her incessant linotype, the only constant sound all day long, not unlike the Chinese windbells on his mother’s side porch. From farther back, in the pressroom beyond, could be heard the steady monotonous thwack-umph-thwack of the hand presses and the faint even roar of the roller press. Another roller press, newer, bigger, modern like the big dailies’ in the city, had lately been installed in the cellar, beneath the front office and the sidewalk. The advantages of this innovation, clearly foreseen by Marvin against the derision of Bert, old Dave the foreman, and the ribald scoffers of the shop, had been tremendous. Not only was there more room in the basement for the men to move about the big press when it was rolling, and at considerably less danger to themselves, but also the heavy loads of newsprint, heavy as a stack of locked forms, could now be lowered directly to the pressroom below through the opening in the sidewalk without having to be carried all the way from the street, through the office and the composing room, and back to the old pressroom. The newsprint was spread out on the concrete floor of the cellar in great piles, white and thick, looking like neat, incredibly well-made beds. Thursday afternoon the completed paper, tied up in bundles of various sizes with various destinations and ready for the post office, could now be tossed up directly onto the sidewalk by a single boy or man, who then climbed up out of the hole himself and finished the job by piling the bundles into the back of the Reo. Since the new roller had been installed and the dark front-cellar converted into a pressroom, Marvin, with his characteristic thoughtfulness for anyone who worked for him, had somewhat relieved the darkness below by an ingenious device: between the bookkeeper’s desk and the front window, in what they called the reception part of the office, he had had a large hole cut out of the floor five feet square and replaced the flooring with a thick slab of opaque glass. The pressmen still snickered among themselves about this arrangement, but on bright days it did serve the purpose of letting into the cellar at least enough daylight to show that there was daylight above.

In all this busy and fascinating world, his particular haven and sphere was the front office. With Marvin and Arlene he ruled the place, and, such was the spirit of comradeship and affection with which Marvin imbued the atmosphere, no one of the three was above another, all were on equal footing, they were colleagues. As owner, publisher, and editor, Marvin was boss, of course, but he was boss in name only; he also solicited advertising a day or two a week, and wrote a few articles. Arlene Arthur was secretary, bookkeeper, stenographer, occasional proofreader and treasurer; she too helped with the ads, and sometimes drove out in her Cleveland to get those that had been late coming in. Don, hurrying in after school hours, found plenty to do. He sat down immediately at the typewriter and typed up the personals that had come in over the phone during the day, scribbled on a pad on the desk; he wrote up obituaries and weddings; he read proof; he made a sizable story out of the bake sale the Eastern Star was holding next week, using Worthy Matron, Deputy Grand, Star Point, Worthy Conductress (“Everyone likes to see their name in the paper,” Marvin said, “and their titles”); he wrote a front-page article about the Big Opening of Tony Fumigalli’s new super market to be ready two months hence, an article that was to be followed weekly with similar pieces, calculated to whip up the public’s interest and to bring in newer and costlier ads from Tony; he composed a poem about the changing season that occasioned the only disagreement, if disagreement it could be called, that he ever had with Marvin, who scorned it as highbrow (though Arlene loved it); he tried his hand at writing heads and subheads and became very good at it, delighting in the mathematical precision with which he had to count off the letters just so and space the lines beneath with the proper indentation, so many letters in on one side, so many letters out on the other. The fruits of these labors he whisked from his typewriter from time to time and hurried them back to Nellie. Arrived at the linotype, he always stood at Nellie’s side respectfully for a moment or two, looking down over her black alpaca bosom while she scanned his copy with hostility and then grudgingly, by a kind of animal grunt, pronounced it all right. During these trips to the shop, for what reason he never knew, he was subject to a concerted derision from the compositors and pressmen, a series of good-natured but nonetheless nerve-racking razzberries, cat-calls, and cries of “Oh, Oscar!” and “Hey, write me a pome, won’t chuh, huh?” He withstood these onslaughts of the shop with no change of expression, even managing sometimes to laugh with the gang or retaliate with a self-conscious obscenity himself; all the same he was glad to return to the safety and sanity of the office.

He loved to listen to Marvin dictating. With Arlene opposite, hunched over the shorthand pad in her lap, Marvin sprawled in the tilted-back swivel chair in an attitude of abandon, his hands restless and alive in his pants pockets as if playing with a double set of keys, and poured forth language. The voice paused dramatically, the eyes squinted into space, the mouth quivered half-open, was silent, and gave again: it was a charming picture of man lost in thought, unconscious man, unaware of himself, so much more appealing than man artful and in command. As always when composing aloud, his choice of words was influenced less by the eyes of his prospective readers than by the ears of the audience present; and whether or not he knew it, he was, during these sessions, trying to charm them both.

Don listened, and absorbed. He sat at his typewriter, staring at the blank sheet, idly fingering the frame below the space bar, and was transported into the great world of the editorial, the business letter, and literature. The simple declarative sentence was something for the First Grade Reader: “Fanny can fan Dan.” Proper writing, to be writing at all, must draw on the rich storehouse (could a storehouse be anything but rich?) of grammar, syntax, and glorious vocabulary. Phrases like “seldom if ever,” “indicative of,” “evince an interest in,” “envisioned in the statute,” “mandatory,” “tantamount to saying,” “commensurate,” all became part of his language and his thinking. Adjectives and adverbs, simile and metaphor, qualifying phrase and clause within clause were all in all. Who but the writer knew the exquisite anxiety and triumph of getting into a complex, interminable sentence and getting out of it again? Elaboration was the thing. Style! Coupled locutions like neither with nor, just as with so does, not only with but also, less something with than something else, were as much a part of the writer’s equipment as and, the, but, and capital letters and commas. Facts were “basic” or “essential” or “immediate”; otherwise they were just facts, prosaic and meaningless. You did not say “Now,” you said “At this juncture of the problem”—or, if it came to that, you didn’t “say” at all, you asserted or averred. A room was not big, it had generous proportions; a man was not sharp, he had business acumen; an idea was not sound, it was instinct with reason; a poem was not beautiful, it was informed with beauty. And of course a story did not begin, “John felt awful,” it began, “Abrupt depression smote Hilary’s vulnerable breast like the blow of Fate.” Common speech was just that, common. Things as they were, were inadequate, you had to take them and change them around and make them into something better, with all the resources at your command. He knew that when people in real life were moved or stirred, they spoke in monosyllables, inarticulate and groping; but who would want to read it like that? And besides, if you put things down that way, just the way they happened, it was nothing but reporting, no good at all. For the purposes of any writing that was worthy of the name, the more deeply you felt, the more rhetoric it called for, expressed with color and grandeur. Life was never good enough for literature.

But much as he loved the activity of the day no less than the company of Marvin and Arlene, the best time of all was evenings and Sundays when the Blade was closed and he had the office all to himself. There is probably no greater pleasure in all the world, he thought as he sat here now, than a place of your own. He had none at home, this was the one sanctuary he had found; and the fact that he had been entrusted with a key was sometimes almost enough in itself to release his best thoughts and help him to find words for the first faint stirrings of a poem that had been tormenting him, perhaps, all through Latin and Science class. The very stillness of the empty office and his rapport with the desk which, a few hours earlier, had seen him dutifully at work on writing of a different kind, now called for nothing less than his best self; the cold practical typewriter itself paradoxically beckoned, as if in its hard mechanical heart it yet recognized the sober fact that the loftiest lyric must be brought to earth and submitted to the efficiency of the machine before it could be given to the world, and no nonsense about it. Though he sat here in full view of the street, no one would be coming in, the phone would not ring, there would be no wauling from the ghoul-haunted jungle of the shop. With the evening still ahead of him, with the thought that his mother and brothers would not return home for an hour or more to find him gone—above all, with the happy accident of Arlene’s purse lying there for him to discover and put away, as if she had been present herself and spoken to him to spur him on—the interrupted poem, still so uncertain yet still so pressing, would yet take shape.

He rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter and centered it. He gave a last glance at his notes and then slowly, with extreme care—feeling keenly the tenseness of himself and the excitement of what was about to take place—he typed out the title of his poem in capital letters. When he had finished, he moved the carriage back without turning up the roller and printed each letter over again on top of the others, hitting the separate keys squarely and firmly so that the title would come out good and black:

A SMALL-TOWN GUINEVERE
and underneath it he set down in parentheses:

(To A. A.)

Instantly he saw that it was wrong. You didn’t dedicate a poem to the person it was about; so he yanked out the sheet, put in another, and typed out the title again. This time he substituted a new dedication:

(To M. T.)

But that was wrong, too. It was too obvious. Not only that; to any other eyes but his own, it would have been sarcastic as well; or worse, malicious. He tore up this sheet also and threw it away. As he began to tap out the title for the third time, he changed it, on a sudden delighted inspiration, to read:

A MODERN GUINEVERE

Surprised and happy at this unexpected change, which he recognized as one of the capricious vagaries of the writer who does not know his own power in advance, he now set himself to copying the three dramatic opening lines.

They read well. They looked well in print; in fact they looked wonderful. But as before, they got him nowhere. He was blocked again, and he felt his spine get all hot and his scalp itch with frustration. He hadn’t the remotest idea of what the next line should be, or, a new line forthcoming, what it should lead to. His dilemma arose, of course, from not thinking out the subject more carefully. Angered with the poem, still more with himself, he ripped out the sheet, wadded it into a ball, threw it into the wastebasket, and stood suddenly up. He paced. Fledgling writer though he was, he had already learned the value of pacing, how it can sometimes smooth out the small troubles of a troubling craft. And now it occurred to him where the difficulty lay.

The subject of the emotion he was trying to express was not only Guinevere; it was Lancelot as well, and Marvin; it was neither one nor the other, it was the two of them together if it was anything at all—and it was just as much himself as either. If he wrote of Guinevere and not of Lancelot (but how could you?), the poem was doomed from the start, and to force it would be false to all three. There was only one thing to do: put it resolutely aside for the time being; then, with discipline, and calm, and searching honesty, sit down and think out from the beginning just what it was that he had to say, or why he had to say it at all.

Fascinated with what he was up to, sensing keenly the marvelous and awful responsibility yet delighting in it to the utmost, he walked slowly around the high bookkeeping desk and into the reception part of the office; he reached up and pulled off the overhead light, then sat down in one of the two oak chairs to ponder his problem in the half-darkness. He gazed across the street at the Kandy Kitchen and saw Nick still standing in the brightly lighted window, staring out as before, but no more moodily, he reflected with secret satisfaction, than he himself now stared. In a half or three-quarters of an hour the kids would be coming along from the gym and Nick would turn happily back to his sodas and sundaes. But he would not be here to see it. By that time, he was certain to have got his ideas sorted out and be back at the typewriter again.

His feet rested on the glass slab in the floor. He shifted to a more comfortable position, and his shoe grated harshly as some rough particle of sand or dirt scraped along the glass surface. It was a jarring note to his mood. He pushed slightly back to avoid a repetition of the irritation.

Don had no idea how old Arlene Arthur was. At times he supposed her to be in her early twenties, but his mother stated categorically she was forty if she was a day; and in this she may have been right, for no matter how Arlene might move about the town, the church, and the professional world as a modern young woman of independence, she had, in many small ways, a curiously old-fashioned quality. She was given to pink, lavender, pearl-gray, and other pastel colors, in scarves, blouses, millinery, and even suits. She wore bonnets rather than hats, poke- and basket-shaped affairs that looked as if they had come out of an historical pageant and been slightly altered for present-day wear. Once she wore to the office a boa of peach-colored maribou, but after a tactful word from Marvin it disappeared and was seen no more; and the only time that Don saw her dressed for a formal evening out, her gown had been white lace over pink chiffon, with a satin sash. With all this, she was distinctly a creature of the contemporary world; it was well known that she was a speed demon, driving her own Willys-Knight like a man. She did not smoke cigarettes.

Her figure was not good; she was broad in the hips, with thick legs and ankles, so that her feet toed out when she walked. She had rather more than a faint mustache, quite black; her eyebrows were very black and thick, and there was a fuzzy fur of black on each forearm; through her flesh-colored stockings you could always see the hair on her legs streaked every which way. But she had two vitally arresting features; and Marvin Tyndall, it was said, was not the first man to have succumbed to these. One was her eyes; the other, her voice.

The eyes, though too close together, were large, black, deep-set, and liquid. When she looked at you or listened, they were wide open to the fullest; they told Marvin, without a shade of doubt, that he was all-wonderful in their sight. But their most extraordinary aspect was the quality they had, indescribable because unique, of being constantly aquiver, shimmering with some inner life of their own, vibrating so intensely that they seemed forever in the process of being opened and shut in a rapid series of blinkings so minute as to be scarcely visible—and in fact, when you inspected them closely, that is just what they were doing. By some curious magic this quality of eye-trembling, so effective and so illusive, was reflected in her throat and there translated into thrilling sound: her slightest uttered word made you stop and listen again, and the prolonged tremolo of a full sentence had an intoxicating effect that seduced the hearer; when it was over, he was often obliged, before replying, to think back through the music in order to get the meaning of what had been said. This gift was no mere affectation on Arlene’s part; Don had once heard her talking on the telephone to her sister, whom she loathed, and the music was there, all right, even through the unbridled hatred and spite that went seething out over the wire. The voice was the luminous eyes made articulate; the eyes were the incredible but visual counterpart of the magical voice—a summary which, for pure concise description, he could not help feeling rather proud of.

At the office, Arlene Arthur was a model of efficiency and resourcefulness; Marvin Tyndall, and the Blade itself, would have been hard put to get along without her. She kept watch of the advertising accounts with a sharpness that might have indicated that the profits went solely into her own bank account (and indeed, some said that this was in great part true), and periodically she came up with new publicity and promotional ideas that greatly enhanced the revenue of the already thriving paper. She was superb at typing and dictation. In matters of money she was responsibility itself and had become the ablest treasurer the company had ever had. She was not only a conscientious and tidy keeper of a highly complicated series of books but also, in a similar capacity, she was of service to Main Street as well, having earned her title of Certified Public Accountant several years before. She could meet the toughest business adversary on his own grounds, yielding no point nor taking advantage of her sex to gain a point from him; and with winning tact she was able to soothe the outraged feelings of old Mrs. van Benschoten who charged into the office several times a year, with banging umbrella, eager to snatch the wool off somebody’s head because her name had been spelled wrong in a personal. After hours, or when only the three of them were alone in the office, Arlene was an engaging companion, feminine to her fingertips, full of little jokes and sallies, entertaining, confiding, affectionate.

Apart from her work and of course Marvin Tyndall, Arlene’s consuming interests were music and the church; characteristically, she had managed most successfully to combine these two. Sunday mornings and at choir practice two evenings a week she played the organ at the Presbyterian Church; and it was said that she went up into the loft again on Saturday afternoons to rehearse to her own exacting satisfaction the kind of difficult composition that she chose for the Organ Interlude during the Sunday service. Sitting at the organ in a long beam of sunlight that fell slantingly across the chancel from one of the high stained-glass windows, her raven-black hair and thick black eyebrows (matched only by the jet of the black flowing tie and mortarboard), darker than ever above the immaculate white of her starched collar and snowy surplice, she was a very arresting figure. It was this Sunday-morning aspect of her life and character, perhaps more than any other single detail in Arlene Arthur’s well-known history, which so aroused the ladies’ indignation, his mother’s particularly.

Marvin Tyndall’s infatuation was understandable; to Don, it was not less difficult to see how and why Arlene had fallen in love with him. He was handsome; more, he was that unique personality, a ladies’ man who was equally popular with men. He was the cleanest-looking man in town, for his years the youngest (far younger in appearance than his wife who was six years his junior), certainly the most expensively dressed. He was the only man Don had ever seen with a manicure; his nails sparkled shiny and bright with enamel, scarcely less brilliant than the large yellow diamond that he wore on the ring finger of his left hand. He liked tweeds of the salt-and-pepper variety, light gabardine the color of cream, flowing Burberry topcoats with bold plaids, hats rather Western than upstate, Argyle socks, and shoes polished to a high mahogany shine. His thinning blond hair was arranged meticulously across the top of his head, and several times a day he stepped to the mirror to check up on this; it was thicker at the sides, where it had been assisted to curl attractively above and behind the ears. He wore glasses with transparent shell rims, resting on the bridge of a nose that was generous, with sharply flaring nostrils that gave his face a keen scenting look. The eyes were light hazel, almost amber, not deep, yet with an engaging friendliness; the mouth, wide and full, was slightly curved up at the corners, even in repose. He was invariably freshly shaved, so closely and neat that it seemed, no matter what the hour, that he had only just that moment left the barber chair; at any hour of the day you could smell the sharp pungent scent of the shaving lotion he used, though it may have been perfume.

He was tall and lightly built, neither spare nor heavy, with a youthful, springy, almost bouncing step. When, on Saturday morning, he parked his car across the street by the Kandy Kitchen and came tripping over the pavement in full view of the office, with plenty of approach so that his every buoyant movement could be watched in full by those whom he knew to be waiting within, the simultaneous hearts of Arlene and Don, side by side at the bookkeeping desk, filled up with pleasure; and somehow this pleasure was not diminished one whit—intensified, rather—by their knowledge that the little pantomime was being staged especially for their benefit, like the compulsive ritual of the primitive lover that has meaning only when witnessed by the beloved. With a kind of dancing step, head turned profile down the street, he would near the curb; at the last possible moment, just in time to avert disaster, he would discover where he was, turn his glance down as he stepped upon the sidewalk, look up and then see them through the glass. The smile that he sent them was radiant. Involuntarily Arlene would lay a hand on Don’s sleeve, and all but gasp, “Isn’t he wonderful!” The purity and girlish innocence of the exclamation, artful like the performance he had just watched, was calculated, Don knew, to disarm him—to disarm and yet, paradoxically, to inform. The very fact that she had troubled to dissemble made him know—and she saw to it that he knew, for that had been the purpose of her guile—that they were lovers.

In similar vein, Marvin sometimes stopped by Don’s desk, and throwing a roguish glance at Arlene in open flirtation, would remark in conspiratorial tones, “Isn’t she a peach though? Isn’t she just a little dandy? Boy oh boy, what I wouldn’t give to be ten years younger—and single!” He overrode Arlene’s quivering cries of “Stop it, Marvin!” with uproarious laughter, and plainer than words the laughter said to Don, “Okay, I’ve told you. Now I dare you to believe it—or disbelieve, for that matter.…” They all joined heartily in the laughter then, sharing the secret and the joke.

Lately the three had been going out together nights, and it was this that his mother objected to so strenuously. They met for what Marvin called “their little office dinners,” adding, with an open sly wink, “For business purposes only, of course. Oh yes. Oh yes, indeed!” He drove them to the city where they dined in the elegant faded dining room of an obscure hotel off the beaten path; and if they were seen by anyone they knew, it did not matter—for was not Don with them? They had a cocktail before and white wine during dinner and they had a wonderful time. Not a word of office matters was allowed to be mentioned during the evening. The nearest they ever came to it was once when Marvin said, “When are you going to forget this poetry idea, Don? Nobody ever got rich writing poems, you know. Or if you can’t help yourself, if it’s got you by the short hairs—beg pardon, Miss Arthur—then for Pete’s sake why don’t you write something that has human interest? Seems to me a waste of time and electricity to be sitting up all night writing stuff that’ll never see the light of day.” Warm with his first wine, Don had not minded; he had even rather enjoyed it; he knew in his secret heart that a volume of his poetry would one day be published—and a very good idea for the title, he reflected with a private smile, might well be: “The Light of Day.”

On the hour-long drive home in the late cool night, Don had once disgraced himself by falling asleep, and Marvin (though he must secretly have been grateful for this lapse) made a great point of never letting him forget it.

It was on these occasions, the small dinners and the drives home, that all Marvin’s protective instincts as a father came out, so disconcerting to Don. Throughout the evening he was more than usually solicitous of his comfort and pleasure, and in fact was far more attentive to Don than to Arlene. But could not this attention, this unaccustomed fatherliness, have been but a part of the delightful masquerade they all kept up together? Whatever it was, Don still experienced the agreeable sensation of being in on a love that he knew to be only fine, and felt a scorn for the small-mindedness of the townspeople whose malice sprang, doubtless, from envy.

One afternoon as he was leaving the office for home and supper, Marvin followed him to the door saying, “What’s your hurry? Hop in and I’ll give you a lift.” He stepped in beside Marvin and the car started up Main Street. But instead of turning off at the street where Don lived, Marvin kept the car straight ahead and in a few minutes more they were in the open country. Laboriously, because he seemed to be preoccupied and had forgotten to shift into low, the car crawled slowly up the long high incline that was known the county over as Shaw’s Hill. At the top he brought the car to a halt, turned it around, then drove to the side of the road and shut off the engine. He had spoken little during the drive, and Don wondered what, if anything, was up.

The village lay spread out below, looking unbelievably small for such a big town. Don knew every street and corner as well as he knew the palm of his hand and he loved it all, but even he was hardly able to accept the idea, so clearly shown below, that the breadth of his hometown was probably no more than thirty square blocks. He could see the Methodist Church spire; and standing right up against it, though he knew they were half a mile apart, was the clock on the corner bank. The great world was so limitless, so rich, promising inexhaustible variety—but he had only to look below to see that his own world was so small.

From the seat beside him he was aware that Marvin had spoken, but in his daydream he had missed the first part of it.

“… What’s become of her anyway? Don’t you see her any more?”

He roused himself for the conversation. “See who?”

“Why, Bettina Chapin, who else? I thought for a while there, that you were pretty sweet on her.”

“Oh, I see her, same as ever. She’s in school every day. We’re in the same class.”

“Sophomores?”

“Yes.”

“But that isn’t what I meant at all and you know it, you know it just as well as I do, don’t you, you old buzzard. Now quit stringing me along.”

Don was not reluctant to discuss Bettina but he felt uncertain as to what this was about. He decided the best way out of it was to try and kid back. “Say, who’s kidding who along?”

“What I mean is,” Marvin went on, and Don heard his voice assume a graver note, “for a while there, you seemed to be stepping out with her a good deal. You took her to the games and the dances, and I suppose that afterwards—well, you maybe drove out to some lane with another couple, maybe, and parked awhile in the dark, didn’t you?” After a pause in which he seemed about to say something different, he changed his mind and repeated, “Didn’t you?”

He had often wished for just such an opportunity to have a good heart-to-heart talk with Marvin, a serious conversation, man to man, about things of the heart or spirit that mattered. But this kind of talk made him uneasy and restless, there seemed nothing in it that you could lay your hands on or come to grips with, and almost sadly he longed to be able to reach his friend in the way that he wished to be reached by him. “Why yes, Marvin,” he heard himself answering, “we have parked like that, once in a while, when Harry Olsen had his father’s car. And we’ve necked. That’s what you meant, isn’t it?”

Almost abruptly Marvin Tyndall sat up and, leaning forward, began to fiddle with the car keys. “She’s a very pretty girl, that Chapin girl. A real peach, a real little beauty. I’ve been watching her. Yes sir, I’ve always admired Bettina very much indeed. But there are a lot of things you young fellows ought to keep in mind, once in a while.” His words slowed up, he seemed to be speaking with great care or great difficulty, Don couldn’t be sure which. “Maybe you do keep them in mind, I don’t know. I know I didn’t when I was a young blood. And one of them is, there’s nothing in this world like going to your marriage bed a virgin, no sir, nothing in this world.” He shoved the ignition key into the lock. “Every one of us, we’re all alike, we all want and expect the same thing in our marriage, and that is that nobody’s ever been there ahead of us. The same thing, every man-jack of us, I don’t care how many fellows tell you different. They may say it doesn’t matter, but boy oh boy”—he interrupted himself with a short sharp laugh—“I’d like to see their faces on their wedding night when they get what they think they don’t mind getting!” He turned the switch and put his foot on the starter, but left the engine running idly. “But what I’m trying to say is,” he added, sober again, “how can any one of us, how do we have the right to expect virginity in our wives, absolutely untouched, if we ourselves have been stepping out high, wide, and handsome without a thought of what our bodies mean to our brides? Of course it isn’t just our bodies per se,” he amended, “they don’t really mean a thing. They’re just as good after as they were before. It’s the idea, I mean, the idea that we’ve been poking around in a lot of places where we shouldn’t. See what I mean?” he concluded almost gaily.

Puzzled, Don wondered for a moment whether Marvin was trying to make a joke. The light way in which the man spoke of such a serious thing as love-making, the very choice of the words themselves, rough, crude, the language of the shop, made him momentarily uncertain as to whether he really knew his friend as well as he thought he did, or, knowing, still admire him. But gradually the faint stirrings of a dim understanding began to creep into his mind; they had not yet begun to formulate into thoughts when Marvin spoke again.

“And another thing,” he said, his voice very low, unaccountably grave again. “Chastity, or whatever you young bucks call it nowadays, has got to go on after marriage, the same as before, or it’s no good. No use trying to turn marriage into license or just plain pleasure, that isn’t what it’s for. It’s a sacred institution, you understand? My marriage with Ruth Whitcomb has been one of the finest things that ever happened to any man on the face of the earth. It’s holy, that’s what it is. Holy! I bet there isn’t another man in town that’s got a marriage as clean in their own home as mine and Ruth’s. Why, there are things between us that no one would—” He broke off, as if moved by his own thoughts. For the first time he turned toward Don. His eyes glowed with a kind of sad but fierce intensity. The voice was barely audible. “Don.… Don. I’m going to tell you something that I’ve never told another living soul in this world, as God is my judge. Do you know what? I’ve been married to that lovely Ruth Whitcomb for fourteen years now. For the fourteen years of our married life we’ve had the same bedroom, not separate rooms the way some of these modernistic couples do, and what’s more, we’ve always slept in a double bed. We have three kiddies, as you know, and Ruth has had a couple of miscarriages besides. But you know something? Not once in all those fourteen years that I’ve been married to Ruth Whitcomb, not once, mind you, have I ever laid eyes on her naked. Or even so much as caught a glimpse of her bare—well, breasts. And that’s God’s truth so help me.” He sank back, as if exhausted; but the lonely intense eyes still looked challengingly into Don’s. “Now do you believe me, what I said about marriage? That’s what I meant when I said it was holy.…”

Both were silent. Don thought that he had never felt so alone in someone else’s presence as he now felt sitting side by side with Marvin Tyndall. He would have given anything he possessed to be able to utter one word. He felt almost a physical necessity to get something out somehow, say something, anything, if only it had been to speak Marvin’s name. He was helpless. Then he remembered the disturbing expression in those eyes only a minute ago and reflected that in this world, perhaps, the really lonely men were, and would always be, men like Marvin Tyndall.

Far across the valley, on the other side of town, he saw a thin white feather of steam shoot up and then trail briefly, clearly visible through the still air of the early evening, as an unseen express train sped along the Central. It disappeared, and was replaced by another white feather of equal length, which, after a moment, vanished in turn. In succeeding seconds, two shorter feathers rose up, all but simultaneously, then were gone like the others. Somewhere beyond Arcadia the train rushed onward. Had the passengers, speeding through, regarded his village home at all, or, if so, had they given it a thought? It was cruel of them if they did not, he thought romantically, savoring the emotion even as it touched him momentarily with sadness; but all the same he knew in his honest heart that had he been on that speeding train, hurrying on through similar towns, he would only have thought for what lay beyond, in destinations yet to be reached.

“By George,” Marvin suddenly exclaimed, “I think I just heard the six-ten going through! My old lady will give me what-for, and yours too. Whaddeyuh say, bo, shall we step on it?”

In the few weeks that had passed since then, Don had often thought over that strange conversation and puzzled its meaning. Gradually, but perhaps more by an act of will than perception (the need to know was important to more than himself), a kind of understanding had evolved. Often it eluded him, then it was almost within his grasp, only to shift and be gone again, perhaps never to return. Now, as he sat in the dark office, an interpretation came once more, he thought he had it now, and with a rising excitement he realized that he possessed the final secret, possessed and accepted it, knowing, as he did so, that he again touched life. How it resolved the problem of his unfinished poem as well! What a rich aura of high and dark doings it cast, like a spell, all the way backward, illumining fitfully even his three opening lines! Marvin Tyndall’s confused and confusing behavior that afternoon had been caused, he decided, by the whips of remorse. The meats had become as wormwood: he was Lancelot wroth with himself, the adulterer guilt-ridden.…

What a marvelous word! Bold and beautiful, dark with evil yet somehow noble! All his childhood long he had sat in the family pew on Sunday morning with his mother and brothers and waited with a shiver of anticipation for that moment when Reverend Brittain should intone the dread commandment—dread because mysterious—“Thou shalt not commit adultery.” The words and the word rang throughout the church with a solemnity that suggested no shadow of sin whatever. The one commandment that did arouse a sense of sin was the one about coveting his neighbor’s wife and his ox and his ass; until only a few years ago it had caused him an anguish of embarrassment; he riveted his gaze on some remote spot in the chancel in a paroxysm of concentration and passionately hoped that his reddening ears would not be noticed by those in the pew behind him. But the adultery one—it had thrilled and stirred him precisely because he did not know the meaning of the grand word. Now that he did know, it had not lost its power; far from it. Aware that the older folk all about him, chastened now and safe in their sins, despised and rejected the philanderer that was never themselves, he secretly championed the Adulterer all the more.

His attention was caught by a flicker of light near the floor. He uncrossed his legs, leaned forward in his chair and looked down. There, as if embedded somewhere within the substance of the glass slab at his feet, he saw the glow of a small flame, blurred but distinct; it flared up slightly, went down, flared up again, and vanished. Instantly, his every sense alert, he got to his feet. Without thinking he reached up and yanked on the overhead light, then at once told himself that this was a stupid thing to have done. But what did it matter? Certainly they knew he had been here all along; but more than that, now, he knew they were there. By lighting a cigarette in the pressroom below, only a few feet from his chair, one of them had unwittingly told him as much. It could only have been Marvin, of course; Arlene did not smoke.

The thing to do now was take his time. There was no point in closing up and hurrying out; quick exit from the scene would give him away, tell them that he knew where they were and what they were up to—and not for worlds would he want them to know that. They could not know, of course, that he had seen their brief flicker of light. There were a thousand chances to one that the striking of a match in the pressroom below would have been seen in the office upstairs—he might have been looking out at the street, gazing into space, sitting with his eyes closed, any number of possibilities—but Marvin had taken that chance, all the same; and now that he had, and his presence was exposed, he must be protected. Perhaps he had been wanting to light a cigarette for half an hour or more, or ever since they had first heard Don unlock the door and come in; then finally he had decided to risk it, hoping to get away with it. As far as Don was concerned, as far as they would ever know from him, he had got away with it. Their secret was safe as it had always been; as it always would be.

He wondered what they were doing. He pictured them sitting down there side by side on one of the white piles of newsprint, talking together in undertones, wondering when he would go, yet perhaps not resentful that he was there. He speculated on what thoughts had entered their minds when they first heard him come in. Of course they had known who it was, walking about on the floor above their heads, tapping at the typewriter; besides old Dave the foreman, he was the only other one who had a key to the office. Had they hoped he would not stay long? Well, they need not worry now; he would pick up and go, but only after a pause long enough to rest their fears by showing them that it was not flight.

He walked back to his typewriter; as he rounded the bookkeeping desk he realized that he was tromping just a little too heavily, perhaps, for his step to seem entirely normal, so he made an effort to regulate his feet to a more natural walk. He began to whistle, but at once cut that out too; and as he did so, he thought of similar occasions (yet none were similar; there had never been another like this) when, self-consciously, he had whistled for reasons other than good feeling or spontaneity: for example, going upstairs as a child in the dark house, whistling to let the burglar know that he was coming and giving him a chance to hide. But not-whistling, too, at other times—and surely this was one of them—could be just as much of an indication of self-consciousness, could give you away as fully as whistling. It had been bad enough when he started to whistle a moment ago; it was worse when he stopped. He began to whistle again.

At his desk, he picked up the notes for his poem and put them in his jacket. He reached into the basket and took out the wadded-up sheets that he had yanked from the typewriter, smoothed them out, folded them in two, then tore them into little bits and stuck them into his pants pocket. He got up. He thought that it was all right to go now, he had probably waited long enough. He glanced at his watch. If he left now, it would give Marvin time enough to come up through the office, get his car, wherever it was, and still be on time to pick up Ruth and the children at the gym.

On the wall above Arlene’s desk hung a small mirror. He stopped in front of it and looked into the glass. He studied the shape of his face and for a moment or two was lost in thoughts of self. It irritated him that he still looked so young. Suddenly the eyebrows went up, the eyes sprang wide, as he thought of the purse.

He was vastly relieved that he had remembered; it would be awful if he had forgotten and gone. He opened the cash drawer, lifted out the purse, and replaced it on the bookkeeping desk where Arlene had left it. He looked at it critically; then, with a finger, moved one corner of it a little to the side. He hoped he was leaving it exactly as it was before.

There was a loud rap on the window, a shattering, shuddering rap, he could hear the plate glass fairly tremble. He glanced up in panic and saw Bert the compositor looking in at him. It was an awful moment. But perhaps Bert was only rapping and waving in passing. With an effort he raised his arm and gave Bert a wave of the hand that he hoped looked casual.

Bert was not passing. He stepped into the entranceway and tried the door. Finding it locked, he pounded on the glass again with the flat of his hand.

With elaborate gestures Don tried to indicate that he was sorry, he was just on the point of closing up: he threw up his hands spread wide, shrugged broadly, lifted his left wrist and pointed to his watch, jerked a thumb in the direction of South Main Street. The pantomime went unheeded; over the open transom came a bellow:

“Let me in, you! What’s the big idea?”

It was no use. If he refused to let Bert in—and after all, as far as Bert knew, there was no reason why he shouldn’t come in—Bert would only make his life a hell, hereafter, every time he went into the shop. Besides, if he didn’t open the door, how could he himself leave? Angered now, Bert would wait there to take it out of him if he had to wait all night. With a sinking heart, never taking his eyes off Bert, he opened the cash drawer, slid the purse off the sloping desk as unobtrusively as he could, and went to the door.

“Seems to me you’re getting too big for your pants, Oscar,” Bert said. “Why can’t you let a fellow in?”

“I let you in.”

“Yeah, after taking your own sweet time about it.”

“I was just leaving.”

“Go on, who’s stopping you?”

“Well—” He hesitated.

“I get it. I ain’t good enough to sit around the front office, huh? Well, as long as her highness ain’t here; I guess it won’t hurt to park my fanny for a while and enjoy the view.” He sat down in one of the oak chairs, put his feet up on the floor of the window, and stuck a match in his teeth. “Run along, why don’t you? I don’t steal.”

“I didn’t mean that, but—well, never mind.” After a pause he added, “Guess I’ll sit down too,” and he did so.

Bert gave him an odd look, and he turned his gaze out to the street.

“What are you up to, Oscar? Been writing po’try?”

Don knew that he only pronounced it that way to get a rise out of him but he ignored it. “As a matter of fact I had some work to do. Where are you coming from, Bert?”

“Movies. Lousy.”

“What made you stop in? Did you want something?”

“Oh, I saw you in here and I couldn’t resist. Sure you ain’t up to something?”

“Why yes. Why?”

“Nothing. Just thought you were covering up again. That’s all.”

“Covering up?”

“Getting pretty good at it, ain’t you. Getting mighty useful to some people around here. Used to wonder why they put a kid like you on the payroll, but not any more!”

He was on edge lest they should hear below. He spoke very quietly, and hoped that Bert would take cue from his tone. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh nothing. Nothing at all. Just happened to see her highness’s car parked around the corner on Merton Street. Funny.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“So-o-o-o,” Bert said, “I just kind of put two and two together like.”

“You mean Arlene’s car? What about it?”

“Well, what’s it doing there? She don’t live downtown, you know. No ma’am, not Arlene. She wouldn’t live in one of those flats up in the Opera House, not her. She’s got herself a nice ten-thousand-dollar house out on Rose Lane all to herself. On what, do you s’pose? On love?”

“Arlene gets a very good salary. She makes fifty easy.”

“And I make more than that. But I couldn’t buy no ten-thousand-dollar house with it.”

“Well, anyway, you’re probably mistaken about the car. I happen to know—I happen to know that Arlene’s at choir practice tonight. That’s where.”

“Run around the corner and see for yourself.”

“I don’t think I’m interested.”

“You any more interested in Marvin’s? ’Cause his car is down at the next corner. Looks like they’re slipping, leaving their cars around town careless-like.”

“Bert, you’re crazy,” he said, surprised at his own boldness. “Marvin’s up at the game. I saw him there.”

“Okay. I’m crazy. But you’re crazy if you don’t know that right this minute they’re probably over in the Corinth Hotel across the canal. That’s where they been going lately, times when her highness is just too fatigued to drive up to the city.”

“Oh, lay off, will you Bert. I’m getting kind of tired of this. Aren’t you? And anyway, gee, I think it’s kind of crummy for us to be sitting here talking about her. Don’t you?”

“Why don’t you get wise to yourself, kid? Arlene’s a no-good tramp from way back!”

“You needn’t shout. I’m right here.”

“Marvin’s only about number ten since I’ve known her.”

“I’m sorry but I don’t believe you.”

“Ask George Bailey. Why, he wouldn’t spit on her any more.” “Who’s George Bailey?”

“George? Conductor on the RS&E. But since she hooked Marvin she’s gotten too grand for her old friends.”

“Funny, Bert, but it just occurred to me that you’re worse than my mother.”

“Your mother probably knows what the score is, like everybody else. And if you don’t, somebody ought to wise you up. Jesus, nobody’d ever catch me being a blind for something as lowdown as that. If they did, I’d sure hate myself in the morning.”

“I’m not a blind for anything!” he said. “You can leave me out of this, please.”

“Okay, okay. I’m only trying to tell you for your own good. You’re a nice kid, Oscar. But Christ Almighty, you’re an awful sap!”

“What have you got against Arlene? What makes you so sore?”

“Me? Nothing. I don’t want no part of her. And it’s no skin off my ass who she sleeps with. But by the Lord Jesus, I like a whore who’s an honest-to-Christ whore! Nothing wrong with that, they’re a swell class of women. I never met a whore yet that was two-faced, till I met Arlene. Laying Marvin nights, then playing the organ like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Nyaah! Makes me sick!”

“I told you I wasn’t deaf!”

“Tell you a little story, Oscar. Seems like churches are right up Arlene’s alley, ’cause a couple of years ago—you weren’t dry behind the ears yet—the organist of Community Church over in Phalanx got sick or died or something, and somebody told Mr. Colvin the minister about Arlene, so one day he drove over here and asked if she’d come and help out till they could get a new organ player. Arlene agreed to take it on for one month, and do you know how long she lasted? Two weeks!”

“Well?”

“On the second Sunday it seems Mr. Colvin didn’t come home to dinner on time, so after a while Mrs. Colvin went down to the church to see if she could find him. She found him all right. Down in the Sunday-school room. They’d taken a couple of those long cushions off the benches and laid ’em on the floor. Made a dandy mattress.”

“Really, Bert, you ought to be ashamed of yourself! That’s the cheapest kind of gossip I’ve ever heard! How can you possibly know any such thing? You’d have to have heard it from the person who actually saw them!”

“I did. Mrs. Colvin is my aunt.”

Don got up. He was hot with anger all through. But what could he do about it? He didn’t want to fight with Bert. He didn’t want this conversation to go another word further. If he argued with him it would only bring out more of the same. He said, “Look, Bert, let’s clear out. Time we went home.”

“Not me. You go. I’m going to stay awhile.” He made a gesture with his head, to indicate something in the street. “Here come the kids, all piling into Nick’s.”

It was true. There they were, coming along the street in twos and threes, hollering or whistling like a lot of louts, turning in at the Kandy Kitchen. The game was over. He leaned forward to look at the clock on the bank.

“Come on, Bert. It’s ten-thirty.”

“Go on, I told you. What’s keeping you? I can lock up, same as you. It’s a spring lock.”

He sat down again.

All he could think of was that Marvin had to be got out of this somehow. Ruth and the children were still at the gym, waiting for him. For a while she would hang around visiting with friends. The friends would know that he had failed to pick her up, and knowing Marvin, they would know why. Then some neighbors would offer to give the Tyndalls a lift home in their car. Or Ruth would step into the coach’s office to telephone Marvin to come and get her. In either case he would not be there. But if Marvin were able to arrive home not too long after Ruth and the girls, he could explain that he had started out too late, perhaps, and missed her. The insoluble problem was: How was he going to be able to help Marvin to get home? How was he going to get Bert and himself out of the way first?

“I don’t want you to be getting sore at me, kid, for anything I said tonight,” Bert was saying. “If you didn’t walk around all day with your head in the clouds, you’d see some of these things for yourself. We all just want you to keep your skirts clean, that’s all. Nellie’s been beefing about you for a month, that’s why she acts sore at you all the time. She ain’t sore, she just don’t like to see you getting mixed up in it. And when you took to going out with ’em nights, that really got her. She told me a dozen times she’d half a mind to tell you a thing or two, one of these days, but she don’t know how to do it. So she clamps down on you every time you come around. Tell you what you do,” he added confidentially, “next time you take some copy out to Nellie, just lean down over that big buzoom of hers and say, ‘Okay, Nellie, it’s all right, forget it now, nobody’s going to make a monkey out of me.’ That’s all. No more than that. She’ll know.”

Suddenly an idea struck him, an absolute inspiration, fantastic, dangerous—but it would work! He was so excited that he was afraid his agitation would communicate itself to Bert. He tried to relax, to wait for the exact moment when he felt calm enough, and completely sure of himself, to pull off the stunt successfully. He thought it all out carefully. Oh wonderful! There was not a flaw in it, except the one possible flaw of not being able to get back fast enough. But he would hurry as he had never hurried in his life. And odd it was, he thought, that he who in all his fifteen years had never so much as skipped school, now planned in the next few minutes to break the law without a qualm.

“Nellie doesn’t care what they do,” Bert was saying. “That’s their business. Marvin’s over twenty-one. If he wants to get himself in a mess, that’s his lookout. As for Arlene—well, it don’t matter about her any more. The way Nellie put it, they’re old enough to take care of theirselves. You ain’t. And nobody likes to see anybody being used. Uh-uh. That ain’t nice.”

Don got up. His heart was beating fast, but outwardly he knew that he was the soul of calm. He said, “Excuse me a moment, will you?”

“Where you going?”

“To the throne room.”

“You ain’t afraid? Pretty dark back there, you know.”

He crossed the office and started through the shop.

He had got only as far as the linotype when he heard Bert yell after him:

“Hey—Shakespeare!”

He came part way back and called out, “Yes?”

“Don’t go away and leave it running!”

He turned and went on again. Reaching the pressroom he broke into a run.

The door to the back alley was fastened by a wooden bolt. He lifted the bolt noiselessly, set it carefully on the floor, and pulled against the door. It swung inward with a low creak. He stepped out into the dark.

He looked both ways. A single light bulb glowed from a pole in back of Arnold’s bakery. He listened. There wasn’t a sound. Then, moving forward into the dirt path, he turned and sped down the alley toward Harrison Street.

He stopped just before the corner. There, on the dark side wall of Phillips Dry Goods Store that flanked the alley, he found what he was looking for. He reached up, felt around for the little iron hammer, then smashed the glass and yanked the lever down hard. As he raced back, he could still hear some of the falling glass. It had made an oddly musical sound in the dark stillness.

He paused by the linotype to catch his breath and calm down, then walked casually back into the office.

Just as he sat down again beside Bert, there it came: swelling over the roof of the Kandy Kitchen, flooding into the street, filling the night with its incredible soaring wail.

Bert’s feet came down with a thump on the floor and he slapped the arms of his chair. “Hey—fire!” He sprang up. Before Don could get to his feet, Bert was out of the door.

Don moved over to the bookkeeping desk, drew out the cash drawer and laid the purse on top, pulled off the overhead light, opened the door, felt to see if the lock was on, then closed the door behind him.…

As always, on Saturday, he was the first of the three to arrive in the morning. Through the partition that separated the office from the shop, he waved casually to Bert and Nellie. Nellie returned the greeting with a sullen stare, her eyebrows pulled down, her lower jaw thrust out. Several galley proofs had been placed on his desk. He sat down, reached for a pencil, and began to read.

Arlene arrived at eight-thirty. “Hi!” she called from the open door. As she came around the bookkeeping desk her good-morning smile was brilliant, her eyes quivered and flickered as if she were walking into a stiff breeze.

“Hello,” he said.

She sat down opposite him, clasped her hands in front of her, and beamed. She wore a pearl-gray bonnet with two long silk ribbons that fell down the back. She opened her pink purse and got out her powder puff.

Unaccountably, he was acutely embarrassed. “Aren’t you going to take your hat off?” he asked, for something to say.

“No, I think not,” she sang. “I read in Everybody’s that ladies in business never take their hats off, only stenographers. Did you know that?”

“No. I guess I didn’t.”

“Now come on, Donnie,” she said, leaning eagerly forward, “shoot. What did you do last night? Who did you see? What did they say? What did you say? Don’t leave anything out. You know, one of those wonderful conversations we have? I want to know absolutely everything. Start way at the beginning with Hello-hello and I-said and he-said, and then go on from there.”

“Why, I—didn’t do anything.”

“You didn’t go to the game?” Her black eyebrows seesawed, her eyes fairly flew out of her head.

“No.”

“But why not, for heaven’s sake?”

“Oh I don’t know, I didn’t feel like it.”

“What did you do? Stay home?”

“No, I—” He found it very difficult. Abruptly, almost in exasperation, he added, “Well, I just didn’t do anything.”

“I know,” she said. “You went to the fire.”

“Was there a fire?”

“Well that’s the funny part of it, because as a matter of fact there wasn’t. It was a false alarm, imagine. It happened just after the game was over, so everybody thinks that some youngsters did it on their way home, for a lark or something. They say the police are hopping mad. Anyway it was awfully funny. I heard all about it at the cafeteria just now. Want to know anything more?”

“Gee, Arlene, I ought to get these proofs back to Nellie.”

“Oh, pooh! Aren’t I more important to you than Nellie?” She winked. “Aren’t I?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “Cat got your tongue? Get out of the wrong side of the bed? What’s the matter with you this morning, Donnie?”

He had begun to wonder what was the matter, too. He had never felt so strange in his life. He tried to think, to find something to say, and to his increasing irritation all he could think of—all he had been able to think of, distastefully, ever since Arlene came in, so much so that he couldn’t get the image out of his mind—were the white piles of newsprint in the pressroom below.

“All right for you,” she said, and flounced out of her chair. “If you don’t want to play, then you can just go pound sand.” She moved to the high desk, took out a ledger, and opened it. She turned and smiled at him over her shoulder, the black eyes blinking like the shutters of a camera. “But remember,” she caroled, “if you forget and want to talk to me, I won’t play either. So there!”

He pored over the proofs. “I’m not mad,” he said, without looking up. “I’m just busy.”

“No excuse,” she cried, and turned back to the ledger.

He wished it were quitting time. He wished it were Sunday so he could be home. He wished the telephone would ring and it would be Ruth saying Marvin wouldn’t be in today, he had had to go out of town or something. Arlene alone, or Marvin, he guessed he could manage that, all right; but the two of them together—he didn’t want to be around for that at all.

A moment later, she sang out, “Come on—here he comes!”

He didn’t move. Arlene turned again. “Don! Aren’t you coming? Be mad at me all you like, I don’t care, but you certainly can’t be mad at Marvin! Now come on, you old sulk.”

In a kind of daze, Don got up and went to the high desk. She linked her arm in his. He gazed into the street and said, “Please, I wish you’d cut out this mad stuff. I guess I have a headache.”

“Oh, I was only joshing you,” she said, and nudged him. “Anyway we’re buddies again.” She squeezed his arm. “Aren’t we?”

Marvin was just stepping from his car in front of the Kandy Kitchen. He tipped his hat gallantly to some girl passing along the sidewalk, then turned and started toward the office. He wore a handsome tan topcoat of camel’s hair and a tweed suit almost white; the brim of his pearl-gray Western hat was turned up in front, down in back. He moved forward as if on a dance floor, but alone rather than with a partner; as if dancing before an enormous mirror. His head was turned to the right, and in the mirror he saw that it was good. Reaching the curb, he looked up; an expression of delighted surprise came over his face before it broke into a charming, warming smile.

“Isn’t he just—just—” She broke off and shook her head in quick little movements, to indicate that it was too much for her.

The door opened. “Hello, kiddies!” He brought with him an aroma of lilac, so strong that Don’s nostrils tingled with the scent.

“We’ve been admiring you, I hope you don’t mind,” Arlene said, her voice liquid and rippling. “This is always the best moment of our day, watching you arrive. Isn’t it, Don?”

“Oh, I bet you say that to all the boys.” Marvin hung up his topcoat and hat. “You missed a fine game last night, Don. A fine game.”

“Imagine, Marvin, he stayed home!”

Marvin turned to her. “And what did you do with yourself, missy?”

“Oh, I had the loveliest evening! Well first, I made myself just a bite to eat, not even a snack hardly, then after supper I filled a thermos with delicious chicken broth, oh just scalding hot, put my embroidery in my knitting bag, and went up to pay a call on poor Mrs. Burton. She’s been bedridden for a week with yellow jaundice—better see if we’ve got a personal on that, Don. But I did the awfullest thing, Marvin, and I’ve been just kicking myself for it ever since. It was such a nice evening that I thought I’d walk for a change. Well, I did. And you know that hill!”

Marvin winked at Don. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. My, my, my. She walked.”

“Well, I don’t care, Marvin Tyndall, that hill is no picnic when you aren’t used to it! And it’s just as bad coming down. The backs of my legs were just as sore as sore, all night. They still are.”

“Hmmm! Let’s see,” and he raised his eyebrows in mock lechery.

“Marvin!” Her shimmering eyes threw Don a look all fluttery with shock. “Isn’t he terrible?”

The thing to do was work, work; it was the only way out. In the weeks to come he hoped he would have more and more work, plenty of it, and still more, and harder. Right now he could get going on that piece about the new funeral parlor; with all that stuff they had given him, it could just about occupy him until noon. He went back to his desk to start. He took off his jacket and hung it over the back of his chair; and as he did so, he saw the notes for his poem sticking from his inside pocket. He took the notes out and sat down.

I’m darned glad I never got to finish that one, he said to himself as he tore them up. I’d hate to have to read it over this morning. I’d feel like an awful fool if I did.

What puzzled and grieved him most was not them, not them at all, it had nothing to do with them; it was him alone. Bitterly, with a passion of disappointment, he realized what he was thinking and the way he was thinking. He could hardly bear to admit it to himself, but in all honesty he had to. His was no better than the smallest mind in town. He had fallen into line.

Rachel’s Summer

My sister Rachel was dead at sixteen. It was a tremendous event in Arcadia, and in our family too, of course, and though it all happened more than thirty years ago, now, I believe I could remember, and set down, everything that was said or done in our house during those three days between her death and the funeral. I can even remember the conversations; and who was there, of all our relatives and neighbors; and what people wore and how they behaved—during every hour from Sunday afternoon, when the thing happened, till the funeral was over on Wednesday. I well knew that we had all been thrown into the limelight, as it were, by Rachel’s death, and that we were the talk of the town. Consequently when I spoke I was careful to speak with effect and act as people expected me to act, with the proper amount of drama, so that nobody would be disappointed. That is probably why I remember everything so clearly. I was so busy thinking about myself and the impression I made that I didn’t have much time to think of Rachel.

It had happened on Sunday, late in October—one of those amazing warm and lovely days that return suddenly, just before winter, to tell us of the end of summer long after summer is ended. In those days people drove out in their cars on Sunday, inviting friends or neighbors for a drive into the country, or to call on someone in the next town. Rachel had been asked to go riding by the Gove family, Wilson Gove and his father and mother; and about three o’clock they drove away, Mr. and Mrs. Gove in the front seat, Rachel and Wilson in back. An hour later, returning to town from nearby Palmyra, the car overturned coming down the East Palmyra hill and Rachel was thrown out and killed.

It was a tragedy in the town for many reasons, and I was old enough to know most of them. Rachel was the only daughter in a family of three boys. She was young, of course, and very beautiful: people used to stop Mother on the street and tell her how beautiful Rachel was getting to be, and Mr. Brittain the minister would say Rachel was going to be a beautiful woman “almost any day now,” wagging his finger at Mother in playful warning; and I myself remember how sometimes I would look at her across the supper table and suddenly think that Rachel—my own sister that I quarreled with so much—was the most vivid and alive creature I had ever seen. And another reason was that my father had left home that year, and his absence made my sister’s death a greater tragedy for my mother. The day after Rachel died—that wonderful Indian-summer Sunday—winter descended at once, with a heavy snowfall in the night, so that we looked out in the morning to white lawns and streets, and the sidewalks had to be shoveled, and kids got out their sleds, and chains had to be put on the cars that drove us over Asylum Hill and down to the cemetery that freezing Wednesday afternoon. Mother said it seemed only fitting and proper that winter should come now: summer was indeed over.

The night before Rachel was buried we were taken in for one last look at her, as Mother didn’t want us to be around downstairs on the day of the funeral, when the house was filled with inquisitive neighbors and townspeople and all the hundreds of school children who filed in and out of the front room for an hour and a half before the service. We stood around the open coffin, Mother and we three boys and our father, who had come home for a few days just to make things look right, and I remember Mother didn’t cry or make a sound as we stood there. The room was heavy with the smell of floral pieces, almost sickish with it. I looked at Rachel, lying so still and beautiful in her white dress with the yellow flowers in it, and all I could think of was Elaine or Juliet, and I wanted to say something about them. A quotation sprang into my mind and I had to hang onto myself to keep from saying it:

“Death lies on her like an untimely frost,

Upon the sweetest flower of all the field”

—which is exactly the way it was, but for once I had enough sense to keep my mouth shut. After a while Mother said, “And now you’d better go to bed, boys. Grandma’ll get you something to eat if you want it.” We left the room in silence, acutely uncomfortable because our father had begun to weep.

The next night, the funeral over, we were having supper in the dining room. There was a neighbor there by the name of Mrs. Kirtle, and our grandmother, Father, the three of us boys, and Mother. Mrs. Kirtle had been very busy the past two days doing things for us, running in with hot dishes, ordering this and that for the house, telling callers how wonderfully Mother was bearing up, and taking charge generally. She was a very active woman in the town, and was president of the Garden Club and also of the Shakespeare Club. People said she had sung in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in her youth, and there was a picture of her on her parlor wall dressed in a Japanese kimono, with a fan, and paper chrysanthemums behind her ears. It didn’t look like her now, but those small beady eyes peeping over the fan were Mrs. Kirtle’s all right.

I was looking at a pin Mother was wearing on her black silk blouse, and Mother must have thought I was looking at the blouse because she said, “Don’t worry, son. I won’t be wearing black after today.” She turned to my grandmother and said, “The boys don’t like me in black—” and then she began to cry, the first we had seen her cry since Sunday.

My father got up from the table and came around to Mother and put his hand on her shoulder, saying, “That’s right, Ellen, let yourself go. It’s just what you need.”

“Yes, it will be good for you,” my grandmother said. “Don’t mind the boys.”

Mother sobbed on and on, shaking her head from side to side, her fingers held to her temples. Tears fell to the tablecloth and Mrs. Kirtle got up and pressed a handkerchief into Mother’s hand. The sobbing continued for it must have been three or four minutes, when Mrs. Kirtle said the thing that made Mother stop crying.

“Think how good it was of God,” Mrs. Kirtle said, “to keep Rachel home with you all summer. You must comfort yourself with that, Ellen.”

We knew what Mrs. Kirtle meant. Every year since Rachel was a little girl she had spent the summer at Grandmother’s farm in the Catskills—every summer, from the middle of June, till school opened in September. But this year, for some reason that we boys didn’t know, Rachel stayed home. Mother had planned to let her go, the same as usual, and all during the spring Rachel had talked about it and looked forward to her summer at Grandmother’s farm. Then, the last of June, just a few days before she was to leave, Mother changed her mind, saying that Rachel would have to stay home for the summer the same as the rest of us. I remember we didn’t think much about it at the time; but I remember, too, that Rachel was hopping mad, at first, and cried a lot when she couldn’t go, and cried often that summer too. It seemed that she changed, then, and became a little older and more grown-up—she acted sort of aloof and thoughtful all the time, and wouldn’t play with us the way she used to, or go for hikes into the country with us, as we had been doing since we were little kids—those wonderful hikes that she had always loved before. Or maybe she didn’t really change at all and I only say this because of what I know now. I don’t know. I only know that though she didn’t go away that summer, and so could have gone on more hikes with us than ever, she never went on another hike again. Anyway, when Mrs. Kirtle said that, about God keeping Rachel home with Mother, we knew what she meant, and it did seem right, too. It seemed God must have known what was going to happen and so kept Rachel home for what was to be her last summer. It even made me feel kind of good when I thought of this; you could feel almost happy about it, if you wanted to, and it wouldn’t be wrong, either.

Mother put her hands down from her head and sat straight up. There was no sob or weeping in her voice now. “It wasn’t God who kept Rachel home this summer,” she said. “You know that as well as I do, Doris Kirtle.”

“Why, Ellen, don’t misunder—You know what I mean,” Mrs. Kirtle said. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

I knew the rest of that. His wonders to perform, it went, because I had heard Mr. Brittain say it during the funeral service and I thought it the most wonderful thing I had ever heard.

“Rachel’s summer—Rachel’s summer,” Mother went on. “That’s all I’ve been able to think of since it happened. That’s the whole—”

“Now now, Ellen,” interrupted my father. “You mustn’t think of it.”

“My darling Rachel, and that terrible terrible summer,” my mother cried. “If God had had his way, Rachel wouldn’t have stayed home. Oh, why didn’t I let her go?”

My grandmother got up from the table. “Come on, boys,” she said. “I think we’d better go upstairs, don’t you? Your mother’s tired out.”

Mother reached up and took Grandmother’s arm. “Wait a minute, Mama, I want to say something.” She looked at us—for quite a while, it seemed—and then she said, “Listen, boys. Your sister was a wonderful girl. Do you hear?” She nodded, as if answering herself. “A wonderful girl. I want you to remember that.”

It was a dreadfully solemn moment, I don’t know why. My knees were shaking, and then my little brother, who was ten, began to cry.

“Don’t cry, son,” Mother said. “I only want to tell you—and you to know—what a wonderful girl Rachel was. You must be proud that you had such a sister.”

“Never mind, Ellen,” my father said. “Look, you’re scaring them.”

“No I’m not—am I, boys. And some day, when you’re older, I want to tell you something about Rachel, something you should know. You’re not old enough now, but some day you’ll know what a wonderful sister you had.”

My grandmother patted Mother’s shoulder. “Yes, dear,” she said. “They know now, don’t you, boys—but look, it’s past our bedtime. Come, I’ll go up with you.”

We went up to bed; and for an hour thereafter, and maybe longer, I lay in my bed in the dark thinking of what Mother had said. I knew all about this I’ll-tell-you-when-you’re-older. It was Mother’s invariable answer to questions that were embarrassing or that she didn’t know the answer to. I had heard it ever since I was old enough to ask questions, and now I didn’t pay any attention to it any more. When Mother would say, “I’ll tell you when you’re older,” I knew she was putting me off and also that it didn’t matter: sooner or later I’d find out for myself. Like the question about babies. For some years I had asked where babies came from (Mother has told me that I asked earlier, and more often, than any of the other boys) and she would answer, “You’re too young. I’ll tell you when you’re old enough to know.” Maybe it was wrong of her not to tell me, but at least she didn’t give me those silly answers about storks and things, that other boys’ mothers gave them. I was answered, and I guess it was as good a way as any.

So now, when she said this about Rachel, I didn’t think of it much, believing it was just another one of those things that I’d discover for myself before Mother got around to it. I didn’t even think of it at all. Instead, I lay thinking of something else that Mother had said: “Your sister was a wonderful girl. I want you to remember that.”

I’d remember it, all right. I’d never forget it. I was well aware of Rachel’s distinction, both in the town in general and in our own house. She was easily the outstanding member of the family, everybody noticed her all the time, everywhere; and I remember my mother used to say that she got tired of being known simply as “Rachel’s mother” when people stopped her on the street and said, “You’re Rachel’s mother, aren’t you,” and then went on to tell her how proud she must be to be the mother of such a wonderful girl. She was wonderful, but I knew many reasons why she was wonderful that my mother didn’t know at all.

I knew that downtown when boys whistled at her, boys from the other side of the canal, Rachel didn’t get cross or blush or look away or stick up her nose and refuse to notice, the way other girls did. Instead, Rachel would look up and see who had whistled, and smile right back, and even wave. They thought this was swell, and I did too.… I knew that when all we kids went on a hike into the country, even though there were boys in the bunch, and some of us almost as old as she was, Rachel was the one who would be the first to go into a field where there was a cow that might be a bull. We’d all stand on the outside of the fence, looking into the field, but Rachel would climb right over, the first thing, and go right up to the cow and pat it or hand it some grass, and then when we saw that it was all right, we’d climb over too. I don’t know whether or not she always knew, but anyway she wasn’t afraid.

I knew, and remembered (would I ever forget it—ever?), something else about Rachel that nobody knew but myself, no, not even Rachel, though she might have suspected. One night—it must have been about four years before, when Rachel was twelve and I was nine—we kids were all in the playroom on the floor, cutting out things, drawing with colored crayons, working busily at this and that, it didn’t matter what—stalling, of course—in the hope that our bedtime would be overlooked and we could stay up longer. Then my father appeared in the door and said, “Come on, time for bed.” He looked in. “Lord, what a mess. I’ll give you just five minutes. If it isn’t cleaned up by then, absolutely every scrap of paper picked up and put away or thrown away—well, maybe then I’ll help you finish the job. But hurry now, get started on it.” When he had gone I got an idea, I’ll never know where it came from or why. I guess I just wanted to start something and then see what would happen—ignite the fuse and see the explosion, out of nothing more than that thoughtless but scheming curiosity and experimentation of children. Rachel had a very fancy way of writing, at that time, an affectation she may have picked up from the handwriting of some other girl at school; it was full of little twists and curlicues, her t’s were crossed with a winding streamer like a tiny banner, the i’s were dotted with little circles instead of dots, and inside the body of the script letter “s” she carefully drew a tiny spring-like coil or curl. I imitated these mannerisms exactly, now, as I wrote the word “shit” on a small piece of paper. Nobody saw me do it. Then I sort of slid the paper among the other scraps on the floor, and waited. In a couple of minutes my father came back. “Well, you didn’t get very far, did you?” He squatted down on the floor with us and then, amid all that mess, began to help us clean up. Suddenly he held up the piece of paper and said, his voice cold as ice, chilling the four of us through and through, “Who wrote that? Who did this nasty thing?” But he did not look at me or my brothers as he said this, he looked at Rachel. Nobody said a word. Rachel looked back at Father, baffled but unflinching. “That’s your handwriting, isn’t it?” he said. She did not answer. “Isn’t that one of those fancy esses of yours? And that tee? Isn’t that the way you write them? Isn’t it?” For a moment Rachel looked as if she wanted to look at us, study our faces, look from one to the other of us; but after only a second’s pause she said, “Yes.” Father stood up. He was a figure of wrath. “Very well, young lady. Come with me. This minute.” Rachel didn’t even glance at us once as she slowly got to her feet and followed him out of the room. And I—it is hard to admit it now, but I—I was thrilled to the core because of the success of the trick and the sense of power it had given me, and because Rachel had taken it all on herself and had not given anyone away. If for that alone, I knew I would never forget Rachel to my dying day.…

And then there was another thing I knew that Mother didn’t know, and I was glad she didn’t. Rachel told an outright lie once and all of us knew that it was a lie but Mother, who wasn’t sure. That was when Rachel was about thirteen, maybe fourteen. Mother thought maybe it was a lie but she didn’t have any proof, and so she asked Rachel if she would swear on the Bible that she was telling the truth. Rachel said yes she would! Mother said, “All right then, bring me the Bible.” We kids were all scared to death—all of us, that is, but Rachel. She walked right into the dining room and got the Bible from the lower shelf of Mother’s reed sewing stand and brought it to Mother. Mother asked Rachel if she knew the seriousness of what she was doing and Rachel said yes. Mother took the Bible and placed it in her lap. Then she said, “Now Rachel, put your hand on this Bible and swear that you’re telling me the truth.” I almost didn’t dare look, but I had to. Rachel put her hand right on the Bible, looked Mother squarely in the eye, and said, “I swear.” There was a terrible silence. I think Mother was scared too. She looked it. Or maybe not scared, but something like it—worried, puzzled, or exasperated. “You swear what?” she said. “I swear I’m telling the truth,” said Rachel. Mother looked back at Rachel for a minute and then she sighed, probably glad that it was over. We were. Then she said, “All right, you can put it back now.” Rachel took the Bible from Mother’s lap and walked back to the dining room with it, looking just as she had before. There had been no lightning or thunder or anything, and she hadn’t changed a bit.

These are the things I was thinking of as I lay in bed that night after the funeral. But only for a little while, because then I remembered that tomorrow I was going back to school and I was glad. I looked forward to that, seeing all the kids and having them see me. I was a hero, kind of, and they would all pay a lot of attention to me. I mean there had been a death in the family and everybody knew it; and all the school kids, and the teachers too, would want to look at me and watch me and see how I acted. Only the day before, when I was returning some dishes to Mrs. Kirtle’s house, I met one of the kids who lived up the street and he stopped and wanted to talk with me. He stood there on the sidewalk looking at me in a funny way, and then he said, “I saw something on your front door when I came home from school yesterday.” I knew he meant the funeral wreath but I pretended not to know. There was a kind of gleam in his eye, and he was almost grinning. “It’s still there,” he said. I didn’t say anything and he kept on staring, peering at me closely as if he expected me to do something. I turned and walked on. “I guess it won’t be there tomorrow,” he called after me, as I went into Mrs. Kirtle’s house.

We pretended the next day that we didn’t want to go back to school. Mother said it was customary for children to stay home a week when there had been a death in the family, and we could have, too, and it would have been all right with our teachers, but she said we must return to school the day after the funeral because she wanted us all to get back to normal as soon as possible, just as if nothing had happened. So we did go back. But it wasn’t as if nothing had happened, of course.

One morning about a week later the teacher called me up to her desk and asked if I didn’t want to look at a certain book she had, with beautiful colored pictures in it. I said yes and thank you and started to take it back to my seat. She said, “No, sit here and look at it, at my desk”; and because it was an honor to sit at the teacher’s desk I sat down feeling proud and began to look at the pictures, all the while thinking this was just part of her being extra nice to me, as she had been all week, ever since I came back. Then I began to realize that something was happening in the room. The kids were all completely still, there wasn’t even any whispering, and out of the corner of my eye I saw something was being passed from seat to seat, up one row and down another. “See, isn’t this a nice one,” the teacher said, leaning over my shoulder and pointing to one of the pictures. I looked at it, wondering what was happening in the room, what was going on. And then, somehow, I knew. It was the card-of-thanks that Mother had had printed and mailed to all the people who’d sent flowers when Rachel died, and of course one had been sent to each class in school. Now it was being passed around the room for the kids to read. I knew then why everyone was so solemn and quiet, and why each one of them looked up at me as he finished reading the card and passed it on to the next one. I pretended I didn’t know, though, and after a minute I turned away from the book as if I had lost interest in it and while they watched, gazed out of the window, staring into the sky with a sad faraway look till the business of passing the card was finished and the teacher said it was now time to take up geography.

This was the sort of thing that happened often after the funeral, a lot of things like that the first few months, and longer, even, so that for years afterward we were always kind of conspicuous because of Rachel’s death, and treated with special kindness by people, or special attention. Most of all we were noticed by Mr. Brittain, our minister, who always stopped us kids in the street whenever we met him and wanted to talk with us. He would stand there for some time, holding our hands and asking how Mother was and how we were, though he had seen us only a few days before at Sunday school and saw us regularly every week there. This was the more odd because Mother, for some strange reason, had given up going to church after Rachel died, and never went again. I thought it was maybe because seeing Mr. Brittain up in the pulpit reminded her too much of the funeral and Rachel; and I thought so all the more when one afternoon, some months later, Mr. Brittain called at our house, and Mother asked me to answer the door and tell him she wasn’t home. She didn’t want to see him again, and as far as I know she never did. At least she didn’t go to church any more and after a couple more tries he never called on Mother again.

All this is so long ago that it seems something I have heard about rather than lived through. When I go home now it is hard to tell whether I really remember these things or whether I just know about them from Mother. It is still the same town in many ways, and in others it is different; but when I go home I am only conscious of the town as it used to be when I lived there, and of the things that happened then. Mr. Brittain isn’t there any more but Mrs. Kirtle is—still living up the street, still as busy as ever: a little old white-haired lady running around the neighborhood doing things for people, managing the affairs of sick ones, and taking charge generally as she always did. And down below Asylum Hill is the cemetery where Rachel lies buried: a lovely spot, grown up now with rosebushes and shrubbery, quite different from the time when we first bought the lot in what was then called the “new part” of the cemetery, and Mother used to mind it so much because the “new part” was all barren and unplanted and very forsaken-looking compared to the “old part.”

The last time I was home I was going through an old desk drawer, looking at papers and photographs I had long since forgotten, when I came upon something that made me laugh with delight. It was a note, on ruled paper, written in a childish but plain hand—a note my sister had written to someone in school and which had been passed back to her, with an answer. What delighted me was the postscript that Rachel had added. It read: “Have you heard that Kathleen McMahon is in a fix. You know what I mean.”

My mother was sitting near me, sewing, and when I laughed she said, “What have you found now?”

I said, “It’s a note Rachel wrote to somebody. Listen,” and I read it aloud.

I saw Mother smile, but she said, “What’s so funny about that?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “It just seems funny after all these years. I didn’t have any idea that Rachel would know—” I stopped, not knowing how to explain what I meant, and added, “She was a wise kid, wasn’t she.”

After a moment Mother said, “Yes, she was.”

I was pleased, somehow, with the whole thing. I liked the idea of knowing that Rachel was—well, sophisticated. It made her kind of a contemporary, less a girl who had been dead more than thirty years—and it made me know her and understand her better too, in a way that I couldn’t have known her when she was alive at sixteen and I was three years younger. “If Rachel had lived,” I said, “she’d probably have married in a year or two and be the mother of twenty kids by now.”

“Probably,” Mother said.

“Either that, or been married and divorced ten times over.”

“What makes you say that?” Mother asked.

“Nothing, except that’s the kind of person she was, or would have become. She was so full of life—so ready for life, wasn’t she. Just waiting for it.”

Mother said nothing. I folded the note and stuck it back in the drawer. “It seems such a pity that that wonderful vitality, that wonderful talent for life, couldn’t have been used, somehow. Because that’s what it was, a real talent,” I said. “Gosh, God doesn’t order things very well, does he, when he permits such waste.”

Mother went on sewing for a while and then, without looking up, she said, “Are you asking me something?”

I didn’t know what she meant and I said so.

“Are you trying to find out something, son? Have you ever heard anything?”

“Mother,” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Well, then,” Mother said, “I’ll tell you.”

I was so surprised by all this that I was uncomfortable. I felt as though I had intruded in some way. I knew I had stumbled upon something I had no right to know, and I wished I hadn’t. But there was no going back now. Mother wanted to tell me, and I passionately wanted to know, even though I honestly wished it hadn’t happened.

Mother told all that she had to say in a quiet voice, unemotional, unmoved by the story—not so much telling it, it seemed, as merely reminiscing out loud. She went on with her sewing, and only stopped her recital when she laid aside a piece of work to pick up another, or when I, occasionally, interrupted her.

“Do you remember when Rachel died,” she said, “I told you boys there was something I would tell you some day, something about Rachel, something you all should know?”

I remembered now. I remembered the supper after the funeral, and Mrs. Kirtle there, and the black silk blouse of my mother, and her saying this. I remembered how solemn and scared we were and how my brother began to cry when Mother said we were too young to know, now, what a wonderful sister we had, but some day—My poor funny mother! At thirty-some, I was, apparently, at last old enough.

“Rachel didn’t go to your grandmother’s that summer before she died,” Mother said, “and I think I should tell you why. Do you remember that she didn’t go, and that she had always gone before, every summer? But maybe you don’t. That’s a long time ago.”

“I remember,” I said.

“She was going to go, the same as always,” Mother said, “but a few days before she was to leave, something happened. I’ll tell you as plain as I can, though it may be difficult.”

“Don’t, Mother, unless you really want to,” I said. “It doesn’t make a bit of difference.”

Mother paid no attention to this but went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “You children had gone off into the country for the day, on one of your hikes, you boys and Rachel and I think the two O’Connell children and the Lincoln girl. Yes, I know that Helen Lincoln was along too. After you had gone, I lit the gas under the heater to take a bath, rather glad to have the house to myself for the day, and just as I was going to get into the tub, the phone rang. It was Mrs. Kirtle. She asked if I was alone and I said yes. She said she wanted to come right over, she had something to tell me. I told her why didn’t she wait till later, as I was going to take a bath now, but she said no, she had to come right away, it was very important. So she came.”

I could see Mrs. Kirtle hurrying over from her house, I could even hear her high little voice on the phone; but more than that, I saw all of us kids on our hike and I remembered the very day: the hot dry road over Asylum Hill and down past the cemetery to the brook, and how we left the road there, and followed the brook through the fields to our favorite place up farther where it was deep enough to swim.

“Mrs. Kirtle told me her news right off, without preliminaries,” Mother went on. “Rachel was in trouble—she said it just like that. It came so sudden that I couldn’t believe it at first or take it seriously, because Mrs. Kirtle was so excited about it. I said how can you possibly know any such thing, and she said that Mr. Brittain had told her about it and had asked her to tell me—I ought to know about it, he had said. I began to understand, then, what she was saying—the seriousness of it, I mean—and asked her to tell me the whole story. I can’t tell you how thankful I was that you children were away at the time. It’s funny, but it seemed I couldn’t wait for Rachel to come back, I would die of anxiety—and yet I dreaded it too. I knew that when I spoke to Rachel, or even looked into her eyes, I would know. But you children were away on your hike, and I had to wait.”

I listened to the story and it didn’t seem real. Much more real was the brook and the big willow tree and the enormous snake we saw there, so big that it seemed we must be in Africa, and Rachel said that we were.

“Mrs. Kirtle had heard the story at the Ladies’ Aid,” Mother said. “During their meeting the day before, Mr. Brittain came in and told a couple of the ladies about it, saying that somebody ought to tell Rachel’s mother. He asked which one of them knew me the best, and Mrs. Kirtle said she guessed she did. That’s how she came to me. I never did know who told Mr. Brittain, or how the story got started in the first place. When I went to him about it that week, he wouldn’t tell me, though I begged him to, and begged him many times that summer. After Rachel was dead, he did come to see me, but it was too late then and I wouldn’t talk to him.”

Mother was looking down at her sewing, she didn’t once look at me during the whole story, and my heart jumped with pity as I recalled that day and knew how it was with her. And all that while, we kids were off at the brook, moving in single file along the bank to our swimming place, a mile or more from the road.

“About four o’clock or half-past, you children came down the street,” Mother said. “I was sitting in the porch swing, I hadn’t been able to do anything all day, and I was never so glad to see anybody, never in my life, as I was to see you children.”

“Mother, I remember,” I said, and I did. I remembered exactly, and could see Mother sitting there now, watching for us through the vines.

“Rachel had a big armful of wild iris,” Mother said. “Flags, you children called them—white ones and blue ones—and she said she was mad at you boys because you wouldn’t bring some home too. I could have had the whole field of them, she said, if you had only helped her.”

“I remember, we wouldn’t,” I said, “I don’t know why.”

“Rachel was beautiful that day, son,” Mother said. “She was only fifteen then, but really she had begun to look like a woman, almost. Maybe she only seemed more beautiful because of the terrible day and what I had to tell her. You’ll know what it’s like when your own children begin to grow up.”

The old phrase—how many times I had heard it, and with what impatience each time. But it was right, it was true, and I was ashamed of my amused tolerance of my mother on many occasions before. “What did you do?” I said, to cover my embarrassment. “How did you tell her?”

“I simply told her,” Mother said. “We went upstairs to her bedroom and I asked her to sit down. We sat beside each other on the bed. Rachel saw that my eyes were red from weeping and suddenly she threw her arms about me and said, ‘Who’s been making my mother cry!’ Then I told her what Mrs. Kirtle had said—what Mr. Brittain had said—but I didn’t tell her who said these things. I couldn’t, though it was the first thing she asked, the very first. ‘Who told you,’ she cried in a rage, ‘who said that!’ I wouldn’t tell her, I didn’t think I should.”

“Oh, Mother,” I said, “you should have, you should have.”

“Well, I didn’t,” Mother went on. “I never did, even to the end, though she kept on asking me all summer, almost every day. Anyway, then I said, ‘Rachel? is this true, are you in trouble,’ and she almost shouted. ‘No!’ she cried, and I told her she’d have to be more quiet on account of you boys, I didn’t want you other children to know anything was wrong. Rachel was very angry—you know what a spirited child she was—and kept saying, ‘I’ll kill those people, whoever they are, I’ll kill them!’ I tried to calm her, and said the only thing that was important was that I should know the truth. And then, between tears and outbursts of anger, Rachel told me the thing that made me know the story was not true. Do you know what it was?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know but I couldn’t ask, remembering Rachel too well, and remembering, too, the episode of the Bible.

“Rachel said, ‘Mother, it isn’t true, because listen. Today I couldn’t go in swimming. All the other kids went in, every one but me. I didn’t because I couldn’t. Ask the boys.’ ”

I could have cheered. It was true, I remembered it perfectly. Thank God for that old-fashioned idea, I thought, and good for Rachel that she knew it. It told Mother without a shade of doubt—and me too, now—that Rachel was telling the truth.

I remembered it all, and said so: how Rachel had sat on the bank waiting for us, while we kids splashed around in the stream, begging Rachel to come in and calling her a sissy for not doing so. I remembered, too, but didn’t tell Mother this, how Helen Lincoln didn’t have a bathing suit and went in with her white middy blouse and bloomers, and how her middy got all wet and showed the points of her nipples when she stood up. And I remembered how I tried not to look at her too much, and that I was glad that Rachel, who wore a middy blouse too, hadn’t gone in with us after all.

“Mother, for heaven’s sake,” I said. “Why didn’t you ask us? It was true, Rachel didn’t go in swimming, and we could have told you so!”

“I didn’t need to, son,” Mother said. “I believed her.” She sighed deeply, but went on with her sewing. “Of course the damage had been done,” she said. “It didn’t matter that Rachel was innocent; the story was around town and the only thing to do, then, was to keep Rachel home for the summer. I wanted to let her go to your grandmother’s, as we had planned, but I couldn’t. I wrote to your father, asking him what to do, and he wrote back to keep her home, not to let her go away once during the summer, not even for a weekend. And all during that long summer, her last summer, poor Rachel wasn’t allowed to go away once, not even in September when the Lincolns invited her to the lake for Labor Day weekend. She had to stay home with me the whole time, and almost every day she’d ask who had told me the story, and she’d swear that someday she’d know and that she’d kill whoever it was, or do something awful to them.”

“So she should have, too, if she’d known,” I said. “But Mother, why didn’t you let her go? How could you have cared so much what people said, especially when you knew better?”

“If she went away, people would believe the story,” Mother said. “She had gone away to have the baby. But if she stayed home—stayed home long enough—But son, you see—you see, she didn’t stay home long enough—”

“What do you mean?” I said. “She didn’t go away once.”

“I mean,” Mother said, “you see, Rachel never—No, she didn’t go away, but you see, she didn’t live long enough, either.”

I got up and walked to the window. I didn’t trust myself to speak, and I knew I would have to wait quite a while. I looked out the window at the street—this street I had played in, it seemed, all my life—and across the way was the house that always resounded to the thumping of a player piano, and next to it was the O’Connells’ house, and next to that was Mrs. Kirtle’s neat little home, kept neat and trim and painted for her by the son who now lived in New York, the same as I did. What drew us back to this town, anyway, and why did we ever come home? How had such a story ever got going? Who had started it, and why?

I looked at Mrs. Kirtle’s small frame house, and the Bartles’, and the O’Connells’, those native huts of our tribal society, and I began to understand, I think, why it happened, why it had to happen, perhaps. Parents of growing girls everywhere—but especially in those times, in towns like Arcadia—lived under a fear that their daughters would come to grief and the family to disgrace. Thus, periodically, as if by some mystic council, a girl was chosen for the sacrifice, and the pressure of parental anxiety was relieved in the neighborhood for another season or two. What could have been more natural than to choose Rachel, the gayest, the most promising, the loveliest of them all? …

“Mother,” I said finally, “I’m going out for a walk. I think I’ll go over to the Library and see what it’s like. Do you know, I’ve almost forgotten it. All I can remember is The Red Feathers that I must have taken out a million times. I know exactly where it is—I bet I could find it in the dark.…”

“All right, son,” Mother said. “But be back early, don’t stop in anywhere. I’ve got vegetable soup cooking.”

“I’ve been smelling it all day! But I won’t stop in anywhere,” I added. I smiled because I knew that if I did stop in at somebody’s house, and be late, Mother would begin calling up.

And then, just as I kissed her goodbye, Mother said, “Son, I want to ask you something before you go.” She looked up at me beseechingly. “Is it true,” she said, “that Rachel didn’t go in swimming that day? Tell me—do you really remember it, or are you just saying you do? I’ve got to know.…”

On my way to the Library, walking alone through the quiet streets, a phrase that Mother had used passed through my head. “Of course the damage had been done,” she had said. But the damage she spoke of then was only the beginning of it; Rachel was long since dead, but it had gone on and on. She knew that Rachel had told her the truth, knew it so well that she hadn’t needed to come to us when Rachel had said, “Ask the boys.” And she knew it still, knew it as well as I did (I who had been there and seen Rachel not go swimming), even though she had to ask at the end: “Tell me.… I’ve got to know.” She had believed Rachel, all right, and believed me; but after so many years of the neighborhood doubt, she had to be reassured again. After Rachel’s death, that death so badly timed, people had said—and of course these things had come back to Mother, as they always do at home—“You see? God in His infinite wisdom.…” And then there had been Mrs. Kirtle’s wonderful phrase, “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” but it no longer seemed to me so wonderful. Now Mother said she had to know. For that’s what Arcadia can do to you: make you doubt when you know otherwise. I had answered as best I could, with the proof that I knew. But it would do no good. To me the tragic thing was that, knowing, Mother still had to ask. The damage of more than thirty years was complete.

The Boy Who Ran Away

The French clock in the library had already chimed seven-thirty, but it was apparent that dinner was still a good hour away. Because of this, and because it was New Year’s Eve, the whole house was in a state of mild, pleasant turmoil. As usual, Henry and Janet Price were to go on later to the Milbanks’ annual party at their big place half a mile down the road—Janet’s flame-colored dress of raw silk, freshly pressed by Mrs. Linton, hung from a coat hanger on one of the light fixtures along the dining room wall, clashing with the pale colors of the scenic paper, and a carton of paper hats, horns and rattles lay open on the Chippendale lowboy beneath the representation of the horsecar, crowded with gay passengers inside and on top, driving along incongruously beneath the Natural Bridge. As a special treat the children were to be allowed to stay up for the first time and see the new year in, Mary because she was nearly twelve and thus old enough, Barbara because, though she was only eight, it wouldn’t be fair on a night like this to let Mary stay up and make Barbie go to bed alone. In celebration of the great event, the two girls were now improvising their own bar in a corner of the living room, with colored mixtures of ginger ale, grape juice and Kool-Aid which they called martinis and manhattans, to be raised in toast, clinked and downed as midnight approached.

In the white library, Henry and Janet Price sat on opposite sides of the desk playing gin rummy on the leather surface that gleamed like fine wood. Through the open door to the dining room Henry Price could see that his wife’s dress hadn’t yet been taken up to her room or the table set; it would be some time before Mrs. Linton announced dinner. His wife was wearing an old housecoat, but her hair had been set that afternoon at Arlette’s across the river and he could smell the banana-like smell of fresh nail enamel as her hands dealt or shuffled the cards. From time to time she reached for his highball, took a small sip, and set it back on the silver coaster. She wiped the tips of her fingers on her sleeve and gave her attention to the game again.

Mary walked in from the living room, followed by Barbie running.

“Papa,” Mary said, “what can we use to make old-fashioneds?”

“Look here, what are you trying to do—get plastered?”

Barbara said, “Isn’t that what New Year’s Eve is for?”

“Go on, beat it!” He made an exaggerated swipe in her direction and Barbie ran squealing from the library in delighted panic. The quieter Mary lingered temporarily behind.

“Is that what they really do tonight, get drunk?”

“Of course not,” her mother said.

“But of course!” He glanced up from the cards and, as always, a wave of affection went over him as he looked at his handsome daughter, so tall and so serious for her age. “Mary,” he said, “I’ll always love you for that literal mind of yours.”

She looked at him, puzzled. “What does that mean?”

“And you know something else?” he added, though he had told her this a dozen times during the past week. “I’ll always love you, too, for that marvelous Christmas present. It was marvelous. It couldn’t have been more right.”

“Thank you,” Mary said, pleased. “I knew you’d like it.”

“Yes you did, you knew it from the very beginning, and that was almost the nicest thing about it—that you did know. You’re your mother all over again. It was so like you, Mary dear.”

“I thought it was like you.”

“Exactly like me! I meant like you to have found, and chosen, just the right thing. Now go on back to your bartending before I burst into tears.”

She gave him a look of momentary alarm; then, seeing his smile, she blushed with pleasure and left the room.

The present from Mary had really been the high point of his Christmas, almost for the whole family, the more so because, though it had been enthusiastically heralded in advance, all that dangerous publicity had been justified. It had been talked about for weeks beforehand, but the exciting secret had been scrupulously kept by both Mary and her mother, and even, for a change, by the irrepressible Barbie, with whom the entrusting of a secret was ordinarily a sure guarantee of its being spread abroad throughout their small New Hampshire community. Almost daily, through December, Barbara had confided enviously, “You’re going to love what Mary got you, you’re just going to love it,” hoping that he would beg her to give him a hint; Mary had announced, all but smugly, “I’m so pleased with what I found for you, Papa”; and their mother had repeatedly told him, “Mary’s present is so absolutely perfect for you that it simply couldn’t be better, not even if you chose it yourself”—till he had worked up an actual worry about it, a fear that he would not be able to react with the proper appreciation. On Christmas Eve, when he and his wife were filling the stockings, he had said, “I’m scared to death about Mary’s present, after all this build-up. Talk about Anticlimax Department!” His wife had smiled and said, “You haven’t a thing to fear, not a thing.” And when the nerve-wracking moment finally came, they had all three been proved right: the present was nothing less than a triumph.

At this moment it rested, in its charming setting, on the Palladian mantel over the fireplace, and the sight of it still warmed his heart with pleasure; as it would continue to do, he knew, for years and years to come. It was set off to perfection by a small cardboard shadow box like a miniature theater. A gaudy proscenium decorated with gold and black scrolls ran up the sides and across the top; along the bottom were the tiny painted hoods of imaginary footlights; inside was the purple floor of a stage, with a purple backdrop; and on the stage, in simple grandeur, was the magnificent toy: the model of a motorcar of ancient vintage, complete with carriage lamps, rubber horn, ponderous rear axle, wagon-like springs beneath the high doorless seats, and a frozen-faced driver at the right-hand steering wheel in linen duster and goggles. Below the footlights was the printed legend, in type like that of an old theater handbill: Stanley Steamer 1909.

No matter how well he might be able to explain it, no one outside the family could possibly appreciate how appropriate was Mary’s gift, how it exactly represented the kind of thing he often loved to buy for himself. He wouldn’t dream of trying to tell the Milbanks, for instance, or any one of those awful people, his neighbors for ten years now, who would be at the party tonight. If he did, they would only think him slightly touched; balmy. But Mary knew, and had remembered, his fondness for models of vehicles out of the past—she had seen them often enough: the painted iron ice wagon on the mantel in his study; the miniature locomotive and cars of antique design, riding on high rails and thick ties, that ran along the outside edge of his long writing table; the black, white and red fire engine with galloping horses on the mantel in his bedroom; the replica of a covered wagon over the dining room fireplace. He did not know or care what was the attraction of these toys; it was enough that he enjoyed them, liked to have them around. True, he had seen that ice wagon a dozen times in his childhood, and on summer days, as it rumbled down the street, he had followed it for the length of the block to catch the dripping water in his cupped hands, try his strength on the hook of the scales that jounced and dangled at the rear, or beg a sliver of ice from Mr. Olsen the iceman; dozens of times he had heard and seen that fire engine come tearing around the corner, spouting smoke and flame, on its thunderous way to save the house or shop of some family in the poorer section; and when he was six years old—1909 was the very date—his formidable father, in just such a duster and goggles, had driven just such a jerking, gasping, mulish Stanley Steamer along Main Street for the first time, to the scorn or rapture, depending on their ages, of the collected onlookers. The covered wagon and the ancient locomotive were something else again; they went further back, to remoter times, but he knew them of old, and almost as lovingly, from pictures in his history book—the big and little wheels of the engine, disproportionate as the wheels of an old-fashioned velocipede, the cowcatcher like a snowplow made of fence pickets and the clumsy smokestack shaped like the urn of the coffee grinder in Mr. van Horn’s grocery store; and the low underslung frame of the much-tried wagon with its dusty canvas above, sagging between the arched hoops that supported it, open at each end so that one could look inside to what was surely the most snug, the coziest tent in the world, and a traveling tent at that. These models had been about the house since before the children were born, and now, thanks to Mary’s forethought, the collection had been enriched by the best, the very prize of them all. How many years, he wondered, would the Stanley Steamer remain there on the library mantel—and how many times, he reflected with a smile, would Mrs. Linton complain of having to dust it, as she complained of having to dust the delicate covered wagon and the locomotive with its fragile cars …

“What time shall we go to the Milbanks’?” his wife asked.

“Let’s go late. The later the better.”

“For instance.”

“Eleven. Eleven-thirty.”

“Oh, no!”

He heard the disappointment in her voice and examined his fan of cards with studied attention.

“Hank! That wouldn’t be at all nice—eleven-thirty!”

“Why not? Who would care?”

“Well, I’d care, for one!”

“Now look, Janet, I didn’t want to accept in the first place—you know that.”

“I certainly do. If it were left to you we’d never go anywhere.”

“Let me finish. And I thought if we went late, late enough to let them get thoroughly boiled first, I wouldn’t mind it so much.”

“And what’s so awful about it, if you don’t mind telling me?”

“I’ve told you a hundred times. I don’t like them any more than they like me, or each other, even. They only get together because it’s the holidays and they think they ought to. It couldn’t have less to do with friendship. We have nothing whatever in common. They make me self-conscious. I’m not at ease with them.”

“Who are you at ease with?”

“My family!”

“But Hank, that’s not enough for any man. We’ve got to see other people occasionally or we’ll just—rot. Who do we see any more? Only the Milbanks and a few others on New Year’s Eve. We scarcely even see George and Betty, my own sister, and they live right here on our own place. We gave up our life in New York because you got fed up with your advertising friends and beat a retreat to the country. Fortunately we were able to and if that was what you wanted, I was all for it. I love our house and it’s a lot better for the children. And many of those people we knew were dreadful, not good people at all. But these are simple people. There’s no reason on earth why you should feel ill at ease with them.”

“I’ll say they’re simple.”

“Now you’re acting like a ten-year-old.”

“If I had a dollar for every time you’ve said that, I’d be a very rich man.”

“I don’t think I could stand it if you were any richer,” she said. “You’d probably buy an island in the Arctic and we’d retire from life for good.”

“Haw!”

“Oh, cut it out, Hank. And please, let’s go early. Ten o’clock, anyway. For my sake, won’t you? That isn’t much to ask, is it? After all, New Year’s only comes once a year.”

“Is that any reason why I should spend a whole evening, and till two or three in the morning, with a bunch of hahnyaks?”

She threw down her hand; the cards slid across the leather surface of the desk and fell to the floor at his feet. “I hate that word. They’re grown-up people and they’re perfectly nice!”

“I said I’d go, didn’t I? Though I’ll be damned if I can see why you enjoy it so much.”

“I enjoy having a drink with some friends for a change, and getting together around the piano and singing. Go ahead, laugh.”

“I’m not laughing. There’s nothing exactly hilarious in ‘Down By The Old Mill Stream’ and ‘When You Wore a Tulip.’ ”

She looked at him coldly and said, “Gee, Hank, you’re mean.”

“I’m not mean!” he exploded. “Or if I am, that has nothing to do with it. The spectacle of aging couples getting together out of sheer desperation to make devilish whoopee like college kids thirty years ago is too depressing for words! I find it very hard to take—it makes me ashamed! If that’s belonging, then thank God I don’t! I can’t appreciate the finer points of all that joshing under the tired mistletoe, all those dirty jokes, those limericks, those near-dirty songs! And the bottom-pinching, the crying jags, the vomiting in the bathroom and over the rail of the back porch, Mrs. Preston kicking off her shoes and pulling up her dress—and the cracks about cleavage and plunging necklines till Jerry Dillon finally gets up enough courage to say ‘tit’ right out loud and feels better. Oh God!”

His wife got up and came around to his chair. She bent down and picked up the cards from around his feet, then returned to her place. She sorted her hand. She said, “Now that you’ve got all that out of your system, maybe you’ll go with better grace. I’m willing to compromise—shall we say ten-thirty?” She drew a card and put down the king of spades. “Oh dear, that’s probably just the card you want,” she said, “but I’ve forgotten what’s been played. How much have I lost so far?”

“Not much. Seven dollars more or less.”

And gradually the game got underway again …

Suddenly there was a small thunder like a stampede of ponies, the jarring pound and tromp of running feet all the way from the kitchen, through the butler’s pantry, the semidark dining room, the middle hall, and on into the living room. Overhead the chandelier swayed slightly, its dangling prisms flashing blue and pink. Husband and wife automatically gave each other the kind of glance that Southern Californians exchange at the momentary agitation of a passing temblor.

“It’s Danny and John,” she said.

“Obviously! But what the hell are they doing here at this hour?”

“They’re staying for the night—didn’t I tell you?”

“You certainly didn’t tell me.”

“I must have forgotten.”

“What’s the idea?” he asked.

“Why, so Betty and George can go to the Milbanks’. The boys can’t stay in the farmhouse alone and it saves the expense of a sitter. I told Betty this morning, why didn’t she let them come up here for the night. Mrs. Linton can sit for four children as well as two. Then she and George can stay out as late as they pleased.”

“You might have told me.”

“Hank! Does it make any difference, really? We have plenty of room and the girls are delighted. John will go to bed early—well, eight-thirtyish—and Danny can stay up with the girls and Mrs. Linton for their midnight drinks.”

With difficulty he checked his irritation. He picked up two cards by mistake, replaced the top one face down, fitted the other into his hand, and discarded. Deliberately he finished what was left of his highball and then said: “That means they’ll be with us for dinner, too?”

“Of course not,” his wife said—with unnecessary lightheartedness, he thought. “They’re farmers, remember? They have supper at six.”

“In a pig’s eye. George never gets his chores done till seven.”

“Is that anybody’s business but their own? We only rent them the farm, please. They can run it to suit themselves.”

“Why do you always have to take their side?”

“Oh stop, Hank. I’m not taking anybody’s side. You just don’t like George and Betty or their children and never have.”

“That’s not fair. I love Betty! If you know anything at all, you know very well I’m very fond of Betty. And John is the most wonderful little boy I ever knew in my life. I’m crazy about him.”

“Very pointedly excluding George and Danny.”

“George hardly counts, does he? I don’t matter a damn to him, or, for that matter, vice versa.”

“Well, Danny then.”

“Have I ever said anything about Danny? Ever even opened my peep? Only once! And you agreed with me completely. It’s your play.”

She drew a card. “But remember, Hank, whether you like him or not, he’s our guest for the night. And you know how uncomfortable he always feels with you.”

“That’s his fault. He simply doesn’t know how to behave. He doesn’t act like a boy at all—certainly not like a boy ten years old.”

“I know that. We all know that. Don’t you think Betty knows it too, and worries terribly about it? We can only try and be kind to him. You can’t change people. Now do a little behaving yourself, please. If you don’t like his sleeping here, you have no right to make him feel it. I’m sure he knows it enough already.”

“I only repeat I think you might have told me. I live here too, you know. Play, I said.”

The George-and-Betty problem was an old one, apparently unsolvable, the more so because he was torn equally between affection and distaste. Betty he had always been fond of, as he had said. In some ways he and Betty had more in common than he had with Janet; he had always found her very companionable. When George went into the army ten years ago, Betty and her infant son had come to live with them and they had got along fine, far better than in-laws generally do. When George was discharged from the service, he had no job to go to and Danny was already a difficult child of five. George wanted to farm, so the Prices had rented him their farmhouse, long untenanted, and all the land beyond the garden wall north to the cemetery half a mile away. Since then, George and Betty had lived in the farmhouse, their nearest neighbors, and had had another son, John, now four years old. George had taken to the land like a duck to water, and also to the village. He was well-liked; he took his part in the local Grange, whatever social life the town offered, the PTA, and even the church. He loved the farm, and from daylight to dusk was happy keeping it going, even making it pay. In spite of the time required to take care of two small boys, Betty helped her husband with the work. They seemed an ideal couple with common interests; at least as far as the farm went. George took no notice whatever of Danny, who had been nearly six by the time they came to know each other as father and son, but he was, by comparison, almost ostentatiously fond of little John. He was very aloof with Henry Price, whom he seemed to regard as a loafer and idler, and in the nature of things, Henry Price felt equally alien to George. There was little love lost between the two sisters’ husbands, but it didn’t matter; their paths, as if by mutual agreement, seldom crossed. The real nub of the problem was Danny.

At times Henry Price partly knew why he could not get along with Betty’s older son and never had, not even when Danny was as young as three or four; at other times he thought of it vaguely as chemical. Certainly a spontaneous antipathy sprang up between them whenever they came together, tempered somewhat at rare moments by ineffectual half-hearted efforts, on both sides, to reach and know and like each other. He could count on the fingers of one hand those occasions when Danny had spoken a civil word to him; and on the fingers of the other, when he himself had been kind, or even fair, to Danny. But countless were the times when Danny had tromped through the library where he had sat reading, with no more word or regard for him than if he had been a piece of furniture, without even so much as a glance in his direction; and countless others, he had flared up in irrational anger at the very sight of Danny. Sometimes he surprised in himself dark feelings of actual hate for the boy, and was deeply shocked and disturbed by the knowledge. He tried to keep his anger in check; he loved Danny’s mother, and not for worlds would he hurt her by hostility to her son; but all of them knew of it and, knowing, to keep the peace, said nothing. Only once or twice had it come out in the open, and then Henry Price had felt a deep gnawing misery and self-distaste that he did not like to remember; and not for anything would he have acknowledged it, not even to Janet.

Danny was a skinny, pathetic-looking child with what Henry Price sometimes thought of as a funny-shaped head. For a country boy, much outdoors, he was pale indeed, with an unhealthy pallor like yellowish ivory—strongly contrasting with his vivid dark little brother and even with his cousins Mary and Barbara, all of whom were normal health and life itself. He had a thin bony face with gray eyes that seemed always to be gazing off into space, bloodless lips, baby teeth, and sensitive nostrils that seemed to be forever quivering. He walked with an odd gait, artificial rather than effeminate. He had cultivated a deliberate heavy stomp as if to give his inadequate body a kind of manliness that he sensed, in his precocious little heart, he did not really possess; when he walked, he held his chin in the air defiantly, his bony shoulders ludicrously high, and swung his arms widely as if marching to a band. He was nervous, jumpy, very intelligent, as sensitive to reactions around him as a feather in the breeze, and brilliantly, almost dangerously, imaginative. He lived in a dream world where nobody could get at him. He not only played at trucks and Greyhound buses and bulldozers, he actually was a truck or a bus or a bulldozer; and only a year ago, at the age of nine, when someone called him by name, he would reply, “I’m not Danny, I’m a tractor”—or a harrow, a reaper, a tank, a train, a snowplow.

He was timid of trying a new experience in which he thought he might not acquit himself well; his mother said with a smile that ill-concealed her anxiety, “Danny’s the cautious type—very sensible, I think.” He was a passionate hero-worshipper of other boys who, at ten, tolerated him without understanding that they did so. Henry Price shuddered to think what their reactions would be a couple of years from now: the cruel ridicule, the butt they would make of him, the luring him into trap after hilarious trap. He was elusive, secret, and frightened; even at ten he would not slide down the small slope on a toboggan between the Price’s big house and the farm; and Barbie, who had been doing this since she had been able to walk, taunted him for it, as children will, and called him a sissy. Danny replied to this: “I don’t want to, that’s all. I just don’t happen to feel like it.”

When Henry Price overheard Barbara’s taunt one day, he was ashamed to discover that he was secretly pleased: Barbie had taken the words right out of his mouth. He did not reprove her, as he knew he should have done, neither then nor when he got her home, in private; he pretended he hadn’t heard, for in his heart he himself thought of Danny as a coward. Clearly the boy was eccentric; the chances seemed about fifty-fifty that he would turn out to be something so extreme as a criminal on the one hand, a genius of the age on the other.

In seeing Danny almost daily whether he liked it or not, always underfoot in their big house, always absorbed in Superman comics and always in some kind of trouble or other, Henry Price remembered his own childhood and his constant, burning, baffling childish fears. He had been obsessed by fears that he would never belong, take his proper place in the growing-up world, make the grade, all because he was by nature awkward, ineffectual and dreamy. How the other boys had despised him because he had not excelled at sports, and how bitterly he had been aware of it. How he had longed to be like the others, and to be liked; and how he had admired them even as they turned from him in scorn. Almost without thought he had finally refused to compete at all, retiring more and more into his own inner life of daydream, till he knew that he was spoken of by his former friends, not less so by his elders, by the shameful word “artistic.” He could still be stirred with horror and shock at the memory of one awful morning when, soon after he had entered high school, two girls from the seventh grade whom he had known since babyhood passed him in the hall and called him “Annabelle” as if it was the natural thing to do, the expected, the understood thing, taken for granted; and the most upsetting part of it all was that, helplessly, he had smiled back at them, replied pleasantly, and passed on. He had not dared to react normally as any other boy would have done, demand an explanation, or challenge them—had instinctively known that if he so much as said “You little snots,” the name Annabelle would dog him through high school. As it turned out, they had dropped the name within a week, but he had not been grateful for this; on the contrary, he loathed them in his heart with an unholy hatred, and did so to this day.

From then on he had loathed, too, the stammerers, the stutterers, the tongue-tied, the nail-biters, the frog-eyes, the pantswetters, the lads with a rash of pimples or acne, the weak, the inept, the unfit, the benighted, sometimes the crippled and always the sissy—the ridiculous ones who didn’t belong and never would, all those miserables on whom, by comparison to his own accomplishments, such as they were, and his own physical equipment, he could look down with scorn.

But his real chance came when he was a junior. One of the freshmen was a ludicrous, idiotic lout; a freak. He twitched; he shrieked with hysterical hair-raising laughter when goosed, and leaped spastically into the air; he tinkered with headsets and batteries and a thing called radio that was unheard-of in those days; he worked out elaborate insane formulas on reams of paper that nobody would dream of trying to make head or tail of; he mumbled jibberish to himself during study-hour, his jaw working, his lips quivering, his feet and knees jiggling up and down frenetically; he wore glasses so thick that he seemed to be forever weeping—and indeed, incomprehensible tears did stream down his twitching cheeks on the slightest provocation or no provocation at all. He was a prodigy at mathematics, a lightning calculator of the most baffling equation or problem, but he could not play baseball, make track, speak to a girl, or even recite in class. Henry Price refused to speak to him, ignored him as if he did not exist; pointedly, in his lonely presence, asked other boys to have a sundae with him after school; and openly declared him beneath contempt. Even his recent knowledge that this freakish fellow had gone on to become one of the distinguished scientists who evolved the atom bomb, summoned to the project by the President himself, did not alter his old opinion. He remembered too well the exquisite luxury of discovering that there could be another boy who was socially more unfortunate than himself—someone whom he could despise in turn as others had despised him.

He remembered all this in connection with Danny, and it puzzled and disturbed him. He recalled the phrase, “To understand all is to forgive all,” and falsely it rang in his mind. To understand was by no means to forgive; to understand could be the very opposite of forgiving! For it was because he understood Danny, understood what he was going through and what lay ahead of him, that he despised him. He despised the boy for the humiliations that he had suffered; he could not forgive him because Danny was weak, would be unable to avoid the errors that he had made, would stumble helplessly into the same pitfalls, would never fit in. All his experience and sympathy urged him to help Danny, spend time with him, show him interest and affection, let him know he had one friend at least who understood. His instinct, on the other hand, his deepest inner emotions, and his painful memories, made him recoil from the boy in contempt. Sometimes he had been almost enraged at the very thought of Danny’s name. Danny! Why didn’t they call him Dan or Daniel, what was the sense of coddling him with Danny! His four-year-old brother was John, just that. And if ever a name lent itself to a childish or affectionate nickname it was John: Johnnie. But no! John was John and would remain John; Daniel was Danny and would never be anything else. What the hell were they trying to do—keep him a baby as well as a coward?

For in Henry Price’s opinion, Danny was a coward. Early one evening last summer, while it was still light, Danny was riding his bike along the single street of their tiny village, with his silly head in the clouds as usual, when, on reaching the other end of town, he made a U-turn without looking to right or left and was run down by a car. Fortunately the driver happened to be old Mr. LaChaise who, because of his extreme age, seldom drove faster than eighteen or twenty miles an hour. In panic, the distraught old man cut the motor at once and got out. The bike had completely disappeared beneath the car; with the help of a man from the garage it was extricated with some difficulty. Mysteriously, there was no sign of Danny; he had vanished. He had simply run away, leaving poor Mr. LaChaise to pick up the pieces, so to speak. It wasn’t till several hours later, after dark, that they found Danny. Unhurt but thoroughly frightened, he was hiding in the hayloft as white as a sheet and trembling like a motor. He had sped on foot the length of the village and fled into the haven of the barn as if into oblivion, as if to erase the incident from his mind forever—make it untrue, something that had not happened.

He ran away from the scene another time, and this was the occasion of a near-quarrel between Henry Price and Danny’s mother, the closest they had ever come to an outright break over her son. One afternoon, silent and secret as always, Danny appeared unannounced in the children’s playroom. He walked straight up to Mary, whipped a squirt-gun from his pocket, and shot a stinging stream of water directly into her astonished face. Instantly, then, he turned and fled the house. Mary came running to her father. More than anything else, it turned out, her feelings were hurt; the trusting literal Mary couldn’t believe that anyone, much less her own cousin, would play her so mean a trick. He had got on the phone in the flower room at once and called Betty at the farm. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” he said, “but I think this is something you should know. I’d certainly want to know if it were my child. And it’s not so much what he did, remember, as his spontaneous reaction, his running away. I think it’s rather significant.” He told her what had happened in the playroom. There was a pause. Then Betty said quietly, her voice rigid with control, “After all, Henry, all boys like squirt-guns—didn’t you yourself? It’s a thing any boy might have done. However, I’m glad you told me. I’ll see that it doesn’t happen again.” “But I’m telling you,” he protested helplessly, “it wasn’t so much the squirt-gun, it was the running away!” “I understand. Thank you for calling.” And she hung up.

But sometimes Danny tried to sue for his favor, as he tried pathetically to woo the attention of every boy older than himself. Once when Henry Price had returned from New York with a spanking new Cadillac convertible, Danny hung around him for a whole week, hoping to be given a ride, hoping that all the bright nickel and chromium gadgets would be explained to him, the spotlights on either side of the windshield turned on, the windows lowered by the push button and the trunk opened at the rear, showing the automatic light inside that mysteriously lighted up when the lid was lifted, like the light inside the Frigidaire, causing Danny to speculate on whether the light was permanently lighted—after all, he said, how was one to know, once the lid was closed, whether the light went off or not? A moment of rare harmony occurred between them, then, when Henry Price told Danny he might wash the car. He went into the house by the side door, leaving Danny at his happy labors with sponge, chamois and bucket of water, and said to his wife, “That boy is positively psychopathic about vehicles. Trucks, tractors, airplanes, tanks, and now it’s our new Cadillac.” Janet had replied, “I don’t see what’s psychopathic about it. It is rather a handsome car, and there’s no reason why Danny shouldn’t admire it.”

Usually Danny’s efforts to win his friendship occurred at the swimming pool. The pool was a natural one in the glen up in Price’s woods, a mile away. It was hardly wider or longer than the room in which he now sat playing cards with his wife, but it was menacingly full of sharp boulders which were concealed by the white rapids that swept through the glen; and on hot days it was deliciously, even fiendishly, cold. Henry Price took his daughters there many a summer afternoon, and often he asked Danny to go with them, but only after his wife had begged him to invite the boy. Sometimes Betty went along, too; and it was pathetic, then, it made him nothing short of uncomfortable, to watch how Betty would take Danny by the hand and gently, stoically unself-conscious before all their eyes, lead him into a few inches of water to wade in the shallows, while Mary and Barbara dove from the rocks again and again and disported in the rushing current like dolphins.

But when Betty was not present, Danny turned his attention to him. Stripped to his shorts, Henry Price usually sat on a high flat rock above the rapids, leaning back so that his body would get the full benefit of the sun. He had a clear view of all that took place in the pool below; yet deliberately he looked away, tried to control his anxiety about the safety of his children as they plunged into the dangerous water, whose hidden rocks they seemed to know by heart, or frolicked in the rapids that could so easily have carried them off. It was always a very trying ordeal indeed, an all but harrowing hour filled with constant imminent catastrophe; and as he turned his head away and tried to relax, he had visions of their young bodies being broken on the cruel rocks, dredged up from the boiling rapids, or carried tragically home in mournful procession along the shady winding path strewn with strong-smelling pine needles—and the tragedy of the daydream seemed all the more heart-tearing because of the silence and beauty of the scene and the broken beauty of his dearly loved daughters.

Danny would clamber awkwardly up the rocks toward him, slipping and sliding a dozen times till he reached the safe dry perch. “Boy! Did I get cold in that current,” he said, as he sat down close beside him. “I could hardly swim a-tall. Boy, is that water icy!” Getting no response, he inched closer. With difficulty, Henry Price resisted an impulse to get up and move away. “You going in swimming, Uncle Henry? I’ll go in with you, if you want me to.” “I’ve been in.” “Boy, wasn’t it cold, though?” Danny’s lips were blue, his nostrils quivered, his bony little frame trembled from head to foot. “Did you see me out in the middle of the stream, Uncle Henry? Boy, was it tough going!” “I saw you.” He had only utter contempt for the cowardly way in which the boy had avoided the dangerous rocky depths and the stream itself; yet even as he rejected Danny, he sat suddenly up and shouted in alarm at the girls below: “Mary! Barbie! Are you crazy? Will you look where you’re diving, for God’s sake!”

Only once had he ventured to voice to Janet his concern over Danny and Danny’s future. This conversation had occurred during a drive to New York a year ago—one of those rare occasions when, perhaps because they did not happen to be face-to-face at the moment, all kinds of intimate things came out that ordinarily they never spoke of. He had barely launched into the subject when suddenly, to his astonishment, she burst into tears. “Oh, Hank, I’ve thought of Danny and thought of Danny, ever since he’s been a baby! You have no idea how much he’s on my mind! My heart just bleeds for Betty. She knows—oh, she knows.… George is no help. He doesn’t even know Danny exists. If the problem were ever brought to his attention, he’d kill Danny—he has that stupid pride that would make him want to die rather than have a son who’s a sissy. And there’s nothing that Betty nor I nor anybody in this world can do about it—except you maybe, Hank. Only you. Oh, Hank, if only you’d try to help him instead of always losing your temper with him! He’s frightened of you, yet he wants and needs your affection so badly. Because I think even Danny knows, young as he is, that the only man from whom he can expect any understanding at all, around here, is you …” Shaken, he had driven on in stony silence, then, his eyes rigidly on the road ahead; and privately he promised himself then and there never to bring up the subject again.…

Abruptly John appeared in the doorway between the dining room and the library. “Hi.”

“Hi there, John! Well, how the hell are you?”

“Good.” His enormous black eyes looked at them soberly, and then he said, in a voice that was all but baritone, “What you doing?”

“Your Aunt Janet and I are playing gin. Come on in, pal.”

John walked into the library like a male thirty years his senior. It was extraordinary, the authority and power of his small body, the utter masculinity of his every move, gesture, expression. He never wasted words; he didn’t smile unless he felt like it; he didn’t try by the flicker of an eyelash to please anybody but himself; he was both indifferent and superior to what anyone might think of him. “Can I play?”

“Not this game, John,” Janet said. “Why don’t you go into the playroom and get some of Barbie’s blocks?”

“Don’t want to.”

“I hear you’re staying with us for the night,” Henry Price said. “Now isn’t that dandy. You won’t miss your Momie and Dad? Your own bed?”

“No.”

“You’re not like me, then. I used to get so homesick that I—”

He did not finish the sentence because he saw that John’s attention had wandered. Frowning, fascinated, he was staring at the Palladian mantel above the fireplace.

“What’s that thing?” said the deep voice.

“That? Why, it’s something your cousin Mary gave me, John. Her Christmas present to her old man.”

“What is it?”

“You tell me. What does it look like to the younger generation?”

“Car. Funny car.”

“Good for you, John! It’s an old-time Stanley Steamer.”

“Why is it in a box?”

“Oh, that’s just the way it came. And it’s a good way to keep it, I think. I want to keep it for a long long time, you see, on account of Mary gave it to me.”

“Can I play with it?”

This was something he hadn’t been prepared for. He saw his wife glance at him apprehensively. John was staring at the shadow box above the hearth, expressionless; or rather, with a frown of concentration that looked almost displeased. His head rested on the back of his neck and he was lost in admiration of the splendid toy.

“Now John, the Stanley Steamer’s mine. You don’t want to play with that!”

“I do.”

“But it’s not a plaything, John. That’s not what it’s for.”

“What is it for?”

He smiled at his wife. “What indeed?” He turned back to the boy. He saw the longing in the beautiful serious little face, saw how he was studying its possibilities, its mysteries. With a resigned shrug he got up from the desk. “You win, John,” he said. “But only because I trust you. Understand?”

John nodded.

“Remember how you asked for my covered wagon once, and how I let you play with it for a while, and how you took awfully good care of it?”

John nodded again.

“Well, I’m going to depend on you, then, to take the same good care of my Stanley Steamer. Promise?”

“Okay.”

He reached up to the mantel, lifted the fragile vehicle from its tiny stage in the shadow box, and handed it to John.

John took it in his two hands and at once began to leave the room.

“Hey, bozo, you might at least say thank you, don’t you think?”

But he was already gone.

Henry Price picked up his cards. He saw that his wife was looking intently at him.

“Skip it,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re afraid he’ll smash it.”

“I certainly am.”

“I’m not. And whose toy is it, any way? Of course it would break my heart if anything happened to it, and probably Mary’s too. But there’s one thing you can do with John every time, and that’s depend on him. No Clumsy Claude he.”

“Clumsy Claude—why, that takes me back a hundred years.”

He recalled the way John had handled the covered wagon and how, not realizing that the linen covering would yield under the pressure of his touch, he had picked it up by its back with all four rude fingers and thumbs, the way he might have picked up a kitten. Alarmed, Henry Price had explained how the wagon must be held underneath, by its solid wooden frame. John had listened, interested but without emotion, then put it on the floor, lay flat on the carpet himself, and gave himself over to oblivious absorption as he examined everything about it—the tapering wagon-tongue, the movable doubletrees and the twin suspended singletrees with their tiny tug-irons, the wire-bound kegs that carried the precious water supply slung underneath one side of the wagon, the block-like brakes against the rear wheels, and the miniature toolbox, pick and spade fastened with bits of leather to the other side. All this John took in, and, his curiosity satisfied at last, he returned the delicate toy intact.

“When are we going to eat?” Henry Price asked. “I’m hungry.”

“Mrs. Linton should be setting the table any minute now. I can hear her in the kitchen talking with Betty and the cook.”

“Oh? Is Betty here too?”

“She drove the boys up in the pickup truck. Didn’t you hear them?”

“I certainly heard the boys. I think all of Grafton County heard the boys.”

“George was probably finishing up his chores for the night.”

“Why don’t we ask her in for a drink? It’s New Year’s Eve!” The sight of little John had cheered him; he was in good spirits again and wanted to make it up to Janet for any unpleasantness he had caused her.

“We’ll be having plenty of drinks at the Milbanks’.”

“I’ll say.”

“You are going then? Oh, I knew you would, Hank dear.”

“I’m going, all right. Can’t let my bride go on to a party alone like an old old-maid.”

“Hank—oh, Hank. You’re such a nice guy when you’re nice. And people like you so much, really they do. Why aren’t—why can’t you be like that all the time?”

“Why can’t it be a lovely day all the time?” he said. “Why can’t I get a tax refund every month instead of only every few years—thanks to your lousy bookkeeping, I might add.”

“Well, you won’t keep the books, you won’t even keep the checkbook.”

“And that’s something I’m very grateful to you for, while we’re on the painful subject. I never was much of a hand at figgers.”

“Well if you’ll please fish into your suit pockets and turn over to me the stubs of whatever checks you’ve drawn during the past month, I’ll be very much obliged.”

“Can’t you do it, when you send my suits to the cleaner’s?”

“Now look, Hank, I can’t do everything for you. You’ve got to show a little responsibility once in awhile, don’t you think? You’re a big boy now.”

“Very funny.”

“But it’s true, Hank.”

“Hey, what about a drink?”

He had barely got to his feet to go to the butler’s pantry when Barbara came running in from the front hall.

“Papa!” she gasped. “Look what happened to your Stanley Steamer!”

His heart sank at the words, even before he saw the damage. She put what remained of the toy on the desk in front of him. Both front wheels were off, a carriage lamp and the steering wheel were gone, the horn was broken, the fenders missing, and the goggled frozen-faced little driver, headless now, lay on his side in his linen duster among the scattered cards. Henry Price was sick.

Janet reached across the desk and put her hand sympathetically on his forearm. He avoided looking into her eyes. Barbara waited, breathless, keenly anticipating the storm that was about to break.

He felt anything but stormy. Foolishly, all he wanted to do was go upstairs to his study and lie down for awhile, be alone. But that was out of the question. Not for worlds would he admit or show his bitter disappointment; and he dreaded the moment when, any minute now, he would have to face Mary and she him. Finally, with an exaggerated gesture of indifference, he scooped up the cards, shuffled them deliberately and thoroughly—while Barbara waited, surprised, disappointed—and dealt the hands again. He managed to say:

“Well, it’s too bad, Barbie. But I guess it couldn’t be helped, could it. After all, John’s only a little boy.”

“John!” she exclaimed. “It wasn’t John who did it, Papa! It was Danny!”

He shot up from his chair like a sprung trap. “Danny!” he shouted. “Come here!”

And within the next second he heard the pound of feet as Danny fled from the living room, through the middle hall, the dining room, and on into the pantry and kitchen.

“Henry!” his wife said. “Henry!”

“Henry what!”

“It was an accident. I’ll admit it could hardly be worse, but also, it couldn’t be helped. You said so yourself. You did give it to him, you know. Please, Hank! This can go into something awful.”

“I didn’t give it to him! I gave it to John!”

“Barbie,” she said, “go back to the living room.”

Slowly, reluctantly, Barbara left.

“Now,” Janet said, “what do you intend to do?”

“Plenty!”

“I know how you feel, Hank, but—may I suggest something? Suppose you go in and find out from the girls exactly what happened. It could have fallen from one of the record cabinets, you know, or the radio or something, and broken by itself. It wasn’t very strong.”

Without a word he turned and quitted the room.

The living room was loud with an oppressive silence. All three children looked up at him with identical expressions of concern as he came in.

“John, tell me about it,” he said, trying to calm his voice. “Did you break my Stanley Steamer?”

“No.”

“Who did?”

“Danny.”

“But John—I gave it to you to play with and no one else.”

“He took it away from me.”

He glanced at his daughters with a sneer that he did not even try to conceal. “That’s just like him. Now you know. That’s just exactly like him.”

“But Papa,” Mary said, near to tears, “Danny didn’t do it on purpose. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t mean to do it. It just—broke.”

“I’m not talking now about breaking it,” he said, and he experienced a sense of rising elation as he went on. “I’m talking about his running away like a coward. That was a very cowardly thing to do. It’s time you knew what kind of a boy your cousin is. You wouldn’t do a thing like that, either one of you. If you broke something, you’d own up to it. You wouldn’t be a coward and run away.”

“I would so!” Mary cried as the tears began. “I even have! Last summer I broke a window in Miller’s garage with a softball and ran all the way home and never said a thing about it till now!”

It was like a blow. Near to tears himself at the sight of Mary’s distress, he returned to the library. He sat down at the desk, laced his fingers tightly together, and braved his wife. “I’m sorry, Janet, but this thing has got to be settled. I—I can’t just let it go.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“I’ve got to have it out with Danny. For his own sake, it’s the only reasonable way to settle it.”

“There’s no room for reason,” she said, “when the passions are involved.”

He rode over this. “Danny will never get any better otherwise. He can’t go on forever and ever getting away with it—running away and then being shielded!”

“Now Hank.…”

He raised his voice, loud enough to be heard all the way to the kitchen. “Danny!”

“Henry! I beg of you!”

“Danny! Do you hear me? I want you to come here this minute!”

“Henry—you’re going too far!”

“I know what I’m doing. You keep out of this!”

Danny sauntered in through the dining room door. He walked slowly over to the desk and stood leaning idly against it. Casually he looked down at the cards, almost nonchalant, but his sensitive nostrils quivered and his mouth twitched.

“Danny,” he began, in the kind of icy voice that he himself had loathed in his grammar school principal, “I want to tell you something that you, at your age, ought to understand already. Any other boy would! And that is, when you break something in somebody else’s house, you just don’t run away! You come to whoever owns it and say I broke it and I’m sorry. Isn’t that right?”

Danny shifted his feet but he did not look up.

“That was a very cowardly thing to do, running away like that! And it isn’t the first time! Don’t you think so, yourself?”

“Please, Henry,” Janet said.

“Why did you run away?” he added savagely.

In tones barely audible the boy said, as if indifferent: “Because I wanted to.”

“I’m asking a question, do you hear me? Why did you run away?”

“Because I wanted to,” Danny whispered again.

“I’ll tell you why you ran away. Because you’re a coward. Isn’t that true? You’re a coward!”

As if sensing instinctively that the discussion was over—not at all, it seemed to Henry Price, because he could bear no more—Danny turned and walked slowly back through the dining room to his mother in the kitchen.

Janet looked up at him, pale and tense. “Henry, I think you’ve done a pretty awful thing. Frankly, I’m scared through and through.”

“About what, for God’s sake?” he shouted in angry defiance, though his hands were trembling so violently that he had to hold them against the desk to conceal it. “About Danny? He had it coming to him!”

“No. Not about Danny at all. About you.”

He stood up. “That will be just about enough of that! Now if you’ll please leave me in peace, I—I’ll——”

“Gladly.” She arose, gathered the skirts of her long housecoat about her, and was gone.

Henry Price got up and closed both doors, shutting himself in. The cards on the desk in the unplayed hands—he regarded them with revulsion, he wanted to snatch them up and scatter them wildly about the room, rend them to bits, smash the glass of the window and fling the pieces out into the snowy night; but more than anything else he was trembling as if with fright, and he realized the awful justice of his wife’s words I’m scared through and through. He didn’t know what his fear consisted of, wherein it lay, what caused it, or what to do to stop his trembling—he could certainly never go to the dinner table like this, not under the knowing gaze of the children, from whom nothing, ever, could be concealed; still less under his wife’s. He looked at the pitiful wreckage of the Stanley Steamer and tears sprang to his eyes, but they had nothing to do—nothing whatever; if he was aware of anything, he was aware of that—with the fact that the toy had been broken. He picked up the tiny figure of the headless driver and held it in the open palm of his hand. He thought: I have never seen anything so pathetic, so moving. And at that moment the door from the dining room was thrown back and there on the threshold stood Betty.

She did not come in; she merely stood there. Her lips were compressed, her stricken face bloodless. In the appalling silence she stared at him as if she had never seen him before; and then she said, her constricted voice a full register higher than normal:

“Well, Henry. What has Danny done now?”

The deliberate now went through him like a knife. He fumbled for words, and at length they came. “Betty, believe me, I’d give anything to spare you this. Anything! I was never going to tell you about it at all.”

The merciless voice said, “You had no need to. I heard every word.”

“Now listen here! You’ve got to understand! The fact that he broke my Stanley Steamer has nothing to do with the matter—any child might have done it!”

“What is the fact then?”

“That he ran away! That he turned tail and fled, as he always does! I think”—he faltered—“I really think that it bears looking into. For his own good! I think it’s something you should know!”

White, trembling like himself, she regarded him as if he were some alien in frightening masquerade. She said: “Please let me apologize for him. I’m sorry he broke your toy. I’m taking Danny home now,” and she was gone.

After a minute, seeing that Mrs. Linton had finally turned on all the dining room lights, including the dazzling crystal chandelier, and was setting the table at last, he moved forward and closed the door again.

He retired to his favorite corner chair and lighted a Parliament; he noticed how the lighter shook in his fingers as he held it to the cigarette. But it was no use; he could not stay there, sitting. He got up and began to pace uncertainly back and forth over the olive-green velvet carpeting, uncertain because he did not know what his next move should be. He did not even know how he felt; he only knew that his stomach pained with an actual physical ache and his hands and jaw trembled as if he had suffered a chill. He dreaded dinner, being with the children, seeing Janet, the party at the Milbanks’—all those awful people who would be there—among whom, certain as fate, were bound to be George and Betty. George would not miss a party for anything, not when it afforded him the chance to get together with the townfolk, hoist a few, and discuss the important things of life like cows and crops. But there was no sense in taking it out on George. The real blame for the dreadful debacle lay squarely on his own shoulders and no one else’s. Distraught, in utter despair, he moved restlessly back and forth in the white closed room.

He was trapped, there was no other word for it; trapped and helpless, indecisive and hopelessly frustrated. The way he felt now, it seemed certain that nothing he could think of could alleviate his despair. He might get bloody, roaring, stinking drunk—and in this he would certainly “belong,” especially tonight; but then he would have to face the cold awakening, like coming out of the blessed gas in the dentist’s chair to see, and disbelieve, the horror of the world of uncompromising reality exactly as it had been before—worse than before, if only because it had not changed or bettered. Tomorrow and all the rest of the imminent new year loomed like a harrowing trial in court, whose precariously uncertain acquittal might be postponed till doomsday while he waited in endless agony for the doubtful verdict, the vaguely remote possibility of an affirmation of innocence, of non-guilt, that he himself did not believe in for a second.…

Again the door opened; it was Janet.

She sat down. She was still wearing her housecoat but she had changed her shoes for her evening sandals. In the silence she watched him pacing back and forth till, self-conscious of the moral judgment she pronounced without opening her lips, he returned to his chair at the desk.

Unable to bear the silence any longer, he looked at her defiantly. “Well? Get it off your chest!”

“Henry, Henry …” She shook her head like an old woman; like his grandmother, he thought. “When will you ever begin to remember that you’re almost forty years older than Danny? Forty years—think of it!”

“Betty ought to do something about him!” he burst out. “She ought to be told!”

“You told her, all right.”

“Then why doesn’t she do something!”

“Can I,” she said quietly, “do anything about you?”

“What the hell might that mean!”

“Only this—and it’s something you ought to be told. Betty’s relationship to Danny is scarcely different in kind from mine to yours. And frankly, I’m rather tired of it, Hank. But it’s a role you’ve forced on me over the years. You’re a very demanding person, Hank, a very selfish and childish person. The whole house must revolve around you or you won’t play.”

“Oh! So that’s what you think of me! Well! If I’m such a pitiable object, then how can you possibly love me? Or do you?”

“Don’t you think Betty loves Danny?”

“You! You insulting——!”

“Let’s not damage each other any more than we already have, Hank. But the real damage has been done to Danny.” For some reason unfathomable to him she tried to smile, then, but only managed a weak imitation. “I don’t mean to be insulting, as you call it,” she went on, “honest and true I don’t. I’m trying to face the facts, Hank, clearly and objectively—for all concerned. Somebody’s got to. Somebody’s also got to undo the damage you’ve done tonight. Hank dear, for my—if only for my sake, I wish you’d try it yourself. Get on the phone and tell Danny you’re sorry, won’t you? Or better still, go down to the farm and see him.”

He gripped the edge of the desk with his fingers. “Get out of here!”

“Very well.” She got up from her chair and quietly walked out of the room. As he saw her go, leaving him alone, his heart seemed to turn over in his breast as if with a sudden sickness; and not only his heart but his stomach as well. He was very near to retching out of sheer depression.

And now, frustrated as he was, helpless, there was one decision that he did arrive at. The Milbank party was out, there was no getting around that. Out for him, at least. Let Janet go alone. It wouldn’t be fair, he reasoned, to spoil Betty’s fun by turning up; the strain would be unbearable for them both. But would Betty be having any fun? He had ruined the evening for her as well as for Janet. And if they should smile or laugh and drink together and act as if nothing had happened, that would be worse; no, that he couldn’t take. If he wanted to drink, he had only to sit in the solitude of his own library after the children were in bed and Janet had gone on to the Milbanks’ and drink himself blind. It was the logical thing to do, he told himself. But the drinking and even the solitude offered no attraction whatever, no hope of release or relief. He didn’t want to be by himself at all; quite the contrary. He wished he could be taken as far away from himself as it would be possible in this all-too-human world to get. A thought struck him like a shock: there is probably nothing in life more unbearable than to hate oneself, to not be able to stand oneself.…

Mary came in. “Papa, dinner’s almost ready.”

“Thank you.”

“We’re all eating together tonight. Won’t that be nice, Papa?”

“Very.”

She moved about the room uncertainly; obviously she wanted to make conversation, to help smooth things over, cover up, make him feel better again. She said, “Papa, why do people celebrate on New Year’s Eve?”

“Jesus Christ!”

She opened her mouth in an inaudible gasp, recovered, and went on. “I mean what is it that they celebrate? If they just want to get together and celebrate, they could do it any old time, couldn’t they? There’s an awful lot of other nights, I mean.”

Sadly he looked at his beautiful child. Was she merely trying to help him out, or was she honestly seeking information? In any case, some answer had to be given.

“Mary dear, come here to me.”

She moved up to his chair and leaned against him, but her eyes sought the sprayed cards as if unwilling to exchange a direct glance.

He put his arm around her waist, was suddenly taken with a sigh that shook his chest like a shudder, and pulled himself together for the effort. “Well, it’s an old custom of some kind,” he said. “People like to get together on New Year’s Eve, and then when midnight strikes, ushering in another year, they drink a toast together. They’re always glad to see the old year go, though I don’t exactly know why—and everybody feels, or hopes, that the new year will be a better one, a happier one. And if the truth were known, Mary, it never is. There,” he added with difficulty, “does that—does that answer your—your—”

He was unable to finish the sentence; and Mary, feeling his emotion, glanced at him in alarm.

“Why is it that it’s never better?” she said at last. “I don’t think I really believe that part of it, Papa.”

“It never is, that’s all—it never is. The old year was always plenty good enough. And the farther back you go, the better it was.”

“But Papa, I can’t go very far back. I’m only eleven.”

“Forget it, Mary,” he said. “I guess I’m talking about me.”

Then Mrs. Linton stuck her head in the door and announced menacingly: “Dinner.”

Barbara’s discarded high chair had been brought down from the attic for John; he sat on the left side of the table next to Mary. A roast turkey, copper-colored as a bright new penny, lay on the gigantic Limoges platter in front of Janet who, as always, did the carving and serving. He took his place at the other end of the long table and smiled at his daughters. They were as sober-faced, even Barbie, as bereft children in an orphanage. Knife and fork poised, his wife looked at him as if he was a guest she had only just met and hadn’t yet made up her mind whether she’d like him or not. “White meat? Dark? Dressing?”

“Very little of each,” he said, hearing the artificial sociability in his voice. “A very little. I don’t happen to feel very hungry.”

“Maybe it’s just as well,” she said, equally artificial, as she put dressing and meat on his plate. “There’s bound to be a big supper at the Milbanks’.”

He did not reply.

“Don’t give me nothing,” John said.

“Oh John,” Janet said, “you’ve got to have a little of our nice turkey! Just a little teeny bit maybe?”

Henry Price saw that his wife’s flame-colored dress still hung from the light-fixture on the side wall. God damn that woman, he thought, what in Christ’s name do we pay her for! And the carton had not been removed from the lowboy. Tissue paper hung over the open flaps, like the large petals of an unfolding, dying white peony. The paper hats sat on top; a barber-striped horn and a few pink rattles lay on the smooth mahogany surface beneath the Sheffield candelabrum.

With a show-me expression, John was gazing at the view of old Boston Harbor that ran the length of the wall from the hall door to the flower room, from the carved molding above to the white dado below. He said nothing. After a few minutes he turned his head and looked at the dance of the Winnebago Indians on another wall and then at the early scene of West Point behind him, with its beaver-hatted gentlemen and hoop-skirted bonneted ladies watching the rows of figures like tin soldiers drilling on the parade ground against a backdrop of the Hudson, whose placid surface was marred only by the creamy wake of an old-fashioned side-wheeler.

Ordinarily, even after all these years, the scenic paper was an endless source of conversation on those infrequent occasions when the children dined with them. Barbie still said, “Sailboats couldn’t get that near Niagara Falls, could they?” or “How could one single horse pull a carriage with all those people in it? And if it’s riding on tracks, then why do they need a horse?” But tonight they were mute as dummies. They ate in painful silence, and even before Mrs. Linton brought in the chocolate soufflé that they could all smell from the kitchen, they asked to be excused. Like children released from school they fled from the room, through the middle hall and into the living room. He excused himself too, and returned to the solitude of the library.

Some minutes later, Janet came in. “I’ve just been on the phone with Betty. I begged her to change her mind and bring Danny back up for the night. She seemed vaguely willing, I think mostly because of me, but Danny refused. He’s had rather a shock and would prefer to stay home; he’s been frightened, of course. I said what did that mean about her and George—were they going to the Milbanks? She said oh yes. George wanted to go, so of course she would go on with him. Danny would much rather stay alone in the empty farmhouse than come up here, even though it’s the first time in his life that he’s ever been left alone at night. I just thought I’d tell you, Hank, in case you’ve changed your mind and want to phone him.”

“I haven’t.”

“Okay, it doesn’t matter too much. Not for the time being, anyway. I know how hard it is for you, Hank—especially when you’re feeling so guilty.”

“Have you finished?”

“Yes, I’ve finished.” She took a cigarette from the box on the desk, lighted it, and looked at him inquiringly. “Aren’t you going to dress?”

“No.”

“But you’re not going like that, are you? Oh, Hank! They’ll all be dressed to a fare-thee-well. You know how terribly proper they get on occasions like this.”

“I think,” he said, “—I think I should tell you now, before it gets any later, that I’m not going.”

She stared. “You’re not going?”

“I’m not going.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Stay home.”

“Why, may I ask?”

“Because I want to.”

“That’s no answer, Hank. Tell me the reason.”

“Because I want to!”

She looked at him in silence. Then she said, “Thank you, Henry. You’ve made my evening a very happy one.”

“There’s no reason why you can’t go. You don’t have to stay home because of me.”

“Oh no. I don’t exactly care to go to parties alone. After all, I am supposed to have a husband. Good night.”

She left abruptly. He heard her go through the front hall and up the circular staircase without even stopping to say good night to the children in the living room.

He went out to the butler’s pantry to make himself a drink. The swing door between the pantry and the kitchen was fastened back—Mrs. Linton was still clearing the table—and he saw that she and the cook were watching him in aloof but nonetheless burning curiosity. How their eyes must be popping, he thought, as he poured himself half a glass of Black & White straight.

It was well after nine o’clock. People would be arriving at the Milbanks’ already, and if he and Janet didn’t show up by ten or ten-thirty at the latest, drunken guests would begin ringing; the telephone was practically an indispensable prop at the Milbanks’ parties, the more so the drunker they got. The thing to do was to phone Mrs. Milbank at once and say that something had come up. After taking a long drink to fortify himself, he went through to the flower room and sat down at the telephone table.

“… Harriet? This is Hank. Look, Hat, Janet and I are not going to be able to make it and we’re just as sorry as we can be. Something has come up, and I didn’t want you to keep expecting us.… No, nothing trivial … don’t give it a second thought. Tell you some other time … Yes, George and Betty are coming, and as a matter of fact I think they’re just about ready to leave … Say, what’s going on there, anyway? I can hear all hell breaking loose … Well, tell them to keep it up and have a good time, but don’t let anybody call me, will you, Hat? I may be going to bed. In any case, Janet and I will be thinking of you, and thanks loads. Happy New Year, Hat, and many of them.”

He finished his drink in the library and went back to the pantry to pour another. When he sat down again, he heard the children in the living room. Mary was being bossy in officious accents, imitating some character that she’d seen in the movies, and Barbie squealed with laughter. The deep tones of John’s amusement complemented the others’ like the low vibrato of an organ to a soprano duet. Under different circumstances their play would have been music to his ears; he should have been charmed. Instead, he was increasingly swept by wave after wave of an almost suicidal despair.

He drank.—How does one ever get outside of oneself? How is it possible, when one loathes oneself so much, to stand oneself? What does one do about it? Can one become somebody else? Another person? A new man, say? The answer was a dreadful No, No, and again No! You’re stuck with what you are, what you’ve got, what you were born with or brought up with, and there’s not a God-damned thing you can do about it. Ah, the lucky, lucky people who never have a qualm, never a moment of self-doubt! As for making over his life, it was far too late for that; and besides, he had very little left to go on with. It was all gone.

On an impulse, a passion of irrational anger, he sprang up. He strode through the front hall and flung open the door to the living room. Mary, Barbara and John looked up in alarm.

“I’m sorry, children, but we’ve changed our minds. You’ll have to go to bed after all.”

“You mean—you mean we can’t stay up and have our party?”

“Look at the clock. It’s after ten. Your mother has gone to bed already and I’m going up in a minute. We can’t have this noise.”

“But Papa—you promised.”

“I told you we’ve changed our minds! Haven’t you ever heard of such a thing? It happens time and again in life and you’ve got to get used to the idea. Now march!”

“But I thought,” Mary said, “—I mean, aren’t you and Mama going out?”

“I knew they weren’t,” Barbara said, to no one in particular. “We all knew.”

“Barbara!” he said sharply. “You’re too damned wise for your own good! Stop talking back to your father!”

“Barbie didn’t mean anything by it,” Mary said loyally. “She only—I mean, we’re disappointed about our bar, and—Papa, what’s going to become of all our drinks and things?”

“They couldn’t matter less. They’re only ginger ale and Kool-Aid,” he said. “You can drink them any time.”

“They’re not Kool-Aid and ginger ale,” Barbie said defiantly, “they’re cocktails!”

“Barbara! Get going this minute! All of you!”

In dismal silence, the three children started to leave the room. Barbie stopped long enough to wad up her bar towel and throw it at the Dufy regatta above the fireplace. Momentarily Mary returned to untie her barman’s apron and drape it neatly over the wing chair.

“Good night, Mary dear,” he said. “Sweet dreams.”

She was gone, and for the first time since she had been able to say the word she had not said good night to him.

He inspected the bar. It was an ironing board laid across the backs of two Hitchcock chairs. A sheet was spread over it, hanging smoothly to the floor; there was a small vase of flowers on the bar, and a row of cocktail glasses from the butler’s pantry, upside down. On one of the record cabinets was Barbara’s toy cash register, ready for business. A thermos bucket filled with ice cubes stood on the floor behind the bar. In the center of the room were a small table with a red tablecloth and four small chairs, long outgrown, which they had lugged down from the upstairs playroom in the back of the house; and on the table was another vase of flowers, an ashtray, a small bowl of matches, candy cigarettes, and the blue carbon of a menu in blurred, fashionably illegible writing. There was a bowlful of pennies for the “juke box,” which must have been the phonograph with its long-playing records, as sheets and strips of clashingly colored papers, violent with the more garish crayons, had been plastered over its facade with Scotch Tape—Mrs. Linton would certainly raise hell about that in the morning.

The sight of all this gave him no pleasure whatever; he was not amused. It was a bitter, cutting reproach. Yet what a foul trick, he thought, what sadistic cruelty of the meanest pettiest kind, to have spoilt their fun and sent them to bed! For a second he felt like summoning them downstairs again; but for no longer than a second. Why the hell should they be spared? One cannot be too young to learn that life is a dirty business, without promise, without fun, full of surprises the reverse of pleasant; and the more you expected, the keener the disappointments. The less you banked on it—the less you expected of life—the better equipped you were to battle it. And they were far better off upstairs in bed with their game of bartending a lovely dream, fairer, more delightful, even truer, than any realization could ever be. Besides, he didn’t think he could have stood the sounds of their gaiety, make-believe or otherwise, if he should call them back to the living room again. He wanted no sound in the house, nobody awake but himself—and again he was oppressed by the awful prospect of no company but his own. Now, when he most needed diversion, a lifting out of himself, the Milbanks’ party seemed to him, by comparison, a pleasant gathering of the most charming, most stimulating, dear friends.

In the white library, miserably alone, he sat at the leather-topped desk where he and Janet had played at, rather than played, their interminable game of gin rummy. A physical illness had taken him, and he thought he wanted to die. If only—if there was only some crazy magical impossible way of becoming someone else! Then there might be hope. But only then. For he was finished, through, done for, as finally as if God had come into the room and beckoned him with the ultimate finger. He was ridden with fear, guilt, and self-disgust, and he didn’t believe he could ever recover. He was his own devil, his own black beast; and no quantity of drink, no staggering sum of money, no amount of parties, no dear friends, no charming children, no adoring but all-too-suffering wife, could ever expunge the beast and the devil and the falsely nice guy that he really was all the time, underneath, inside, even when Janet said, as she had said only tonight, “You’re such a nice guy.” He hated himself with an active hatred that was almost too much for a single human body to contain without running amok, and he did not think he could contain that hatred another hour. There were hateful things in this hateful world, things and people that should be hated, else why was one ever given an emotion so strong? But who can live with hatred in his heart when the hatred is directed only within?

Sick, dog-tired, he turned out the lights late, very late for New Hampshire, and went upstairs to his room. He undressed. In pajamas at last, staring in a fury of hostility at his face in the mirror, he heard the church bell begin pathetically to ring and the sound of a feeble horn or two blown by merrymakers—(merrymakers!)—in the somewhat larger village across the river. It was the new year. The old year had just passed and the new come in, but he scorned it with all the intensity of his hatred and his guilt. On a dangerous whim, he stepped out of his room in his bare feet and crossed the hall to Janet’s bedroom; but he did not go in. Crafty, noiseless, he paused on the threshold, because inside he could see the faint pinkish-yellow light of a cigarette glowing in the dark; and he knew that his wife had long been lying sleepless in the night, had heard the church bell just now and the silly toots of the horns across the river—like the horns on the lowboy in the dining room that had not been blown at all and probably never would be—and he knew what she was thinking as she lay in lonely misery and, most intolerable of all, in pity for him.

… She was thinking of the sentiment of New Year’s, the toast at midnight that had not been drunk, the kiss that had not been exchanged as the clock struck twelve—almost their warmest, most affectionate, most meaningful kiss ever, nowadays—and the perennial melody of “Auld Lang Syne” they had not sung together, roaring drunk or cold sober though the others might have been. She was thinking of the dangerous risk they had run in neglecting to see the new year in together, with all that it meant between husband and wife; and she was thinking: We ignored it, for once we purposely did not observe it, and the consequences will be dreadful indeed. It seemed to him that the end of their life together, their long relationship and love, all that they had been through since their youth, all they had built for the future and the future of their children, lay in ruins about them in their own beautiful house, because in ignoring the old rite that everybody shared as a matter-of-course—whether or not they had anything else to hold them together at other times besides clinking glasses and an old Scotch air—they two, Henry and Janet Price, had gone against custom and the urge toward life, had strained marriage itself and defied love. And suddenly, reacting, he didn’t give a good God-damn. Hate was the only sentiment that held him now. He felt it stronger in him than gratitude for marriage, adoration of his children, love for his wife—even, for a change, self-love. He turned from her doorway and fled into the dark study that adjoined his bedroom.

He knew his way in the darkness and moved toward the window without so much as scuffing a rug. He looked out toward the south. There, at the end of town a quarter of a mile away, with every bedroom and every room downstairs lighted up so that it shone in the night like a festive inn open after hours, was the big Milbank place. In his mind’s eye he could see what was going on there; in his mind’s ear he heard the screaming senseless chatter. He did not care now what songs they sang, what dirty stories they told, what maudlin tears they wept, who made a pass at whom, or how much vomiting went over the rail of the back porch. It wasn’t much good, of course, it wasn’t the ideal, surely life had more to offer than that; but in any case, it was life of a sort, and he had no part in it. Vulgar it might be, but it was living at least; and he had quitted life, abdicated. He was outside, rejected; and the cruelest part of it all was that the rejection had not been made by them, it was something that he, and only he, had brought on himself. Mrs. Preston was pulling up her skirts to show her garters, Pete Harper was confiding the secrets of his wife’s inferior background, Jerry Dillon was giving a feel to the nearest breasts, miserable Betty was laughing or singing with her husband, the crisis of the early evening deliberately forgotten, drowned in drink; and he was here, alone, alone. Did they miss him? Not for a second. They missed Janet, perhaps, but not him. Too often he had shown that he did not care to participate or share in their pleasures. In disgust of all that they represented, he turned and went back to his bedroom.

He pulled down the covers of his big double bed, switched off the light, then went over to raise the windows on either side of the highboy. The midnight winter air streamed gently in; it cooled his body, chilled his torso through his thin pajamas, but he welcomed it.

He bent down to the sill and looked out. In the semidark night he could barely make out the dim outlines of the lonely farmhouse beyond the garden wall. He thought of Danny lying in that house alone, upstairs in his room, lonely and afraid. There—there in that dark farmhouse lay the source of his misery, the cause of tonight’s horrible fiasco and, who knew, of how many crises and clashes to come. That nervous, jumpy, quivering child, living like a psychopath in a world of fantasy, had brought on him such despair as a boy couldn’t have dreamed of. Looking at the farmhouse beyond the low wall, he despised Danny with all his accumulated passion, and hated him bitterly, for good and all, in all his lonely hatred. Oh, he understood Danny completely—too well!—but he knew he could never, never, never forgive him.

CARD-OF-THANKS AND NOTE TO THE READER

My first published story was “Palm Sunday”; my second was “Rachel’s Summer.” Both appeared in the Partisan Review; and I wish to thank the editors of that periodical for publishing these stories in the first place, for publishing them as written, and for permission to reprint them here.

Equally (indeed even more so, because of the unconventional nature of the story), I wish to express publicly my profoundest gratitude to the editors of Cosmopolitan for publishing “The Sunnier Side” and for permission to reprint it. None of the stories in this collection was written primarily with an eye to publication in a magazine, and this is true of the title story most of all. Yet, with the exception of half a paragraph and the change of a word or two, Cosmopolitan published it exactly as it appears here.

Similarly, thanks are due to the editors of Mademoiselle and Good Housekeeping, which printed shortened versions of, respectively, “A Night Visitor” and “Tenting Tonight.”

Arcadia, the scene of these stories, is a village that exists only in the author’s imagination; so is the summer place called Parson’s Point; so are all the characters described in these stories, whether told in the first person or in the third; and the stories themselves, including all details related therein, are invented.

C. J.