59

Winter 1984

Editor

Executive Editor

Managing Editor

Fiction Editor

Special Projects Editor

Design Director

TriQuarterly Fellow

Fiction Readers

Editorial Assistants

Advisory Editors

Reginald Gibbons

Bob Perlongo

Joe La Russo

Susan Hahn

Fred Shafer

Gini Kondziolka

Greg Myerson

Lisa Cole, Chris Olson

Brian Bouldrey, Will Johnson, Michael Lindsay, Frances Norton

Robert Alter, Michael Anania, Elliott Anderson, Terrence Des Pres, Gloria Emerson, Richard Ford, George Garrett, Gerald Graff, Francine du Plessix Gray, Michael S. Harper, David Hayman, Bill Henderson, Maxine Kumin, Elizabeth Pochoda, Michael Ryan

TRIQUARTERLY IS AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ART, WRITING, AND CULTURAL INQUIRY PUBLISHED IN THE FALL, WINTER, AND SPRING AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, EVANSlON,lLLINOIS 60201.

Subscription rates-Individuals: one year $16; two years $28; life $100. Institutions: one year $22; two years $40; life $200. Foreign subscriptions $4 per year additional. Single copies usually $6.95. Sample copies $3. Correspondence and subscriptions should be addressed to TriQuarterly, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, 1735 Benson Avenue, Evanston, Illinois 60201. The editors invite submissions of fiction, poetry, and literary essays. No manuscripts will be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. All manuscripts accepted for publication become the property of TriQuarterly, unless otherwise indicated. Copyright © 1984 by TriQuarterly. All rights reserved. The views expressed in this magazine are to be attributed to the writers, not the editors or sponsors. Printed in the United States of America.

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TriQuarterly is pleased to announce that two stories it published during 1983 have been selected for the 1984 O. Henry Prize Stories anthology: "Prayer for the dying" by Willis Johnson (TQ #55) and "The third count" by Andrew Feder (TQ #56).

Choice Magazine Listening, a periodic audio anthology for the blind, the visually impaired and the physically handicapped, has included a story from TriQuarterly #50-"Prize tomatoes" by Anne Rosner-in CML #126. For more information about CML, which is available free of charge to anyone unable to read regular print because of a visual or other handicap, write to CML, Department TQ, P.O. Box 10, Port Washington, NY 11050.

On December 1, 1983, TriQuarterly sponsored a reading and discussion by Larry Heinemann, author of Close Quarters, and Bruce Weigl, author of A Romance. Both writers are veterans; their reading and the following discussion were focused on "The Writer and Vietnam." The event was supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council.

Publication of "Alberti and others" in this issue was made possible in large part by a grant from the Committee for Cultural Cooperation, Spain-U.S.A. The printing of the postcard with the illustration by Rafael Alberti was aided by a grant from the Spanish Embassy in Washington, D.C. For both these grants, we are grateful.

Contributors should note that TriQuarterly will not read manuscripts submitted during the months of June through September in 1984. All submissions received during that period will be returned to their authors.

Alberti

and others

An exile returns: a birthday a

Gil de Biedrna

Arcadio, William Goyen; The Succession: A Novel of Elizabeth and James, George Garrett; Tar, C.K. Williams; The Infinite Passion of Expectation, Gina Berriault; Works and Days, David Schubert

From. The American blues

Ward Just

1

This is not a story of the war, except insofar as everything in my unset' tied middle age seems to wind back to it. I know how much you dislike reading about it, all dissolution, failure, hackneyed ironies and guilt, not to mention the facts themselves, regiments of them, armies. But I must risk being the bore at dinner for these few opening pages, for the life of the war is essential to the story I have to tell. And that is not about the war at all but the peace that followed the war.

At the time the People's Army commenced its final murderous assault on Saigon I was living safely in a remote district of New England, far from the anarchy of battle and outside the circulation zones of serious newspapers. This was several years after my wife and I had quit the city for the country, having decided to go back to basics in the woods. We wanted a natural environment, clean air, safe schools, wood stoves and a preindustrial economy. In our fervor to simplify, we went to the northern edge of the nation, thinking of it as the frontier.

In fact, we were refugees from wartime Washington. Or perhaps the more accurate term is exiles, though no one forced us to leave. Our exile was voluntary, we abandoned Washington as good soldiers might desert a ravaging army. We believed that our home for many years had become diseased-poisoned with greed, ambition and bloodlust. My wife saw this before I did, and saw also that we had become part of it, accomplices-against our will, she insisted, though of course as a jour' nalist I had been a willing witness to the war's progress, drawn to it for no other reason than it was there, remaining because there seemed no other place to be. In Washington my wife and I feared for our marriage and what we considered our special closeness and appetite for each other. Sexual passion withered, desiccated in the heat of such megalo-

mania. My wife thought of the capital as some monstrous contagion, hence our abrupt and bravura departure for the north country-from the vicious to the chaste, from the extraneous to the basic, from the heart of America to its margins. This was in 1973. Without newspapers to read, I followed the end of the war on television, via a single network because my house was so situated in the mountains that I could receive only one channel. I watched the collapse on that one network, my continuity. And it was different than yours. I knew the theater of operations, its geography and ambiance, and many ofthe American officials present at the end and most of the journalists. I knew its history as well as I knew my own, having been there for two and a half years, and indeed in some respects watching the war on television was like watching a home movie, a blurred eight-millimeter film from childhood showing the house we no longer lived in and the father who was dead, a tiresome experience unless you had been there and remembered: then it was excruciating. This was a house in which some part of you would always dwell and a father who would be on guard forever. You saw yourself skylarking, innocent and unafraid, though entirely aware of the Kodak whirring away, seizing the moment. I wanted to call out and stop the film: Don't Do That! But it would speed up, the images racing, faster and faster, and there was no stopping it, then or later. Of course at the time the future was unrevealed: I could not foresee the consequences. Later, I would understand that it was predictable - even by me, one who believed that history never repeated itself. What came later was no surprise, including my own broken nerves and trepidation. The shakes came much later, when images leeched from my memory like shrapnel from flesh: so many human beings, multitudes. I had watched them, now they watched me: turn, and turnabout. In 1975 it was my own memory on film and this memory was crowded with fear and ardor, hot and bittersweet as an old blues,

You told me that you loved me but you told me a lie

They were diabolical memories, hard to communicate and ever harder to share. Yet my feet beat perfect time to the music, everyone said so. The war, the war, the war, the war; for a while, we thought it would go on forever, a running story. And how fascinating that it was an American responsibility, supervised by our best minds. Surely somewhere there was consolation.

So I leaned forward toward the small screen, connected to the war by the network, my looking glass. I was alert to the most obscure detail, often smiling, frequently near tears. It was all personal. I knew their faces, mannerisms and personal histories. A particular friend of mine

was a senior diplomat in the American embassy who was routinely interviewed in the last days by myoid colleague Nicholson. The interview was a near-parody of the decades-old quarrel between officials and reporters. My friend was by then a very tired and distracted official and he gave Nicholson no satisfaction. Of course Nick was polite and sympathetic, his bedside manner never more attractive than when tending a terminally ill patient. But my friend gave at least as good as he got and his truculence amid the ruins showed him to good advantage. On the small screen he was a formidable character.

Nicholson asked him, "What do you think, now that it's almost over?"

My friend was shrewdly silent, knowing that television cannot abide silence. He was careful not to move his eyes or dip his head or to otherwise display embarrassment or disarray.

Annoyed, Nicholson began again. "It's collapsing all along the line." He named the provincial capitals that had fallen in the past twenty-four hours, even pretty little My Tho was under siege. "And now that it is, is there something we could have done differently? Or should have or might have? Or perhaps there was something we shouldn't've done at all?" Nicholson leaned over my friend's gunmetal desk, holding the microphone delicately with his thumb and forefinger, as he might a flute of champagne. He scented blood.

My friend said, "Yes:' not needing to add "you son of a bitch," because it was plain in the tone of his voice. They had known and cordially disliked each other for years.

Nicholson said, "Looking back on it-"

"Looking back on it is something we'll do for a very long time," my friend said. "It'll become an industry. There are so many of us who've been here."

"Yes," Nick said. The camera moved in tight on him. "And the lessons? What will the lessons be?"

"In order to sleep soundly, Americans will believe anything. Do you know who said that?"

Nicholson, thrown on the defensive, shook his head.

"Stalin," my friend said.

"Well-"

"According to Shostakovich." Nick said nothing, wary now and alert to diplomatic nuance. But my friend only added mildly, "The composer. In his memoirs, I think."

Nick pounced: "But what will they be, the lessons?"

The diplomat's voice was soft, almost hushed. "They will be whatever makes us think well of ourselves. So that our sleep will be untroubled. But it's too early to tell, isn't it? We must wait for the after-action reports. The conferences and symposia. The publication of classified

documents." I watched my friend thrust and parry, his face perfectly expressionless, though drawn. I thought he was getting the better of it.

"You've been here as long as anyone," Nicholson said, smiling as if he intended a compliment. "And now you seem to be saying that the war's ended at last." Nick wanted a confession and this was by way of reading the subject his rights. He moved the microphone in the direction of the window and cocked his head, smiling wanly. Boom boom. Gunfire, or what sounded like gunfire.

"It is lost, yes."

"That's not the same thing," Nicholson said.

"No," my friend agreed.

"Well!" Nicholson said, smiling again. I noticed that he had had his teeth capped. He looked fit, though tired. Probably it was only a hang, over. "Surely you would not contend-"

"I am not contending anything," my friend said. "It's only a word. Pick the word you want. Your word isn't accurate, as a matter of fact. The war will not end when the Americans leave. One part of the war will end, but the war has more than one part. However, this is not our happiest or our proudest or our most honorable hour. If that is what you want me to say, I am saying it." He opened his mouth as if to continue, then didn't. He probably figured he had said too much. There was a moment of silence. Nicholson let it run, knowing now that the advantage was his. My friend said, "One can choose his own word. That word or some other word. It depends on where one sits."

Lame, I thought. Dour, obscure and unconvincing. But dead accurate.

"Right now," Nick said smoothly, "we're sitting in the American embassy, third floor." He smiled again and gestured at the American flag behind the big desk. It hung from a standard crowned with a fierce golden American eagle. There were framed documents on the walls, and a lithograph that I remembered from other occasions. My friend took it with him wherever he went, one of Picasso's melancholy musicians. The camera lingered on it.

"Exactly," my friend said. His voice was like flint and now he moved to gather some papers on his desk. He ignored the microphone Nick held only inches from the end of his nose. "At least you've got that exactly right, where we are now."

I remembered his tone of voice from another occasion, early in the war. He had taken me to lunch to explain a particularly subtle turn in American war diplomacy. It was too subtle for me, I didn't get any of it; but I did not let on, and let him talk himself out, thinking that sooner or later I would pick it up, understand what it was he was trying to tell me, and then I would have a story. He wound down at last and looked at me with a frigid smile. Then he said, "It's convenient for you, isn't it? Being

here, listening to me, waiting for a crumb of information. Some fact, any fact at all will do, so long as it's fresh. Facts and fish stink after a day in this heat. Isn't that right?" I protested. It was his lunch, undertaken at his invitation- Yes, he said wearily, that was true. Then he laughed and when I asked him what was funny, he replied that his situation was too droll; now he was conducting diplomacy through the newspapers, and they were American newspapers. He explained that he was trying to reach a certain circle in Washington, and he thought he could do it through my newspaper, through me. They never read the cables, and when they did they carped and complained Too droll, he said again, ordering cognacs for us both; it wasn't diplomacy at all, it was public relations.

There was a brief fade to black and then the camera went in tight on Nicholson. Now he was standing in the embassy driveway. He delivered a few portentous sentences, a kind of fatigued now-you-see-it-now-youdon't commentary on the interview. Artillery crashed in the background. Then he identified himself, "outside the American embassy on Thong Nhat Avenue, Saigon."

Nicholson had a reputation as television's most adroit interviewer, but that was the closest he came to cracking my friend. And he kept at it, night after night. Their little sparring match would end Nick's report, until more violent events in the streets made interviews superfluous, or perhaps they both tired of the charade. I admired my friend's tenacity, but I was distressed at his appearance, his eyes tired and his hair graying and longer than I remembered it, his widow's peak pronounced and causing him to look older than he was. His shaggy hair gave him an untidy appearance. Normally he was a fastidious man and a model diplomat, the son of one ambassador and the nephew of another, the grandson of an army general and the great-grandson of a secretary of the treasury. One way and another his family had been in government for a hundred years and this fact was never very far from my friend's thoughts, certainly not then, in the last days of the war. Despite his ancestry, or because of it, he was the most "European" of the American officials I knew. His was a layered, mordant personality, the past and the present always in subtle play. He had married and divorced a Parisian and was now married to an Italian woman, a Venetian who was my wife's closest friend; my wife and the Venetian studied history together. He had a special affection for his wife's family, who had survived, by his estimate, seven centuries of criminal venery from the doges to Mussolini in the family palazzo on the Grand Canal-and how had they survived? Indolence, he said.

I pulled for the diplomat in his struggle with Nicholson, and not only because of my friendship with him and my wife's with his languid Vene-

tian lady. I wanted to see him come away with something. There was no equity in an agony where only the observers profitted. The more bad news the better, the deeper the quagmire the more the correspondents flourished. Connoisseurs of bad news, Nicholson and I had been the most celebrated of the virtuosos, Nick with his camera and deft interrogation and I with my pencil and notebook and clear sight. We were scrupulous in our search for delusion, error and falsehood. We worked close to the fire, give us that; and we were entranced by its light, smitten, infatuated. And it was not a schoolboy's crush but a grand passion, a coup de foudre that often strikes men of a certain age. However, my mordant friend was not smitten; and he distrusted romantic metaphors. He believed simply that the United States had got itself into a war which it could not win. It could not win against the Vietnamese Communists any more than Bonaparte could win against the Russian winter. Americans had begun the war with an excess of optimism, but what country did not? The Italians always had. Now there would be consequences and to avoid them would only make matters worse, perhaps a good deal worse. Of course he hated being a part of it, there had been so many blunders and so many dead and so much waste. And unlike the Italians, we had tried so hard.

In front of the camera my friend was still and contained and vaguely contemptuous. He approved of journalism in the abstract but disliked the kind of man who seemed attracted to it. Journalists seemed to him naive utopians, and they were never worse than when covering wars. They routinely violated the physicist's great rule, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." And Nicholson and I? We tried hard, too; no one could fault our zeal. Our enthusiasm for the fall- its blood and dark rhythms, its delusion, the inexorability of the descent, the fulfillment of all the worst prophesies-was almost religious in its intensity, and at home our dispatches were followed with the devotion that gypsies give tarots. Of course we wanted no wider war, Nicholson and me-though I was obsessed with my friend's prediction, it seemed almost to be a curse, "Now there will be consequences and to avoid them would only make things worse, perhaps a good deal worse."

That was my own situation, appallingly real in the north country as I watched my friend on the small screen. He was a good man and an able diplomat and I felt sorry for him, distressed at his appearance and uncomfortable in his company, though we were 12,000 miles apart, and of course disappointed that he never looked the camera in the eye, though that may have been the strategy of the cameraman, who had been with Nicholson for many years. Nick was a professional, no more but no less either.

That last week of the war I watched television every day, beginning with the morning news and ending with the wrap-up at eleven. Of course, I was most attentive in the evening, my own day done; and knowing that in the Zone it was early morning. Their day was just beginning. Each day was worse than the day before, and the suspense was in wondering how much worse. How bad could it get? My wife refused to watch with me, being opposed to both the war and to television news on principle. We had always been great newspaper readers. In the evenings my son, aged seven, agreed to keep me company. That last week there was combat footage from the countryside and film also of the various landmarks in the capital, the Street of Flowers, the old JUSPAO building, Aterbea's Restaurant, the National Assembly, and the two white hotels, the Caravelle and the Continental, all places I knew well from the previous decade.

Don't you want to see this? I called to my wife.

Not especially, she said from the kitchen.

Look, I said, there's [essel, This was another old friend, a newspaperman. A hand-held camera caught him standing in Lam Son Square at the corner of the Rue Catinat, making notes. He was wearing a sort of bush suit and a sidearm in a holster and a steel helmet. He was thick around the middle.

I don't know him, she said.

I said, Sure you do, don't you remember? We met him and his wife, his then-wife, in New York that time. That time we had so much fun in the bar at the Algonquin. She was very young. You liked his wife, remember?

She said, Yes. It was at some bar. And they're divorced now. And I didn't like her.

I said, I wish to hell they didn't wear those bush suits. They didn't wear them in my day, at least the newspapermen didn't. And, Christ, he's packing heat. He thinks he's Ernest Hemingway, liberating the bar of the Caravelle. Except he's not going in, he's going out.

My son squirmed on the couch next to me.

I think it's a violation of the Geneva Convention, I continued. The rules are very clear. Correspondents are not combatants, and they are not authorized to bear arms. And you have the rank of major, so if you're captured you're a field-grade officer and entitled to respect-

Your dinner's ready, she said.

In a minute, I replied. I was watching [essel, so tubby and complacent. In the old days jessel had never worn bush suits. The war was not a safari. He had never carried a handgun, either.

I'll go ahead then, she said.

A rooftop shot from the Caravelle Restaurant provoked a cascade of reminiscence, much of it overwrought, perhaps bogus. This lunch, that dinner: who was present and what we ate and the details of the wine list, and the horror stories, the changing estimate of the situation, and the waiter who we believed to be a VC agent. A glimpse of the adjoining building made me laugh out loud. It was the apartment window of the Indian money changer, "the mahatma." The window was ablaze with light, and I imagined the transactions within, torturous now no doubt. I described the look of the flares over the Mekong River, the river bright as a carnival in the light of burning phosphorus, and the thump of artillery on the opposite shore. I was being cheerful for the benefit of my wife, who had convinced herself that we had all had a fine time in South Vietnam.

I thought again ofJesse!' At that time he was living with a Vietnamese woman with whom he had no common language. His American girl friend, the young woman he later married, had gone home. The Vietnamese was a well-educated woman who spoke excellent French, but jessel had no French, so they communicated by high sign and in pigeon. [essel, I said. A funny son of a bitch. Then a radio jingle came back to me, a choir:

Don't you get a little lonely All by yourself Out on that limb? Without Him?

The last word was drawn out, in barbershop harmony, Himmmmmmm. Sponsored by the Army Chaplain Corps, it ran a dozen times a day on the Armed Forces Radio Network, inserted between the Supremes and jirni Hendrix and exhortations to Stay Alert, Stay Alive. I sang the jingle to my son, who did not understand it. I remembered smiling every time I heard it. It was so chaste. And the chaplains were so demoralized and broken up. They were from another world altogether and now, thinking about them and their jingle, I moved to the other end of the couch. Tears jumped to my eyes. My wife gathered up our son and took him to bed. But I did not stop telling anecdotes, which were coming now in a rush. I recited them out loud, to myself. An American official-a new man, I didn't know him - appeared on screen and gave an accounting in a gruff voice. He looked frightened, listening to explosions in the distance.

I waited for my friend the diplomat. I had come to depend on him. But he was not interviewed that evening, nor was Nicholson anywhere in sight. Nick had probably gone up-country. The news shifted to Washington, a correspondent standing in the great circular driveway; in the

background, figures moved on the porch of the mansion. Of course it was dusk in Washington. The correspondent had information from confidential sources, none of whom were prepared to appear on camera or permit the use of their names. But the situation in the Zone was very grave, desperate in fact, and they in the White House seemed courageously prepared for the inevitable. The reliable sources described the atmosphere as tense but calm. The correspondent leaned into the camera, I knew him as a bon vivant; now he was selling gravity as he would sell soap or automobiles. Really, he despised his metier; but the camera was kind to him.

The news ended and another program replaced it. I refilled my drink, but I did not move to turn off the set. I had arranged a drinks tray so everything was within easy reach. I watched a game show, noisy with hysterical contestants and a frantic master of ceremonies. My time in the Zone came back to me in bits and pieces, an exotic tapestry - it was with me part of every day, in any event, but now, concentrating, I discovered forgotten material. The patterns changed according to the distance you were from it, one of Escher's devilish constructions. It was like reading a well-loved novel years later and finding fresh turns of plot and character to admire. I remembered a friend saying once that if you were lucky enough to discover Trollope in middle age you'd never do without because you could never live long enough to read all he wrote. I felt that way about the war, so remarkably dense an experience, with such treasure still buried. My Trollope war, so rich with incident and the friendships were forever. The diplomat and I had had many escapades.

Upstairs, I heard my wife reading to our son.

Come on down! I shouted.

The door opened. What do you want? my wife asked.

I want to tell you about the war! On television, the master of ceremonies gestured grandly at the balcony and yelled, Come on down!

She said something I didn't hear and closed the door.

I didn't notice. I was too drunk to notice. I had been drunk for a month, since well before the final offensive of the People's Army and the collapse of the Free World Forces. So the offensive was not a cause of my drinking, nor an excuse or justification for it. But it was not a reason to stop, either.

That year was turbulent and even now I have difficulty sorting it out. Public affairs seemed to loom over us, darkening the prospect. Of course Nixon was already gone. Ford was soon to go. Each day brought weird revelations. The attorney general went to jail. The disgraced vice president was frequently photographed at Las Vegas and was said to be making a killing as a corporate consultant, import-export. There was a

picture in the newspaper of him shaking hands with Joe Louis, his fingers on the Brown Bomber's shoulder as if they were friends. The vice president's tan was so deep, he could have been the champion's brother; he was smiling, obviously enjoying himself in Vegas. Joe wore a plastic golf cap, looking so old and ruined. I went on the wagon for a month.

There were changes in the north country as well. A Venezuelan bought the dairy farm down the road from my house, the purchase conducted through nominees. An article in a business paper asserted that for the rich in nations of social and political unrest, New England farmland was a collectible, as desirable as Krugerrands or Old Masters. The Venezuelan was followed by an industrialist from Peru, who bought a horse farm. The columnist in the local paper complained that the lingua franca in the valley would soon be Spanish. He took to describing our Selectmen as "the junta" and predicting revolution. Then he announced that he himself was emigrating to Maine, at least the Abnaki spoke English and were indisputably North American. My wife and I briefly discussed putting our house on the market, then thought better of it; we were in the north country to stay, she said. There were other confusing portents. A large New York bank failed and nearly brought down the valley bank with it. The chairman explained at a party one night that his bank had gone heavily into Eurodollars on the expert advice of the president of the New York bank, a close personal friend who owned a condominium in the ski area nearby. The president facilitated these purchases, one banker lending his expertise to another. That was the reason there was no mortgage money in the valley, it was all in Europe and disappearing fast.

The news after the fall of Saigon was fragmentary and weeks would pass with no reports on the evening news. No news was not good news. I thought of it as a dark and threatening silence, as unpropitious in its way as the deep, restless fastness of the woods that surrounded my house. Then the Chinese invaded North Vietnam. The dominoes trembled, then held; so fathead Dulles had been at once right and wrong about the course of events in Southeast Asia.

I was writing a history of the war. I completed the book in good time, all but the final chapter. For my description of the end of the war I was obliged to depend on the recollections of others. I decided to write a simple reconstruction of the final battle. Six times I went to Washington to interview civilians from the State Department and CIA and the Pentagon, and military officers everywhere in the city. Many were friends from the previous decade and were generous with their time; we knew many of the same stories. I obtained classified documents, but these did not clarify the situation; they were secret but not very interesting and often false or misleading. Facts piled up but I could not fit them

together in any plausible way. What had seemed so clear in front of the television set now seemed erratic and unfocused, drunken events reeling from day to day with no logic or plan. And what was the consequence, other than the obvious thing? I was unable to interview my friend the diplomat, who had been posted to another, very remote embassy; there was a rumor he was on the outs with the Department. We corresponded for a time, but his letters were perfunctory and he declined to volunteer any fresh facts or fresh interpretations of the known facts. I was disappointed but not surprised. He had always been a discreet official.

I knew that a simple reconstruction of the final battle was not enough. Through friends who had been active in the anti-war movement I applied for a visa to Vietnam, but was put off; perhaps later, when the situation stabilized. No one was getting in then.

I told my wife, I can't end this book.

You have got to let it go, she said.

The book? I asked incredulously. She couldn't know what she was asking.

The war, she said furiously.

I went on writing. I did not watch television much, though many of the faces in the new administration were familiar. They were experienced men, chosen by the President to inspire confidence, having served in administrations from the previous decade. Everyone agreed, there was no substitute for experience at the highest levels of government, even during dark times. However, the President believed there was a crisis of the American spirit. There was narcissism and malaise, and the American people had to put these dark times behind them in order to advance to greatness. Narcissism and materialism threatened progress; the people had become pessimistic, they were so preoccupied by the past. The people had to be tough of mind and spirit; they had to forget.

My last chapter wouldn't come.

One afternoon, disgusted by the day's yield, I left my desk and went outside. Although the temperature was near zero, I was in my shirtsleeves. Standing on my unprotected deck, I looked west at the mountains, which on bright days bounded the valley in various shades of blue. My wife maintained that at dusk there were seven different shades ofblue that changed as you watched them, like a musical piece changing key. There were no houses visible, nor any sign of civilization. It could have been a wilderness anywhere, these deserted and silent highlands. We had had a thaw, then a sharp freeze. The ground was hard as iron, the dead leaves brittle under foot. I stood motionless in the cold, listening. I did not flinch when I heard the familiar sound, though it gave rise to a crawling fear. It came from the west and I searched the sky, trying to

stand at ease, inconspicuous on my own property; but my feet would not obey and I danced away into the corner, under the eaves. At last I located it, low and approaching from the tree line, a moving object in the dull blue and growing. No one who has ever heard the sound in wartime will ever forget, slapslapslapslap. I watched him approach over my empty quarter, dipping a little, then rising, flying contour only a few feet above my firs and bare maples. Very close now, the nose suddenly dipped and the Huey turned like a runner reversing field, skidding, its engine screaming, and banked dizzyingly away, rising higher in circles and flying off to the south. I watched it go, seeing the pink, excited face in the passenger seat, a quick grin and a too-casual salute-my banker friend, Eurodollar Ed, scouting the valley for a developer.

I was trembling with fear and memory; the Zone had been so singular in its urgency and restless vitality. I had been so long in this place, I could not see the future; the past blocked my vision. I was alone with my cocktails, my interviews and my boy, and my increasingly aggrieved wife. Now it was another late fall with infinite winter in the sullen air, the winter that went on forever. As the sound of the chopper faded and then ceased altogether I understood that I had been living inside my history of the war, my feverish memory of it; this year was that year relived, but in a cold and lonely climate.

I shivvered suddenly, hearing a car door slam and my wife's voice, high and insistent. She and the boy were back from the market. I stepped off the deck and walked to the edge of the woods. It was so cold. I heard her call but I did not answer. I felt a sharp sting on my face and remembered that snow had been forecast. It would be heavy, the first of the season. Various country portents indicated a hard winter. The prospects were excellent for snow all night long, and for the season. My wife called again and I moved farther into the wood, away from her voice. This place was so remote, perhaps that was what she meant by returning to the fundamentals. Snow fell heavier now and from my redoubt in the woods I watched my son skylark on the deck. He was a sturdy boy, built like a fireplug, brimming with energy, always cheerful. Shivvering still, I longed for the damp heat of Asia and the thick sweat that came after a long walk in the hot sun. I advanced into the woods, until the house was no longer visible. My son called twice, then gave up and went inside. I heard the door bang twice. I continued to walk into the woods, whiten, ing now, the snow striking and melting on my face and bare arms. I came to a clearing and paused under the big maple; bunches of dead leaves clung to its branches. I thought of myself as a swimmer striking out to sea: this terrain was as monotonous as any ocean. Then I smelled the syrupy sweet smoke from our wood stove and that reminded me of the sour charcoal smell of Asian villages.

I remembered accompanying a patrol once, it was a routine sweep in the Delta somewhere. My friend the diplomat had asked to go along; he was then a junior man, new to the embassy, and had never been on a military operation. It was strictly against the rules, but he was determined to do it. We left the Caravelle early in the morning and by noon we were slogging through rice fields with an incompetent ARVN platoon. We walked and walked and it was too hot to talk so I was silent. At length, bothered by my silence, he asked me if anything was wrong. What was I thinking about? I said I was so bored I was planning my funeral. He thought that very funny and laughed all the way back to base. Just the other day he sent me a letter recalling the incident and what I had said. I had forgotten completely about it and laughed as I read the letter. My wife looked up and asked me what was so funny. I deliberated a moment, then passed it off without comment. She would not have understood. How could I explain that on a personal level the experience of the war was inalienable? You could not share it or transfer it or communicate it in any recognizable form. It was yours alone, your own shadow, a doppelganger present night and day.

She thought, reasonably, that I was driving her away. My moods, my drinking, my pessimism, my excess, my nightmares, my zeal, my boredom; my memory had become a penitentiary. I refused to accomodate myself to the north country, being so preoccupied by the war and by Asia. She said I reminded her of her father, so often absent on business; he was a great traveler when she was a girl, and even when he was present he was somehow absent. Just like you, she said. Her father had been in the war, five years in the Pacific Theater; and he never spoke of it at all. Of course he had not been an important journalist, a prizewinner. He had been a colonel of intelligence, and when he returned to his family it was as if he had never been away. Later, he was often gone on business. Even now she could hear the slam of the front door and his voice, always the same, the same words: Hello! Hello inside! I'm back! The Boss is home! And everyone rushing to greet him, her mother, her younger sister, her older brother-as if he were Marco Polo.

So perhaps that was what war did to men, gave them an itch, made them restless and discontented, though with me it was more than itch and restlessness. My discontent was like a sickness threatening to overwhelm us all. She shrewdly declared that I was like the man who had constructed a ship in a bottle, stick by wee stick. To release the ship I would have to break the bottle and that I was unwilling to do, was afraid of doing, but until I did I would have no rest nor would she.

It's a no-win situation, she said.

For whom? I asked.

We talked it over one morning six months ago at the kitchen table. The breakfast dishes had been cleared away and we sat at the bare table in the glum half-light of midmorning. I toyed with the saltcellar and looked into her dark eyes, then over her shoulder through the sliders into the gray valley, the heavy clouds above and the range rising beyond. She was wearing old corduroys and a blue wool shirt, and her hair was back in a pony tail, tied with a pink silk scarf; she loved the rough masculine clothes of the north country, though always managed to add a feminine, sexy, touch. We had sat across the table from each other so many times, it was where we habitually discussed family business; it was a refectory table and six feet separated us. Her voice was low and husky. I was just fooling myself, she said. She continued, I have been an idiot not to have seen it before now. But you have to go away somewhere, it's obvious. You have to get your head together, go away for a while, forget about things; and when you come back, make sure they stay forgotten. She said, I'm sick and tired of living in a haunted house. We were silent a moment. I spilled some salt and threw it over my left shoulder, for luck. Then she said, Go visit one of your friends. She named friends who lived in Washington and one in New York. Why not one of them? The hunting season's open, isn't it? My friend the diplomat owned a place on the Eastern Shore, a pretty farm on the Wye with two duck blinds in the backyard. Go there, she said. Go kill ducks. But he was abroad on assignment and the house rented. I explained that, and also that I did not want to go to Washington.

Washington's regressive, I said, intending to make a joke.

But she did not smile. She said at last, Then go see Quinn. That's what you want to do anyway, I can tell. And it'll be quite a meeting of minds, I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall. He's just as irresponsible as you are.

I smiled. She was right on the first point, wrong on the second. Quinn was not irresponsible. He had no responsibilities, how could he be irresponsible? We had argued the point many times and agreed to disagree. My friend Quinn was never less than controversial. I put water on for coffee.

This isn't getting us anywhere, she said. I stood watching the kettle, waiting for it to boil. I wanted to get away, no question of that; and controversial Quinn was convenient. Visiting Quinn was like visiting an exotic foreign land. There was so much to see and do! We both lit cigarettes, the smoke hanging heavily in the dim, silent room. The flame under the kettle was the only artificial light, a dull blue. Presently the water began to hiss.

A change of scene, she said wearily. I nodded. That would be Quinn all right. She said, My father had a friend like Quinn.

Family patterns, I thought. Women were obsessed by them. To a woman, there was nothing new under the sun.

She said, He lived in Boston and when my father went to Boston on business, that's where he stayed. They had been in school together, I think, and at one time he had dated my mother. He was so mysterious, I never met him until my father's funeral. He wore a Borsalino hat and a moustache, very dapper. I met him then, and have never seen him since. My mother told me later that he never married but had a mistress. I don't know if the mistress was a live-in mistress or not.

I said, She wasn't.

My wife looked at me, surprised. How do you know?

Your father told me, I said. When? When did he tell you?

I don't know, I said. One night, we were talking. He told me about Charles, the life he led and the fun they'd have. It was innocent enough, a few too many drinks in the Ritz Bar and then dinner at Locke's. Sometimes they'd end up in the mistress' apartment for a cognac. Your father was always amused by the mistress, who was no cupcake. But she was humorous and full of life. She wouldn't marry Charles because she had a huge alimony from her first husband and the alimony'd stop the minute she remarried, and while Charles had some money, he didn't have as much as her first husband and she'd gotten used to a certain style oflife and didn't intend to give it up, not even for Charles, she said.

My wife said, I wonder where she is now.

I shrugged. I didn't know.

And Charles. I wonder where he is.

I didn't know that, either. I said, Probably wherever she is. Christ, she said. She lit another cigarette.

I looked up from the kettle, whistling now. I said, You're smoking too much.

She said, How would you like to kiss my ass? She was so angry. She banged her fists on the table. My restlessness and unease had always been a thing between us, worse in their way than the war-or were they the same thing? What did I want from her?

She said to me, We came to the north country to get back to fundamentalsYes, I replied. That was the trouble.

2

We were both correct and of course there could be no compromise; we were fighting for our lives. In any hand-to-hand combat the vital rule is to move in close, attacking, a risky strategy but the one that holds a

promise of victory. But I had so many enemies and I could not sort them out. I was outnumbered, at war with the north country itself and everyone in it, and unquestionably "the fundamentals" as well-whatever they were, they were by no means as clear to me as they were to my wife, or as benevolent. The forested north country with its extremes of temperature, terrain and psychology was no place to mediate or bargain. There were no honest brokers and its austerity discouraged magnanimity, in the way a dour or unfriendly audience chills a performer Yet its extremes were beguiling; the courageous thing was not to run from it but to close with it, persevere in an advance to its very heart. In the end you were always your own broker.

So I made preparations to evacuate - a temporary measure, I told myself. I needed time off, some rest and recreation at Quinn's playground in the Northeast Kingdom. The moment I made this decision (and how prescient my wife had been, how helpful; her light cut through the darkness), I felt a tranquility and certainty I had not felt since the exhilarating commencement of the war. I was in control again, on assignment. In my exhilaration, I knew my whole life had been leading to this point. I was in the middle distance, poised to observe the previous decade and from its contours weigh the present and forecast the future. I knew my decision was a self-seeking act, and a kind of psychosis; it was very much in the spirit of the age. That was obvious. But as everyone knows, something altogether special can be created in psychosis. I took psychosis to mean extreme animation, a kind of delirious or lunatic holiday on credit. No foreboding: it would be an extraordinary and cheerful adventure with no immediate accounting or predictable consequence.

I took inventory that morning, three hours' worth. There was the manuscript, more than six hundred pages, and the notebooks. There were fifty of them, mostly interviews, each notebook identified with a name, a date and a place. Handling them, I felt a particular kinship. One wall of my �tudy was covered with photographs in black frames, infantrymen on patrol or in trouble. I looked at them often to remind me of the damp heat and of the stunned look of fear, and the various shapes of the gear, weapons, packs, helmets, fatigues, and of the machines, helicopter gunships, tanks, APCs, Jeeps and the four-wheel-drive Scouts the civilians used. The photographs jogged my memory no less than the notebooks, there was a story behind each one. On the wall over my filing cabinet were the dago dazzlers, as Quinn called them: my Pulitzer and the two OPC awards and the others, and a letter from the secretary of defense denouncing me to my publisher. There were no family photographs in my office, except one of my wife and son together, tucked into the bookshelf next to Giap, Guevara and Grivas.

I wanted the manuscript with me, so I packed it and the notebooks into a duffel. My desk looked naked without the thick stack of paper, weighted with a Buddha's head. As an afterthought, I threw the Buddha into the duffel, too. I took a last look at the photographs and straightened my desk. I covered my typewriter and put the thesaurus, dictionary and almanac away. The house was silent except for the hiss of the woodburning stove. My wife and son were out shopping and would be gone all day long. We had made our goodbyes after breakfast, my son cranky because I wouldn't take him with me. Outside, the duffel in one hand and my suitcase in the other, I paused and listened. Somewhere nearby a chain saw growled, a sound as familiar and constant as auto horns in mid-Manhattan. I put the duffel and the suitcase in the trunk of the car. I drove down the old road, and was away.

Have a good time, she'd said. We had partially made up, to the point where there was truce, or anyway cease-fire. She and the boy were at the door, anxious to be off. The smell ofbacon and coffee was all around us.

I never get to do anything, he said.

I said, It'll only be a few days. A week at the most.

Yes, she said. Whatever. We'll be here. You'll definitely be at Quinn's, then?

Yes, I said, and gave her the telephone number. She looked at it and put the piece of paper on the bulletin board. Quinn was unlisted unless you knew the code. He listed himself under the name of his alter ego, Tom Plumb. Not that anyone could remember the name of the town he lived near. It was very far north.

You always get to do everything, the boy said. Tell him hello, my wife said.

Let's go, he said.

I said, Maybe we'll get some skiing in. It looks like snow. Yes, she said. Then she smiled. I'd like to see that, you on the slopes. Watch you don't break your hip. Anyway, there isn't any Ritz Bar or Locke's.

No, I said. No chance of that. Is he alone? she'd asked.

Quinn's never alone, I said. That's right, she said brightly. Of course that's right, how stupid of me. And now he'll have you, too.

I remembered all of that, each word, as I drove down the old road and turned north, away from our town and its atmosphere of civilized rustication. It had changed so in the years we'd lived there. In 1973 it had been a pretty little dying village, the half-dozen resident artists and writers guarding its anonymity with the zeal of gourmets guarding the location of a fine inexpensive restaurant. The ski area changed that and now there were articles in the travel sections of newspapers. Television

crews from Boston and New York prowled Main Street looking for local color. Everyone agreed, Eurodollar Ed had done a hell of a job; condominium money was coming back into the valley, and prosperity was just around the corner. We ridiculed it but we were fascinated, too; I came to think of the valley as a colony, like the Costa Brava or Nassau, its economy controlled by absentee landlords.

Our town was at the edge of the picturesque mountainous zone. Twenty miles north the land flattens and the forests thin, nature's entropy. The mountains peter out to mere hills, and even the trees are shorter and scrawnier. Panoramas vanish and what beauty there is, is in miniature. This region is not quaint, only poor; as the natives say, it is close to God and Canada. But it supports life, and as the natives also say, Never criticize the bridge that carries you safely across. Twohundred-year-old towns nestle close to small, seedy rivers; here and there are red brick mills, sturdy as fortresses, vacant now. The mills always seemed to be located at a pretty part of the river, a bend or a rapids: the marriage of aesthetics and convenience. They manufactured essentials, shoes, bobbins, woolens, lumber. All that was gone, and had been gone for many years. The towns crouch, huddled against the weather, never more than a few stores and a gas station, and no traffic lights to delay the busy motorist or trucker. The few people on the sidewalks are aged but hearty. Things move slowly, to a different time. It is hard to know what occupies people here, and where the money comes from. There is little industry and no tourism, except for the occasional deer hunter or trout fisherman, come to set up camp near the Nulhegan or the Clyde or the two beautiful lakes, Willoughby and Memphremagog. But they were not big spenders. Still, the large white houses with their rambling porches, sharp gables and belvederes, sport discreet signs,

ROOMS INQUIRE WITHIN

earning a few extra dollars a season to supplement savings and the Social Security. North of our town there were no boutiques or piano bars, and no young people either: this was not the end of the line but its beginning. I thought of it as North America in 1955 or before, except that the inhabitants were old and the towns worn out. It was Eisenhower's America-the churches so pretty, white and modest, and congenial to the surroundings. I guessed that the prayers were modest, too. I often drove here for a day, to get away from the isolation of my place or from the youth and complexity of our town in the valley - from the chaste to the ultra-chaste. This far north, there was very little news or urgency or consequence; it was a landlocked region and the important news was

private. It was always a nice drive and I had cause to observe that the real beauty of it was man-made, a barn and its silo, a rail fence, a child's swing hanging from the thick branch of a sugar maple, or an old party bending to peer into a mailbox at the end of a driveway.

I drove slowly, in no hurry, as I knew the route well. Nothing ever changed along it so there was nothing to interfere with my reverie, which had cheered and amused me since the moment I left home. Driving over the mountain, my way out, I began to place writers I'd loved and grown distant from during my time in the country. I conceived of my homeland as a great clinic, the American Hospital, Dr. Twain, chief of surgery. He supervised a number of distinguised associates, Dr. Dreiser the bone man; Dr. Eliot, chaplain; Drs. Stevens and Jarrell, internists; Dr. Faulkner, chief pathologist; Dr. Hemingway, director of the trauma unit, and Dr. Fitzgerald, general practitioner. Dr. Lowry, our British cousin, was loitering somewhere near the operating room, perfectamente borracho. And on the ground floor, in a huge consuiting room all to himself, dwelled Dr. James, chief of psychiatry.

I had grown very distant from James, in my return to the fundarnentals in remote New England. His paragraphs were as dense as the woods and his sentences as torturous as the switchback trail to the summit of the mountain due west of my house. We had lost touch, Dr. James and me. In the past I'd read all his books for inspiration and consolation at those times when, following impulse, I'd run the scale, changing tempos, harmonies, all the rules of music. Strike as many notes, deep, full and rapid, as one can Do as I say, not as I do. James in the jungle, the spoils of James. I consumed the canon, but each time the Master was a little less consoling. I reckoned he did not have much personal experience with running the scale and with disharmony, nor of the casualties that result from improvisation. A great field marshal, he was aware of the smallest details yet never lost sight of the objective. I saw him as Bonaparte on the hilltop at Borodino, wheeling armies into battle. Bonaparte with his nine-o-clock-in-the-morning courage. From his summit he heard the explosions and witnessed the clamor of battle, its noise and confusion and restless movement, its terror and awful randomness-but remote, too, a field of smoke and miniature men advancing into a many-colored maw. Field marshals never heard the screams or dried the blood; and the tears, if any, were their own and the result not of pain but of anguish. They were not obliged to attend to private soldiers, except to hand out the medals in the surgery later. James' exhortation was attractive if you were James. It didn't make it less true or less poignant or noble or attractive if you were not James, only less authoritative.

I turned right off the macadam road, driving very slowly now. The woods began to thicken again and here and there great maples stood out

among the firs. The forest looked somehow tended, as if there were a hired man to care for it. I smiled, a can of Heineken's beer rested on a stump beside the road. Quinn's welcome. I stopped the car, got out, and stood listening to the silence. A faint odor of wood smoke was in the air. I hopped the ditch and touched the can with my fingertips. It was still cold so I cracked it and drank. I stood with one foot on the stump, rocking back and forth, drinking the cold beer. No inventory of literary men would be complete without an accounting of Quinn, new man in the burn ward, his modern specialty plastic surgery. Quinn, my oldest friend, whose door was always ajar. Quinn, who craved society as I craved solitude. Nine months a year he lived stylishly in London, off Chester Square in a maisonette the color of vichyssoise. October, November and December he hibernated, more or less, in the Northeast Kingdom, writing. His house had been built by a lumber baron as a summer retreat, and sold because the lumber baron's wife hated the loneliness and severity of the wilderness. She preferred Provincetown; in Provincetown there was gaiety, and no bears to ravage her pygmy roses, and no raccoons to scavenge the garbage. The house itself was a wandering affair of clapboard and fieldstone, a structure more suited to Sharon or Gloucester than to the north country; it had cost a fortune to build and was not cheap to maintain. There was a tennis court in back, but the net was always down and mushrooms had pushed through the HarTru. The garden with the pygmy roses had been let go. Except for a small lawn in front, the wilderness had reclaimed the land, and it was not a benign wilderness. Quinn said he preferred it that way, the terrain in its natural state. The house had been on the market for two years when Quinn bought it. That was five years ago and now he referred to it as "my American office."

I finished the Heineken and got back in my car. I had been playing a tape of the Benny Goodman 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert. I turned the volume up and sat for a moment, thinking about Quinn, author of a dozen mystery novels, all of which featured a newspaperman. Each year he produced a novel, finishing it in his American office in the fall and early winter, always writing the final sentence the day after Christmas; he was as disciplined as Trollope. The stories invariably took place in a cold climate, somewhere north of the fiftv-fifrh parallel, in a political milieu. Quinn was a connoisseur of parliamentary atmosphere, where casual conversation was as deadly as a knife fight. They were sexy stories, Quinn maintained, because the newspaperman always fell in love with a suspect, usually the guilty party. When the case was concluded, he went back to his wife, no happier, but no wiser either. Like Ian Fleming, who created James Bond at the precise moment when secret agents replaced army generals as heroes of the cold war, Quinn

created Tom Plumb at the height of the Indochina War, when newspapermen replaced novelists as the most reliable interpreters of public reality and menace. With the advent of Watergate, the success of the series was assured. Tom Plumb became as well-known as Nero Wolfe or George Smiley, and Quinn became a millionaire.

I dickered with the tape deck until I found Jess Stacy's solo on Sing, Sing, Sing - dah dah dah, dah dah dahdah dah and Goodman's appreciative "yes, yes" as he pulled the microphone closer to the piano. Then I lowered the window, turned the volume on full, and accelerated up the road. Quinn's house was around the next bend behind a low stone wall. When I pulled into the drive he was waiting on the tiny lawn, huge in greatcoat, muffler and deerstalker. He did a little boogie to the music and we embraced with shouts and laughter, our breath pluming in the chilly air.

He said, "You didn't bring her."

I laughed. "No."

He rolled his eyes. "Good thing, comrade. It's no time for quarrels. And I've got you a date, marvelous creature, better than you deserve. Thank God, she doesn't break easily. You'll love her, she's out of the ordinary and a little off the wall." He peered at me closely. "Where is she?" Quinn couldn't bring himself to pronounce my wife's name. They were not well met, a matter of personal metabolism; in fact, they had not spoken in more than a year. It was one reason why Quinn and I did not see each other often.

I said, "Home."

"A woman's place," he said, rolling his eyes again.

"No," I said. "But that's where she is, or's supposed to be."

"Christ," he said. "It's cold." We went inside. I dropped my bags in the hall and followed him into the study. He had a bottle of champagne in a bucket and immediately poured two glasses. While Quinn busied himself with the hors d'oeurves, I looked around the familiar study. I had not been to this house in almost a year but it looked unchanged. There were a number of photographs of Quinn and me with various notables, Harold Macmillan at a garden party' at a country house in Kent a few years ago, with Georg Brunis at a jazz club in Chicago in the late fifties, with Edith Piaf on a beach in the south of France. That was 1962, the year before Piaf died, though she looked dead then; Quinn had a letter of introduction from an American impressario and Piaf seemed amused at meeting two young American men. There was one of Quinn in soupand-fish at a dinner in the Guildhall and one of me at a microphone at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where I had been a radio commentator, being familiar with both Chicago and the war. A year later I took an editor's job and four years after that was out of the

business altogether, though you never completely left journalism: too many memories.

He had arranged pate and a Stilton and pumpernickel bread on two plates and set them on the coffee table. "What's happened to the book?"

"Stalled," I said.

"I suppose you can't end it."

Quinn had an instinct for the jugular. I nodded. He smiled. "I'm almost finished with mine."

"Swell," I said.

He said, "Plumb in Love."

I said it was a good title. He was always good at titling his books.

"But before we get down to the hardtack," he said, "we must have pleasure." There was a party that evening. People were arriving from all over the region. Quinn was expansive, listing the guests by name, occupation and personal eccentricity. I listened attentively, though I knew most of them. I admired their spirit, commuting to Quinn's house at the back of beyond, though it was true that his parties were famous. There was one surprise, a retired diplomat and his wife and their houseguests. I knew the houseguests, he was labor attache at the embassy in Brussels and his wife ran a small wine business. They were on home leave.

Improbably, everyone lived within a fifty-mile radius of Quinn's house and fifty miles was nothing in the north country. Also, Quinn said shyly, there was his new girl friend, Tessa Dane. Surely I had heard of the New York Danes, rich, very rich and notorious, Tessa's brutish father was the luminous Jack "Great" Dane, no stranger to the pages of Fortune and Sports Illustrated. He owned horseflesh and mines. Her mother was the infamous Betsy, onetime darling of the OSS, womanabout-town and matchless raconteur. "My life has taken an erratic turn," he said. He looked up at me and laughed, prodding me with his glass: More drink. "I'm glad as hell you got out of there, comrade. On the phone it sounded bad, very bad, and only likely to get worse."

"Was," I said. "Is." I didn't want to talk about it then.

"This girl," he began, "the marvelous creature we've gotten for you "I might stay a while," I said.

He shrugged; I could stay as long as I wanted.

"Maybe through Christmas," I said.

Quinn shrugged again. So what? One week, two; a month, two months. It was all one to him, so long as I was quiet in the mornings when he was working. He began an involved anecdote about the girl, she and Tessa had become good friends-

I was looking out the window, at the teeth of a rock outcropping and the woods beyond. Dusk was coming on and there was drizzle. Quinn rose to stoke the fire and in a moment it caught and leapt, blazing. The

woods began to disappear in the dusk and drizzle. Of course there were no lights anywhere outside. I listened to Quinn talk about the girl, who she was and where she came from. Tonight or tomorrow night my wife and son would cut a small tree for Christmas. There was one particular spruce, deep in the woods in a stand of maples that was nice-sized and shapely. It would be a job getting it back to the house, though. I said, "Tell me about Tessa."

"She came with me from London. She's been here all this time and's gotten on pretty well, considering that this place is not exactly Chester Square. Harrod's and the Antelope are not around the corner, no." He poured champagne for us both. "Our first meeting, it was wonderful, not to be improved upon. It was like the opening chapter of one of my books!"

"Aren't they am" I said.

"Everything's material," he said grimly, and began to tell the story. Listening to Quinn, I forgot about my wife and son and whatever difficulty there would be in getting the spruce through the woods to the house. In this study, with its brown leather chairs and bookshelves and photographs offamous men and women in silver frames, its Perrier-jouet in a bucket and gnarled Stilton on a bone-white plate, the north country was far away. It was typical that there was no view from the house. Quinn said that if he had wanted a view he would have moved to Cornwall or Northumberland. On still evenings you could stand on the porch and hear water running in a stream, almost inaccessible through the forest. Indisputably an American, he lived here as Englishmen lived in the remote colonies, northern India perhaps, or Rhodesia before the unpleasantness.

He loved noise and speed, confusion and hustle. His life was so different from mine, stepping into it was like stepping through the looking glass of a novel, the ambiance as dense and particular as anything in Dickens or Waugh. Quinn led a teeming melodrama of a life, rich with people and things and never less than controversial. It always took me a day or two to catch up with him when we met; we ran different races to different clocks. Quinn seemed to hurtle through the years with no backward glances, and whatever second thoughts he had he kept to himself. No remorse, no regrets. Of course he had his books and his books had their dark side. Sitting by the fire in his study, I listened to him tell his story, my own memory nagging at me

When he was finished it was dark outside. Quinn told a good story, adding dialogue, embellishing, inventing what he didn't know and exaggerating what he did. He was a man of many voices and there was nothing I could say at the end of it. His life was so distant from mine; his

was a different country. There was no comment on it I could make. It would take me a time to acclimatize myself to his weather, the pressure of it, the music and the mischief and the restless motion and muscle.

We went upstairs to dress. Quinn's guestroom was spacious and wonderfully appointed, a soft leather chair in one corner and a fine big bed and on the wall a framed poster of the man in the tuxedo, Max Beckmann's self-portrait. There was a dresser with an oval mirror canted down, just so. I put the manuscript on the dresser and the Buddha on top of the manuscript. Buddha was at eye level. When I looked into the mirror I saw the dimpled back of Buddha's head, the crown of his pointed helmet touching my chin. Max Beckmann was behind me, staring morbidly over my right shoulder into the mirror and into my eyes. The poster was from a museum in Frankfurt, though the painting was the property of Harvard. Lowering my head, I looked Buddha full in the face. His eyes were closed in contemplation or in sleep, his lips curving, sealed and expressionless. He had been with me for many years, always guarding my manuscripts. A friend had found him in Cambodia and given him to me as a present. For your peace of mind, she'd said. From me to you for your peace of mind, darling. That was well before the hecatomb, and the invasion and bombing that preceded it. There was a time when Cambodia was like Switzerland. I looked at the back of Buddha's head and again at his strong face. I avoided Beckmann's accusing stare, Deutsche Kunst des 20, lahrhunderts. Speak, Buddha. His face was in neutral but it was potent, like an idling engine. I turned away from Buddha and began to get dressed.

Later, I stood at the window, looking down at the driveway. I watched the cars arrive, one behind the other. They all arrived at once, expensive off-road "vehicles" and dark American sedans easing into the circular driveway. No sound penetrated the walls of Quinn's house. The cars stopped but no one got out. For a moment, until the doors flew open and the people gathered in the headlights, animated, bundled up, laughing, their cigarettes arching into the night sky-it looked like a funeral procession.

The cure for folly, from Marya: A life

]oyce Carol Oates

1

Marya's career prospered, Marya was doing very well for herself, all sorts of things were cautiously promised for her. She rarely returned to Innisfail though, in weak moods, she thought a great deal about it. She thought a great deal about the past-the profitless past-in her weak moods.

When she telephoned home-she still called Everard's and Wilma's place "home" though it hadn't been her address in years-she heard her voice shift into another register, become bright and shadowless, hearty. She sounded like the university instructor and graduate-scholar she was. Marya Knauer with all her fellowships and prizes, Marya Knauer with her somewhat precocious (as one of her professors called them) publications But if her voice wasn't strengthened at such times she knew it would go faint and reedy; she knew it would fail her.

Telephoning home, she was certain to ask about everyone, including neighbors, in detail. And Wilma, echoing Marya's bright manner, answered her in detail, though interrupting herself now and then, to say with a nervous little laugh that this conversation was long distance, wasn't it, and must be costing a small fortune, and did Marya really want to know all these things. ? "Oh, hardly a small fortune," Marya protested, though in truth she didn't always exactly follow all that Wilma reported. Joey had a better job now working for and Davy was living over in. and Lee's wife Brenda had another little girl, the sweetest thing or had Wilma told her that last time? Everard's blood pressure was high and the fool was supposed to be off salt, but Marya knew how he was: stubborn as an ox, still twenty pounds too heavy. But business was all right, Wilma said almost reluctantly. She supposed they couldn't complain

The telephone line was beset with static when Marya, in turn, spoke rapidly and half in embarrassment of herself. She had the idea that Wilma followed very little of what she said, that her questions and approving murmurs were only courtesies (an article accepted where?what kind of journal? - will it be on the newsstand in town, will people see it?); but at the same time it was Marya's obligation to supply Wilma with something - virtually anything - about which she might casually boast to her women friends. (Oh, Marya called last night, she keeps in close contact though her life is very busy, yes she's planning to come visit next time she has a chance )

Afterward Marya's ear invariably ached from pressing the receiver so hard against it. She rubbed it, caressed it, gently, for some time.

It was true that her career prospered; she was doing very well for herself indeed. For instance, Maximilian Fein so clearly favored her that the others in his circle were jealous and even a little offended. She was one of the newer students in the program, after all; she was a woman of a certain sort. attractive, outspoken, possibly rather contentious; she certainly wasn't self-effacing, (Maximilian Fein preferred his womenand his young men too, for that matter-to be self-effacing; or so it had always been rhought.)

If Marya had been awarded a certain coveted grant for next summer, it was clearly Fein's doing; if one of her seminar papers was scheduled to appear in Speculum, that most distinguished ofjournals, it could only be by way of intercession by Fein after all, he was an advisory editor, wasn't he? and known to force his proteges on others.

One of Marya's colleagues, a perpetually melancholy young man named Ernest who had been an assistant of Fein's for several years, asked her pointedly one day what Fein was really like-the implication being, of course, that Marya was on some sort of intimate basis with him. She felt her face go hot; she chose her words carefully. "If! were in a position to know," she said, "anything I said would be a betrayal. And I'm not that sort of person."

She hadn't intended to fall in love with Fein, or even to fall under his spell, as so many people, male and female, evidently did. There were legends, disturbing rumors That wasn't Marya Knauer's style, that wasn't quite the way she saw herself in this phase of her career. (Adulatory, calculating, subservient, "feminine." She had learned to think of herself as genderless, just as knowledge itself was genderless, just as the scholarly life was genderless. In truth she had learned in graduate school to think of herself scarcely at all-she was too absorbed in her work.)

But, of all her professors, Fein was the one who most insisted upon a

personal relationship. At their first meeting-when Marya sought him out to ask, to insist, that she be allowed into his seminar- he interrogated her for some minutes, keeping her standing awkwardly in a doorway, neglecting, or not wishing, to invite her inside to have a seat. He wanted to see how serious she was. How substantial her background was. Frankly (so he said, adjusting his blue-tinted glasses and regarding her critically)-frankly, he and her advisor didn't get along very well; the man's notions of the medieval period were asinine. His single published book in the field was a disaster of misguided energies Not knowing what she did, Marya found herself nodding, smiling vaguely, seeming to agree.

Fein stared at her. "But why are you agreeing?" he asked sharply. MAre you really in an intellectual position, Miss Knauer, to know enough to agree-?"

So she was shamed, exposed. But she went away buoyant enough since Fein had-reluctantly, magnanimously-allowed her into his seminar.

Some months afterward Marya was singled out for the awkward honor of looking after the Fein household for ten days while the Feins were in Europe. Maximilian was scheduled to speak at a medieval con' ference in Munich (his paper was on a newly discovered manuscript attributed to Agrippa von Nettesheim), following which the Feins were flying to Madrid to visit the Prado. (Every few years, Fein explained, the need came over him to see Bosch again, to stand in his extraordinary presence. It was more than need-it was hunger, sheer desire.)

Marya, embarrassed at being chosen, and more excited than she cared to acknowledge, consented at once. It would be no trouble to bicycle over from the graduate college a mile away she would be delighted to tend to the Feins' several cats She didn't ask Fein if he trusted her alone in his house, because of course he must have trusted her.

(Someone had broken into the house a few years ago, he told Marya, when he and Else were at a similar conference. But the poor man went away with little because the books meant nothing to him - not even the treasured Chymical Wedding, or the volumes of Picinelli. He might have intended to steal the Sung funerary urn, but something about it - its weight, its smell, the little rattle of the bones inside-discouraged him. So he took only a few dollars' worth of stamps, a portable typewriter, some of Else's grandmother's gold-plated spoons Fein hadn't troubled to report the theft to the police, he said, because he didn't want any more strangers in his house.)

When Marya let herself into the gloomy front hall she felt intimidated at once, even a little apprehensive, as if she might be stepping into a trap

of some kind. She might be Maximilian Fein's favored student at the moment, but she didn't really know him-she certainly wasn't on intimate terms with him. "Hello," she called out cautiously, though she knew no one would answer, "hello, it's just Marya-Marya Knauer." She reasoned that an intruder, hearing her, would flee.

The Feins had taken possession, twenty years before, of one of the splendid eighteenth-century houses on the river, owned and to some extent serviced by the University. Though they had one child-a daughter, Marya gathered-they had never cared to buy property, evidently; Maximilian was not the sort to wish to be encumbered by such things. (Didn't he make contemptuous reference now and then, in his seminar, to the property-holding bourgeoisie, to the contamination of the human spirit by such things as the "burden of excessive ownership"?) A scholar in the classic European tradition, he owned books; his treasure was all in books, old manuscripts, objets d'art.

Marya had visited the Fein residence four or five times in the past year, when Fein's graduate seminar- his "circle" - was invited over, but of course she had never been there alone; she had never been free, as she was now, to explore the downstairs rooms with their high, shadowy, beamed ceilings, their slightly warped parquet flooring, their narrow, leaded windows that appeared to glow with, rather than to transmit, sunshine and, of course, the rows and rows of books. Even in the dining room, books were shelved nearly to the ceiling; even in the narrow hallways. Ah, what a feast of books! - Marya had begun to assemble a library of her own, she could appreciate Fein's collection of some forty-odd years. (He owned a first edition of Hegel's Logic, for instance. A first edition of Goethe's completed Faust. Volumes by Nietzsche, Schiller, Mallarrne, Holderlin, Locke, Kant. Medieval manuscripts in German, French, English. Inscribed copies of Mann's Doctor Faustus, Broch's The Sleepwalkers, volumes by Georg Lukacs, Erich Kahler, Hannah Arendt, Levi-Strauss and many others, which privileged members ofthe circle were allowed to examine and even to consult if their work required.)

Marya entered the living room - two steps down - a narrow, cavernous room with its shades partly drawn. Her eye darted nervously about, but there was nothing to see, nothing out of place. The Romanesque bas-relief (a mirthless, grinning angel) on the mantel above the fireplace, the tilted old mirrors in their heavy frames, the overstuffed furniture, the discolored lampshades, the slightly frayed carpets There was a smell of dust, mildew, pipe tobacco, old books, which she found highly agreeable. What might it be, Marya dared wonder, to live here by rights-to be Maximilian Fein's wife?

One by one the Feins' cats appeared, blinking mistrustfully. There was Deuteronomy, there was Cagliostro, and now Twill Marya coaxed them to come closer but they kept their distance. She thought them exceptionally beautiful creatures, but it rather annoyed her that she had to court them anew each time she came to the Feins'. And now she was their custodian for more than a week. Empowered to change their cat litter, freshen their bowls of water and food, squat before them and make the effort of scratching their ears: an ignoble sort of task, Marya supposed, but so long as no one observed, she did not greatly mind. In fact, she did not mind at all.

She tried to pet Cagliostro-silky, gray, suspicious, with widened, greeny eyes-but the cat stepped haughtily away and Marya was left squatting off balance, groping at the air.

Occasionally, in a charitable gesture toward putting the members of the circle at their ease, Fein drew one of his elegant pets onto his lap and stroked and petted it as he continued his informal remarks; he was the sort of professor whom Marya most admired-capable in an instant of making adroit and witty references to whatever suddenly presented itself, as if he had prepared the digression beforehand. (Cats as heraldic figures in art; cats as bearers of "occult" messages; cats in medieval texts, Renaissance lyrics, crudely pictured in A Discourse of Witchcraft, of 1621- a facsimile of which Fein happened to own and delighted in showing them. Witchcraft, warned the Discourse, is a practice of deluded minds,! Where Grace is wanting soon admission finds.) But it was an eccentricity of the circle and of Fein's students generally-wrongly ascribed as an eccentricity of his-that they did not particularly want to be put at their ease. They resisted; they smiled stiffly, shyly. As Marya's friend Ernest dryly observed, "You don't come this far, and humble yourself in so many small ways, only to be reassured by Maximilian Fein that he is, after all, ordinary."

In any case, Marya thought, he wasn't ordinary; no one could ever be deceived in that direction.

So Marya changed the malodorous cat litter, flushing it down the toilet (there was a windowless little toilet just beside the door to the cellar) and spreading in fresh litter; she changed the cats' bowls, wiped them with paper towels, continued to speak cajolingly to the wary animals; but with little success. As she emptied a packet of cat food into one of the bowls, the mottled black and white Persian, Twill, condescended to brush his silky tail against Marya's leg; and that was all.

Marya thought of that enigmatic sonnet of Shakespeare's with which, oddly, quirkily, she had in a way identified, years before: They that have the pow'r to hurt and will do none,! That do not do the thing they most do show,! Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,! Unmoved, cold, and to

temptation slow .I They are the lords and owners of their faces,! Others but stewards of their excellence. She liked to think of Marya Knauer as unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow

In fact, she had hardened her heart beforehand, that she might not succumb to the romance of this university-its fame, tradition, wealththe singular beauty of its Gothic architecture - its atmosphere of privilege and academic rigor; she was an alien here, she felt her presence in a way subversive, a tactical error on the part of others. For this part of the world (its geographical as well as its intellectual location) was as different from the State University at Port Oriskany as Port Oriskany itself was as different from Innisfail. Yet it was romance, and she had partway succumbed; she simply could not resist. For this was an environment that sheltered persons like herself: brilliant, she might have boasted, and genderless: it was an environment in which genius and near-genius were honored. In such disciplines as mathematics, physics, and certain branches ofphilosophy, "genius" was unmistakable, and usually declared itself at a very early age (there was a world-famous logician in the Philosophy Department who had come to the University at the age of twenty-eight, given the highest rank and any number of academic privileges); in other disciplines-Comparative Literature and Languages, for instance, which Maximilian Fein taught - "genius" was rather more a matter ofspeculation, debate, prejudice. Fein's many admirers took it for granted that he was a man of genius-consider, for instance, the quality of the offers he received from other universities in North America, and abroad - but his detractors granted him only a flamboyant, rather precious sort of talent, a talent of style, awkwardly wedded to an obsessive scholarly methodology. Fein was inimitable, they claimed: so very sui generis, of what value was his work ultimately? At the age of twenty-five he had published a brilliant and controversial study of the "therapeutic" function of the perverse, in sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenthcentury Western Europe; at the age of fifty-five - for so Marya knew him to be, having looked up his birthdate in a biographical encyclopedia-he was hardly less controversial, provocative.

It was known that Fein had been working on a definitive examination of the medieval mind for the past fifteen years, and, judging from a few chapters he had allowed to be published, his revisionist study would alter forever all scholarship in the field. Hence Fein's circle at the University, and the various "circles" that had formed about him over the years-passionately faithful to their master, chronically ill-at-ease in his actual presence, hopeful of being included, in however peripheral a way, in what promised to be his grand, sweeping conquest of his branch of the profession.

(Marya was grateful for the fact that Fein's study, at the ground floor

rear of the house, was kept locked; she didn't want to be responsible in any way for that gathering of books, manuscripts, notes, drafts. It was even said that the study was off limits to Else Fein herself; but Marya indulged herself in a fantasy, a harmless sort of schoolgirl fantasy, of being one day invited in. "Should you like to assist me ," Maximilian Fein would begin, fixing Marya with his impenetrable, blue-tinted gaze-for he wore his tinted glasses at all times, even at night; "Should you feel you have the time to spare from your own work ")

Marya went boldly into the kitchen: she would celebrate by making herself a cup of tea.

This was her year, this was her time. Or so it seemed. For wasn't she at this very moment in Maximilian Fein's kitchen, moving unhesitatingly about, as if she belonged here? opening cupboard doors, peering into drawers, daring to examine the contents (very few, actually) of the old refrigerator. She was so close to euphoria that the teacup she'd chosen for herself nearly slipped through her fingers.

Marya, calm down. Marya, for Christ's sake. He isn't even on this continent at the present time; nothing you do matters.

She was too restless to sit at the cramped kitchen table, so she prowled about, sipping tea, looking out the rear windows to the steep, rocky lawn that dropped to the river some seventy feet below. Evidently neither of the Feins tended the yard, which was hardly more than a patch of weeds amid the remains of a rock garden. Marya noted an old swing, a child's swing, painted red but now badly flecked with rust. Straggly, climbing roses on a rotted trellis; a stone wall, perhaps twelve feet high, that had begun to crumble. The Feins' house at 37 Azazel Drive belonged to the University, but neither of them must have reported the condition of the wall, nor, Marya gathered, the somewhat shabby condition of the house generally, outside and in. There were water stains around the windows, the linoleum floor in the kitchen was badly warped, most of the kitchen and bathroom fixtures were old, even antiquated; the sink in particular was shocking, deeply stained, even rutted. It could never be scoured clean, Marya thought. Not even if she were to try her hand at it.

She half-closed her eyes and saw Else Fein enter the kitchen. For it was her kitchen, after all-she couldn't really have wished one of her husband's young woman students to have made herself so much at home. Else Fein with her stolid, ungiving, handsome face, the gray eyes watchful rather than animated, the features sharp as chiseled stone; Else Fein with her rather thin, streaked hair pulled back into an old lady's bun; Else Fein, his wife, of whom it was whispered that she was a disappointed scholar herself a former student of classical languages who only did, now, occasional translations for the university press. Everyone in the

circle had a theory about Mrs. Fein, who had never troubled to learn their names or sort them out from one another. (Perhaps because there were so many? - because the composition of the circle was always changing as older students moved on and newer students joined?) It was thought that, like many transplanted Germans, she believed herself superior to her American environment; then again, it was thought, even argued, that she was a desperately lonely and isolated woman who believed herself inferior for, after all, she hadn't many acquaintances, and virtually no friends, among the foreign-born faculty members and their wives. Ernest Slater, who could boast self-mockingly of being Fein's "oldest" student at the present time, claimed that Fein had simply exercised an Old World prerogative in keeping his wife to himself, a true hausfrau. She stayed away from the living room when the seminar met, except to serve coffee and tea; she was rarely heard speaking above a murmur, and then in German, with her husband, rather than English. Ernest joked of her famous coldness, her stubbornness in refusing (for so it seemed) to learn his name after four years. She hates us all, he said genially-her very gaze is thistles in the heart, an elbow in the ribs, surely you've noticed?

Marya flinched at the woman's imagined presence. Yes, that steelygray stare was unyielding and resolutely unfriendly; perhaps it was even a warning of sorts. Marya wanted to protest that she had not wronged her-how had she wronged her?

Marya rinsed her cup at the sink and was careful to replace it exactly where she had found it. With a stiffened old sponge she even made a few spirited swipes at the rust stains in the drain, as if she were back on the Canal Road with Wilma hovering over her. "Leave things neat as you found them" was one of Wilma's pet admonitions. Then again: "Clean hands, clean heart." (Both remarks were meant to be funny, even witty. Wilma always joked about matters she took perfectly seriously.)

Since she had fed the cats and checked the downstairs windows and doors, Marya supposed she should leave; there really wasn't any purpose in staying longer. Suppose a neighbor noticed her bicycle outside Or one of Fein's circle, nosing about on Azazel Drive She had work to do waiting for her in her room at the graduate college; this little excursion had been an interlude, a reward of sorts, since she'd been reading and transcribing notes all morning.

But she knew she wasn't ready yet to leave.

When she returned to the living room one or two of the cats scurried before her. She paced about, her hands on her hips, still excited, apprehensive, on the verge of a mysterious euphoria. Usually, by this time of day, she felt fairly exhausted; today she was suffused with a childlike sort of energy. If only he were present! surprising her with his brusque

greeting striding forward to shake her hand, and to inquire how she was. He was wonderfully lean, lithe, sharp-featured, striking rather than handsome, with a somewhat pocked skin, and thin lips, and a long angular nose. Or was he in fact ugly, Marya wondered - as if it mattered in the slightest. (To dispel Fein's immediate influence upon her, Marya had tried to speak casually of him, months ago. She told Ernest Slater that their professor was certainly articulate, perhaps a little glib at times, didn't he think? - and Ernest responded quite coldly. Fein was incapable of glibness, he said. Marya saw then that she must say nothing about Maximilian Fein to his other students unless she was prepared to love him as much as they did.)

She examined the bas-relief above the mantel, a dour, grinning angel with close-set eyes: rather like a gargoyle, impish and malicious, at this distance. Next, a row of funerary urns, all in graceless black stone that exuded damp. Then the large reproduction of Hieronymus Bosch's early allegory "The Cure for Folly" that hung above a horsehair settee, overpowering that corner ofthe room. The painting was an oval "miniature," a frame within a frame, filled in with calligraphic ornamentation that seemed to mock the burlesque scene depicted, and the victim's prayerMaster, cut the stone out quickly-my name is Lubbert Das. It was one of Bosch's engagingly ugly works; Marya tried to see it through Fein's admiring eyes, tried to find it engaging rather than repulsive. She had read Fein's excellent little book on Bosch, so she knew what she was supposed to be seeing: the medical "master" wore a funnel on his head, and a pitcher (the sign of Satan) at his waist; the anxious patient in red tights begged to have folly (an actual stone) cut out of his skull-like any frightened sinner begging for deliverance. Close by, a monk with a tankard in his hand offered a sort of bland encouragement; and a nun looked on, bemused, with a large red book (a book of wisdom? -or fallacious knowledge?) balanced foolishly on her head. The colors were dark and earthen, the sky a faint, watery blue. Church and steeple in the distance. A queer, dream-like slant to the earth. Fein had concluded his discussion of the allegory by saying that one could analyze it at great length without ever quite grasping it-its iconographic surface yielded superficial meanings, like most of Bosch's work; its depth, its mysterious essence, remained elusive.

Marya shaped the words aloud, softly and wonderingly: " 'Master, cut the stone out quickly-my name is-'"

One of the cats brushed against her bare ankle, startling her. She stooped to pick it up-it was Twill, the snub-nosed Persian-but it shrank away.

Marya half-closed her eyes, rocked on her heels, tried to summon back the last meeting of the circle in this very room. It had been at the very

end of April, a Thursday evening. Marya had delivered a paper on the role of the madman as prophet in several sixteenth-century texts, and Fein had praised it - had praised it moderately - but then his most lavish praise was never more than moderate. He had startled the group, and Marya as well, by concluding that "Miss Knauer has a future awaiting her if she is equal to its rigors."

Afterward, when the academic focus of the evening ended and something approaching a social hour began, Maximilian Fien appeared to be in an excellent mood. He drifted among his student-guests like any responsible host; he laughed more frequently and with more warmth than usual; Marya was gratified that he paid so much attention, however obliquely and circumspectly, to her. He was witty, entertaining. A master of the wayward and revealing detail- the detail that suddenly sets an entire relationship into perspective. Did they know, for instance, that Freud's wife Martha was a compulsive housekeeper and husbandkeeper? -so attentive to her genius that she even put toothpaste on his toothbrush daily? And the motherly wife of one of the local geniuses (a youngish mathematician: no names supplied) not only brought his food to him on a tray three times a day, but bathed him, shampooed his hair, helped him dress every morning while his brain spun its incalculable fancies and his eyeballs rolled inward. "The privilege of genius appears to be a curse to others," Fein observed. "But in fact it provides a sacred obligation, a religious 'path,' to the close-at-handthe adoring spouse; and, by way of the spouse, the larger world is served. Thus genius is a phenomenon of symbiosis; it can only be a relationship, not a condition in itself."

Marya could hear his voice distinctly. The Germanic-southern Germanic-accent; the erratic rhythm of the sentences-slow and almost drawling, rapid at the close. She could see the gleam of his metalframed glasses, but of course she could not see his eyes.

Before meeting Fein, Marya would not have thought that one might have a sacred obligation to another person; she had long given up-in fact she had rejected with distaste-the very notion of the convent, the cloistered life, decades spent in selfless adoration of Christ. It had not occurred to her that there might exist mortal versions of Christ, human and secular saviors. But then she had lived her life until now in what she saw as a remote and irrelevant corner of the world.

She meant to leave; she saw with surprise that a half-hour had passed rapidly by. But some books on a nearby shelf drew her attention - old editions of the Bardo Thodol with numerous commentaries by English, German, French, Italian scholars. And here, close at hand, Theologie und Glaube, A History of Satan in the Netherlands, Finnische und estnische Volksmarchen. In an old mahogany cabinet, untidy copies of The Journal

0/ Modem Gnostic Studies dating back to 1946; a yellowed stack of offprints of an article by Fein himself (liThe Coniunctio of Male and Female in the Drawings of Opicinus de Canistris"), published in the Winter 1958 issue. Squatting, her leg muscles beginning to ache, Marya read excitedly through the essay. It dealt with issues Fein was to explore some years later, in more detailed form, in his masterful study of the medieval Quete du Saint Graal. She wondered: would anyone ever notice, if she took a copy of the essay away with her? For it was an offprint, after all, printed up to be given away to colleagues and students; surely, if Fein knew of her interest, he would happily give it to her, perhaps even with an inscription.

She folded the offprint over twice-rather awkwardly, since it was more than twenty pages long-and slipped it into one of her pockets. No, no one would ever notice; it was absurd even to hesitate.

Following this, however, Marya began to behave oddly. Or so it seemed to her in retrospect.

She wanted to leave and return to her room, to her work; yet she found herself prowling about the house, checking windows she knew were locked, checking the rear door a second time, even turning the handle doorknob of Fein's study on the ground floor and pressing her ear to the door. What did she hear, what could she expect to hear, except the agitated murmur of her own blood? a dull, distant heartbeat.

The thought that no one was in the house except Marya ran through her head, struck her as a new discovery. The thought that she was free, unobserved, a kind ofbride She had a future awaiting her, Fein had casually prophesized, if she was equal to its rigors.

She examined the contents of a singularly messy closet, breathed in a rather agreeable odor of wool, boots, damp, tobacco, dust, dirt. She believed she could detect his smell She found herself on the stairs (but she did not want to go upstairs, she was disapproving, mildly incredulous), innocent and reckless as an overgrown child. Even the cats had caught on to this alteration of mood-Cagliostro ran past her, pretending to be frightened, his plume of a tail bristling.

She poked her head into the bathroom at the top of the stairs, ventured inside. Why not? Who could prevent her? A fly was buzzing at the window, feebly. The shower curtain over the tub was new, bright yellow-and-black striped plastic, but the rest of the room was old, shabby, badly in need of renovation. An outsized tub, rust-stained; a shower nozzle flecked with rust; a stained sink and toilet bowl; worn linoleum tile, once black. In the medicine cabinet mirror Marya's face looked flushed, but she did not care to examine it too closely. And what was inside the cabinet? nothing very interesting apart from six or

seven bottles of prescription pills, two for "Dr. Fein" and the rest for "Mrs. E. Fein." But Marya reasoned that anything crucial to their wellbeing would have been taken along with them to Europe.

She left, she hurried along the corridor. A linen closet another clothes closet. a former child's room, now used (evidently) for storage and now the master bedroom itself: furnished with a surprising formality, and rather somber, shadowy, with wine-dark velvet draperies at the windows, and wallpaper in an austere fleur-de-lis pattern, and a brass chandelier, and a high old-fashioned bed covered in an elegant white crotcheted quilt

On the dresser beside the bed, in an oval frame, was the photograph of a dark-haired child: sullen, pretty, with a small fierce chin and shadowed eyes, perhaps ten years of age. There was something both infantile and malicious about her expression. Marya held the photograph to the light and examined it for several seconds, intently. She could see-she believed-Maximilian Fein's features in the child, about the mouth especially.

(Disconcerting, to think of the Feins as parents. Else Fein giving birth, Maximilian Fein an excited father. Both of them young - Marya's age perhaps. And then what had happened? The girl had died of rheumatic fever-or was it a respiratory disease-they had grieved, mourned, had no further children. Marya was greatly moved, though she could not have said why. Someday, she thought, she might ask Fein about his daughter-if she dared. If they were ever that close.)

Now the child eyed her with a faint, mysterious smile. Her deepset gaze gave her an old-world, legendary quality, a look of fate, as if she knew very well that she was destined to die young and wanted no sentimental pity.

For some reason Marya thought of an incidental remark Fein had made during one of their early seminars. The subject was asceticism and the mortification of the flesh in the ancient world, the so-called pagan world; Fein spoke of the voluntary self-castration of priests in the service of the Magna Mater. Evidently self-castration and the inducing of impotence by way of herbal medicines were not at all uncommon in the ancient world: but now (so Fein mused, with his thin-lipped smile) if a man merely speculated about such practices, what might society call him!

The members of his circle shifted uneasily in their seats, one or two made an attempt to laugh-for perhaps Fein meant to be funny? Marya, frowning, had been making little nervous zigzag marks in the margin of her notebook In the service of the voracious Magna Mater, men were driven to strange forms of worship, Fein concluded. By this time Marya was damp with perspiration and her heart seemed to be swinging

from side to side. Elation, euphoria, on the verge of-might it be panic? The terror of mortals as they approached the great god Pan, in the chartless depths of the ancient forest?

One of the cats (it was snow-white Deuteronomy) leapt onto the bed, circled several times and lay down in the indentation between the pillows. He seemed to know the spot well, but Marya wondered if she had better haul him away. Had the door to the Feins' bedroom been ajar, or had she opened it herself? She couldn't remember.

She opened the door to the enormous clothes closet, which smelled of mothballs, stale warm air, that rich tobacco scent. Fein's clothes-coats, trousers, shirts, sweaters, neckties-were to one side, his wife's to the other. His shoes to one side and his wife's to the other. But the division of the closet was distinctly uneven-Fein had far more clothes than his wife. And Fein's side of the closet was more neatly arranged. Marya, not knowing what she did, pressed her face against the sleeve of one of Fein's tweed coats. She gripped it tight, the scratchy wool, the small, leather-covered buttons.

She closed the door carefully, paused to take in her tall slender reflection in a bureau mirror, wondered how she would ever be able to sleep that night. In her cell of a room. In her narrow bed.

And now she could not resist the dresser, opening the first of the drawers, the second, the bulky third. her heart still swinging, her pulse beating hard. You little savage, someone chided-aren't you a little savage! Don't we know you through and through! The bottom drawer of the dresser was crammed with Fein's things, somewhat haphazardly. Stray cuff links, single socks, linen handkerchiefs, tie clips and stickpins, loose papers, rubber bands, buttons, a worn leather portfolio which, naturally, Marya could not resist taking out and opening

The handwritten note seemed to leap out at her, to strike her between the eyes.

My dear brazen Marya-

She stared, blinked, felt a wave of faintness rise in her: a knowledge that yes, yes, she had halfway expected something like this. To be caught like a trespassing child, a thief, to be exposed as the low-minded criminal she was

At this point she might have closed Fein's portfolio and slipped it carefully back into the drawer (had it been on the right side, or the left?); she might have retreated, fled; but of course she did not. She read the note. She even went to the window to hold it to the light.

My dear brazen Marya-

If you hold this in your hand. if you have ventured so far. I think it futile for us to keep up certain pretenses. I know you-I seem to have recognized you from the

first-do not be frightened. my dear (do not be less brazen) if I shortly make my claim upon you.

- Maximilian Fein

Fein was forced to descend periodically, he later told Marya, into the Underworld, the Night World: but not by choice.

It was a species of hell contained within the perimeters of his skull-or, if you like, his soul.

Nor could it be shared. Not even by a lover or a disciple.

Not even by a wife.

What had happened was simply that, as a young man of twenty-two, traveling alone in Egypt, he had picked up an infection of the inner ear.

Within forty-eight hours he experienced terrifying symptoms-dizziness, vertigo, nausea, a sense that the world was disintegrating, and he himself with it; he had never been, he said, so entirely alone before-nor had he been so convinced of the individual's metaphysical isolation in the universe. ("Is this the 'benign indifference' of which the existentialists so blandly spoke? I wonder!" Fein said.) He had collapsed in his hotel room, was taken to a hospital in Cairo-a noisy, unsanitary, wretched place; too sick to be moved, he had had to stay there for weeks, with the consequence that his eyes were infected as well- he was actually blind for more than a month. It was simply hell; he had prayed to die. Consciousness was hell. As his vision returned by degrees he suffered terrifying hallucinations which he still saw, three decades later, in his dreams; he was convinced he'd experienced the "hell" of the Tibetan "twilight following death"-which he later recognized when he studied the tradition of the Bardo Th6dol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

It was his belief too that one must not reject such visions; they were fragments of a whole: an entire vision, shattered into innumerable pieces. Did Marya understand? No? Yes? Well, perhaps she was too young and too innocent at the present time to understand.

After Fein's discharge from the hospital in Cairo, he spent a convalescence in Munich, during which his vision partly returned. For the remainder of his life, however, he would have to wear tinted glasses; and it was inadvisable for him, even with these glasses, to venture out into bright sunshine. His head would ache ferociously, the terrible vertigo might return. He felt the need-it was spiritual as well as physiologicalto retreat from the world periodically, to "descend" once again into the depths of his own consciousness: he would remain in his study for days at a stretch, sleeping on a couch there, reading very little, eating virtually nothing, the room darkened, silent, his thoughts turned inward-

absolutely inward. His study was ideally suited for such meditation, since it had only one window, facing the river; it was at the rear of the house; of course it had no telephone. At such times Else protected him from all interruptions, though he also locked the door against her.

For it was true, Fein said passionately, that Hell is ourselves, nor are we out of it; but most people shrink from acknowledging the fact. They prefer to think that Hell is other, alien. They prefer to think that this twilight of the soul-this inevitable fact of the soul-can be successfully eluded.

Marya, who loved him, believed anything he said - anything he said. But, for all her intelligent sympathy, she could not make her belief quite credible to him.

No, Fein concluded, with a fatherly sort of patience-she was too young, too innocent, she struck him as supremely American: a creature of health and daylight.

"I'm not young," Marya protested, "I'm twenty-two."

Her voice was so soft, so hesitant, Fein had to ask her to repeat what she'd said.

"Why do you drive yourself so hard?" Ernest asked.

"I want to be perfect," Marya said, showing her teeth in a semblance of a smile. To indicate that of course she was being ironic, self-mocking.

"To be, or to seem?"

Marya was puzzled, not understanding. "To be, or to seem?"

"To be perfect will get you nowhere," Ernest said, "if you don't also seem perfect. In this part of the world reality counts for very little apart from its appropriate appearances. As Wilde so sharply observed Ernest Slater spoke with the fastidious melancholy of one who has seen, if not experienced, a great deal. He was all of twenty-six years old; married; he'd almost been a father, once- but he and his wife had done the pragmatic thing, the necessary thing, and had an abortion. He had been in the Graduate School for five years- "enclosed in its stony womb"-studying Old High German, Middle High German, Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Medieval French, linguistic theory. And all in preparation for what promised to be a massive dissertation under Maximilian Fein's guidance. He was slender, tall, prematurely balding; his shyness could be mistaken for severity; his playful and gently ironic tone could be mistaken-as it frequently was, even by his friends-for cynicism. He had recently discovered, he told Marya, inexcusable gaps in his background: he would have to study Romance linguistics and semantics before beginning his dissertation with Fein - which meant a delay of another year, at least. He hoped, he told Marya half-seriously, that his wife wouldn't leave him in the interim.

Marya, not knowing what sort of response Ernest wanted, could neither concur nor protest.

"But there are no shortcuts in this life, after all," Ernest said. "Unless it's to failure. Or death."

The Feins returned from Europe on schedule; Marya handed the key over to them; she and Professor Fein exchanged a long, neutral look as they stood together in the shadowy front foyer of the house Marya flushed and a little breathless from her bicycle ride, Fein rather severe, edgy. He was, he said, suffering a mild sort of reaction to the transAtlantic flight. His wife was really a better traveler than he-her health, her nerves, were sounder. And what of Marya, did she like to travel? Had she been to Europe?

"No," Marya said. "Not yet."

At the next Thursday evening meeting of the seminar, Fein surprised them all with a little banquet.

They were served stuffed cabbage loaf, potato griddle cakes; fried pork sausage, egg noodles, and an elaborate brioche filled with candied apricots. Mrs. Fein had prepared the food, but an undergraduate woman served it - Mrs. Fein made no appearance downstairs at all, though Marya and the others would have liked to thank her for her kindness, and tell her how superb the food was. ("Well-Else does not need to be told such things, perhaps," Fein said. "It is enough for her to nourish us all and then to absent herself it is her Kaiserslauten temperament.")

Fein himself was in an excellent mood. He found things to praise in the several papers that were presented in the seminar; his critical remarks were less acerbic than usual; he smiled a great deal; he was even wearing a somewhat informal outfit-a black turtleneck sweater with a lightweight beige coat. Though he remarked that the conference had drained him of a great deal of energy, they gathered that it had been a considerable success, so far as his presentation was concerned; and the visit to the Prado had been immensely invigorating. Bosch's ecclesiastical diableries filled him with a curious sort of atavistic rapture, as if he were in his temperament-though assuredly not in his intelligence-a fifteenth-century man. A late cousin to Philip II of Spain.

For most of the evening he and Marya behaved toward each other with impeccable discretion; they were formal, courteous, grave, perhaps too grave-Marya generally questioned some of Fein's remarks during the course of an evening; it was her habit to draw him out in her odd, shyly aggressive way. But tonight she was quiet, rather contemplative. Three hours, three and a half hours, passed quickly and not quite coherently She was watching him, hearing My dear brazen Marya,

my dear brazen Marya, I know you, I seem to have recognized you from the first, I know you, know you and so it was difficult for her to attend to what he and the others were pursuing so energetically.

(Warring and mutually exclusive theories of human behavior: Might belief in free will be said to be the product of an evolved consciousness, or was it a symptom of arrested development - of simply knowing too little, from the cosmic to the microscopic; might there be an unexpected freedom in determinism, after all? It was Fein's playful position that if one's fate was decided beforehand, one was then free to do whatever one wished: for how was a "mistake" possible? How could "sin" exist?)

The seminar usually ended by eleven o'clock, but tonight everyone stayed longer; tonight was clearly a festive occasion; perhaps Fein was welcoming himself home, celebrating a secret success. They were treated to brandy and bitter chocolates given to Fein in Munich by a Russian delegate to the conference: which is to say (so Fein corrected himself) a Soviet delegate. For some reason the Soviets were courting him - inviting him to spend a year at Moscow University, or in Leningrad-as if he, Maximilian Fein, would wish to spend even a few weeks in that unspeakable country. All that he believed in they really branded "decadent"; they had not the crudest notion of academic or scholarly freedom; they wanted to use his name and reputation - as they used those of all foreign visitors-to give an imprimatur to their totalitarian madness.

He spoke with unusual passion. Marya found herself quite moved. It was false to charge Maximilian Fein with being indifferent to politics, as certain of his colleagues did, when it was clearly his work-his unique work-that might be designated as indifferent, disinterested, impersonal.

For he was primarily a scholar, as he said, and his allegiance was to the objectivity of Truth; he was a scholar before he was a citizen of any political state.

Marya was staring at him, no longer caring if he noticed. She did love him-she was greedy and exultant with love of him-it was absurd to pretend otherwise; as he himself had said, it was futile. Do not be frightened if I shortly make my claim

The highly potent brandy went to Marya's head. She knew herself beautiful- indeed she was beautiful- she knew herself one of the very best students, male or female, currently working with Fein-she believed herself absolutely free for the first time in her life, and absolutely in control of her future. It might be rigorous, but she would be equal to it.

Since she did not care to outwait the others, she excused herself not long after eleven-thirty, and Fein graciously saw her to the door. He was a tall man, Marya saw with satisfaction; he carried himself with a certain

languid assurance. So very charming, so very European telling Marya that it was a pleasure to have seen her this evening and to have known, while he was abroad, that she, and no one else, occasionally entered his house. Marya laughed, saying that it had been a pleasure - an unexpected sort of pleasure.

She made an attempt to be playful, reckless, as at ease as he. But when he took hold of her hands, when she breathed in that warm, intimate scent of tobacco and ashes-so familiar, so harshly fragrant-she experienced a moment of absolute fright. She might have been a young girl who had never been kissed-who had never been touched by a man.

Fein was saying half-chidingly that her hands were cold; then, as if the question were related, "Are you angry?"

Marya hadn't the strength to draw away.

"Are you angry?" he asked.

She wanted to say lightly, Why should I be angry?-but she heard herself say instead, in a quavering voice, "What do you want from me?"

"Oh - everything!" Fein laughed.

Marya had never loved anyone, Marya had never been attracted to anyone, Marya had long ago declared herself inviolable-autonomousentirely self-sufficient. She believed that her body craved its own freedom far more than it craved union with another person.

As for the cravings of others, of men, why should she honor them? Why even take them seriously?

Her attitude was rarely articulated, because, being shrewd as well as naturally puritanical, she avoided such occasions; she avoided being alone with men, being approached as a woman and not as a colleague. Perhaps she was a nun in her own way - an uncloistered nun, a selfdetermined virgin.

(One of the young women with whom she had become friendly here complained wistfully to Marya that, despite her numerous academic honors and prizes, despite the fact that she would be moving on, with her Ph.D., to Stanford-her family, her mother in particular, seemed only to be waiting for news that she would be married. Nothing else mattered, evidently; nothing else struck them as ultimately significant. She asked if Marya's family was like that, or were they more enlightened? "Enlightened!" Marya laughed. Then it occurred to her that Wilma never said anything-never asked anything-about her plans for the future. Nor did anyone else back home. Davy, now twenty years old, and Joey, eighteen, gave the impression of being uneasy in her presence - vaguely embarrassed, strained - and would never have broached any personal subject whatsoever. None of them thinks of me as a woman, Marya realized.)

She supposed she had remained a virgin so long because she hadn't exactly believed in other people-in men. In what they might bring to her that she didn't already possess, in the most secret, inchoate depths of her being.

One afternoon in June, when Marya had been Maximilian Fein's lover for less than a week, she happened to encounter Ernest Slater on the steps of the Graduate College. She saw how his eyes moved swiftly over her, how his mouth shaped itself into its usual ironic pose. She noted for the first time his disconcerting youth - his air of being somehow unfledged, not yet entirely formed, despite his high intelligence. She noted, too, the narrow wedding band on his left hand.

He had a sharp eye, did Ernest. What was that remarkable old book she was carrying? Could he see it?

"Musaeum hermeticum? In an 1820 edition? How did you get hold of this?" he marveled. He leafed through it, examined it closely, taking his time, while Marya stood close by, her cheeks smarting. He said, "You must be researching medieval alchemy: it is a fascinating subject. Making gold out of base metals making something precious out of something quite worthless." When Marya said nothing he went on, rapidly, "I've never known it to be his custom to lend out books, any books at all, let alone something of such rarity-Fein, I mean. This is his book, I assume?"

Marya had no choice but to say yes. She said it quietly, almost inaudibly. Without either the sense of triumph or the frightened guilt she felt. 2

It was Maximilian Fein, of all persons, who told Marya she must try to locate her mother before too much more time elapsed. Fein, with his reputation for being cold, self-absorbed, resolutely unsentimental.

"But I have no idea how to locate her," Marya said at once.

"Of course you have some idea," Fein said. "Don't be childish."

Marya was deeply shocked, offended, rather angry. She did feel like a child caught out in deceit. She had thought-in fact she had been quite confident - that her lover would assure her she was better off without such a mother, that things had certainly worked out for the best, with a creature like Vera Sanjek absent from her life.

Marya repeated, less certainly, that she wouldn't know how even to begin any kind of search. Her mother had been missing for so many years she had made inquiries about her, now and then it really didn't seem to be her responsibility, did it, and not her mother's?

And in any case, Marya said, her aunt and uncle would be insulted. She loved them, she said. She didn't want to hurt them.

Fein was putting his glasses back on, adjusting them in his slow, rather distracted way. He seemed suddenly indifferent to their conversation, as if the subject had been dropped.

"I don't want to hurt people who have been good to me," Marya whispered, "when when she abandoned me my brothers and me when she's worthless she doesn't deserve I've been told even that she was probably sent to prison for a while, she may even have died there for alII know, she's really nothing to me now."

Fein was bored with her, Marya saw; his mood had changed in a matter of seconds. He said, "She's nothing to you now, really" - as if it were more a statement than a question; and Marya, blinking angry tears from her eyes, said, "Yes, yes, yes. Oh God, yes."

To her relief (and to her disappointment?) Fein never brought the subject up again, during all the months of their relationship. Perhaps he simply forgot. Perhaps he was bored. And Marya, who intended to do nothing about locating Vera Sanjek, nothing whatsoever, pushed the issue out of her mind entirely.

She had enough to absorb her at the present time. She was in fact pushing herself a little too far at the present time.

Can there be love, Marya wonders, if the word itself is never uttered, if it seems to stick in the throat?

Still, there are the manifestations of love, the long rapturous moments, the sobbing exclamations. Marya's lover caresses her with slow, reverent fingers, speaks constantly of her beauty-the beauty that resides in her flesh-charts an iconography altogether new to Marya herself. She reminds him, he says, of certain baroque madonnas-there is a powerful mater dolorosa by the Spaniard Murillo-has Marya ever seen it? Fein will show her; Fein has all the books in his library, the costly full-color reproductions.

Marya, brushing her hair out of her eyes, still short of breath, finds herself laughing in delight - being confronted with a Marya not herself, a fictitious Marya, worshipped if not precisely loved.

Marya loses herself deliberately in long, aimless daydreams. To recollect, to anticipate, to brood, to puzzle over-these are wholly absorbing activities, complete in themselves. When she is actually with Maximilian (in one or another of the anonymous hotel rooms to which he takes her, or in his very study on Azazel Drive) the experience is blurred, her sense of things confused. She hears herself speaking-she seems to see herself

behaving in certain prescribed ways- but it is not altogether real to her: not so real as the anticipation was, or the languorous memory will be. In her daydreams she is invariably challenging Maximilian with her love, declaring it, confessing it, exacting from him a confession in turn. "Yes, I love you, Marya; of course I love you, Marya; how can you doubt me?"

For a while Marya's passion for Maximilian Fein inspires her in her work. He cannot see her very often, not even every day: he has warned her that they must leave each other a considerable measure of privacy. So she does her meticulous research, she studies her languages, she writes her essays-with Fein as her ideal audience, her admiring listener. She is, in fact, always speaking to him in her imagination; sometimes, locked away in her room, very late at night, she murmurs aloud-to him, always to him, in reference to him. If she spends some time gazing at herself in a mirror it isn't Marva-seeing-Marva but her lover-seeingMarya. And the young woman he sees is invariably beautiful-with the pale, suffering features of a Latin mater dolorosa.

If anyone should inquire, Marya's official relationship to Maximilian Fein is that of his research assistant. But no one inquires-not even Else Fein who, in midsummer, suddenly goes away for several weeks. Her absence is a surprise to Marya, but Fein insists that the trip had been planned all along. For most of the time Else will be staying with a friend in Cape May, New Jersey, the widow of a professor of German, Germanborn herself, like Else. Has she left because of us, Marya would like to inquire, but of course she does not. The very word us, uttered in Fein's presence, would have a proprietary ring her lover might find disturbing. Marya waits, Marya waits for Fein to suggest that she move temporarily into the house with him; after all, he isn't really equipped to live alone and unattended, wifeless. But Fein never brings up the subject, Fein can manage with a cleaning woman once or twice a week, and of course, with Else gone, he is invited out to dinner far more frequently: there's something attractive, even rakish, about Maximilian Fein as a scholarly, other-worldly bachelor, alone for six weeks during the summer.

He does speak vaguely of their going to a seashore of their own, perhaps in Maine-then again the mountains, the Adirondacks, might be even more secluded - but of course there is the problem of his work, his innumerable books, papers: there is the problem of his "capricious" health.

Marya is alarmed, apprehensive: for several days during his wife's absence Maximilian goes into seclusion, tells Marya not to come by. He

is going to steep himself in that other world, that Night World: He'll spend most of the time in his study with the blinds drawn, sleeping there, eating very little, descending into well, he supposes it is only himself. But, by way of that self, he enters a dimension of psychic experience otherwise inaccessible.

"What about me?" is Marya's immediate, childish rejoinder.

Then, more prudently: "I wish I were capable of accompanying you."

Fein laughs, strokes her hair, smooths it away from her brow. She can see that he loves her, in fact he adores her; why has she ever thought otherwise? Marya the beautiful one, Marya the adored He says in a tone she can only interpret as fatherly: "No, Marya, you really don't wish that."

Gradually it happens that there are two "times" in Marya's experience, two aspects of time. One is vivid and pulsing with life (the hours she spends with Maximilian), the other is bleak, drab, achromatic (the hours apart from him - which in fact constitute most of her experience). A familiar story, Marya instructs herself-a woman yearning to be completed in a man, by way of a man. As if she hadn't a soul of her own.

As if she hadn't a soul of her own

It is a story, a fiction, in which Marya Knauer does not truly believe, and one she would never have condescended to write, herself. She might take up the challenge of seeking out romantic and anti-romantic structural patterns in medieval French narratives-the Chanson de Roland, for instance, Tristan et Yseut, Le Roman de la Rose-but she does not wish to "believe" in such extravagant fates as possibilities in life.

Still, she consoles herself with fantasies of Maximilian Fein as her husband; her husband; for hasn't he made oblique references to hasn't he indicated that one day they might and of course his relationship with Else is dead, burnt-out, that goes without saying. He has spoken of certain parts of Vienna, Rome, Florence, even Cairo, with such enthusiasm, surely he means to take Marya there one day soon; perhaps it is simply a matter of her professional coming-of-age. (She will have her Ph.D. in two years, she calculates. If work with Fein goes well. If there are no setbacks.)

"Tell me about yourself," Fein says.

And Marya's imagination goes blank-for what is there to tell, apart from this?

"You have been in love before, surely? You have been loved?"

Marya shakes her head mutely, wonders ifshe might alter the mood of the moment by being (for instance) ironic, witty, droll? The Marya of her high-school days, the Marya who "cracked up" her friends and

sometimes' even her teachers. Smart-ass, she was called. Sometimes Sour-mouth - by people like Wilma, who couldn't quite appreciate her humor.

But in Maximilian Fein's presence, especially in his embrace, she is not that Marya at all. She finds herself inordinately quiet for long periods of time, aware of her lover regarding, and admiring, her; she is suffused with a sense of her own precarious beauty, and the power (for surely it is power?) that resides in that beauty. We love each other, we should get married is a sudden vulgar refrain that runs through her head, but she would not dream of uttering it aloud; such a sentiment belongs, after all, to another level of being country-and-western music, perhaps.

"Tell me about yourself, Marya, Why are you so secretive?"

"There is nothing to tell."

"Oh - surely not!"

"Nothing, nothing significant "

"You're a hard young woman, aren't you? - hard on yourself."

"Apart from you," Marya whispers, close to tears, "there is nothing."

(I know you don't love me, Marya rehearses, alone-but it doesn't matter. It doesn't really matter.)

The summer ends and Else Fein returns, the house on Azazel Drive is hers by rights, Marya finds herself banished for days at a time, fired to work, work, to keep from despair. She is convinced that the fierce sexual excitement she sometimes displays in her lover's presence disgusts him; she wonders if his occasional bouts of impotency are related to that disgust, or to his waning interest in her, or, as he himself has ruefully said, simply to his age - his health.

Marya would like to assure him that making love is not that significant to her. She has always experienced sexual sensation as something that happens to her, not that she initiates or wills: a sudden explosion of the senses that overcomes her as if imposed upon her from without. In any case it only accompanies her love for him, it is only related to her intense feeling for him.

But perhaps her feeling is too intense. Perhaps he has come to dread it.

Once he said half-seriously that young women require young lovers, and Marya, stung, replied that he shouldn't think of her as young-she never thought of herself in those terms.

"Are you ageless, then? A creature out of mythology?" Fein asked, bemused. "You sometimes behave as if you were. As if your own self, your human self, were temporarily in abeyance."

Marya laughed, as if he had said something witty.

So the weeks pass. The months. He has no soul, Marya finds herself thinking, with a pang of envy.

She is working with no less concentration than ever. Or so it seems. It is the Marya of Port Oriskany, celibate, fierce, determined. When she isn't with her lover, after all, she finds the remainder of life so slow, so dull, so purposeless-what choice has she but to sink herself into work, as deeply and as obsessively as she can? It is a way of commending herself to him, proving herself, hour after hour. For Marya Knauer's writing, her thinking, her very being, take value now solely in reference to Maximilian Fein.

Odd physical symptoms have begun to plague her. Jagged headaches, stinging eyes, dizziness when she climbs a flight of stairs, frightening dreams On the very edge of sleep she hears someone call her. But she can't respond. She sees shadowy shapes in the room, but she can't respond. Her face is caressed by groping, invisible fingers-her breasts, her belly. A flame,like sensation rises between her legs. One night she is paralyzed with terror by the spectacle of a man, a pink husk of a man, only a torso and part of an abdomen, broken open like an eggshell! - a creature that turns to her with a malevolent, impish grin, opens his great dark mouth slowly, and sticks out an immense tongue.

Marya, dear Marya. Dear, brazen Marya.

From The stamps of Canada

Howard Norman

Cousin-letters

I skated out to the mail-plane. The pilot opened his door against the wind, tossed down a satchel, and shouted, "Three more stops this morning. And a storm in the forecast. Regards." I could hear his radio static, like a broom's bristle-end burning. He taxied to the far end of the lake, turned, and flew over the trees. I knew his bimonthly route. I knew he was heading toward Paduola Lake, and wondered if he would see the furniture my mother had left out in the yard. I wondered what a sofa looked like under snow.

I carried the satchel to the Hudson's Bay Company store. There Einert Sohms, with myopic squints, read each envelope then put it in the wooden hive. He had managed to salvage the key-and-mail hive from a fire that ransacked the small hotel where he was desk clerk, in Flin Flon. He had brought the hive north to Quill and nailed it up behind his store's counter. There were far too many slots for the few people in Quill who ever received mail, so Sohms used the hive to store jars of nails, ink bottles, medicines, buttons, a small-framed photograph of his niece, candle holders, batteries and myriad other paraphernalia.

"One for you," Sohms announced.

I was taking a sack of flour from its shelf, to bring home to Hettie and Samuel. "What one for me?" I said, as if complaining. "A what one for me?" I had never received a letter; I was inquiring around the word itself. Sohms held the letter up and flapped it. I placed the flour sack on the floor; it had all of a sudden felt twice as heavy. I took the letter from Sohms, then led the rolling ladder along the shelves of waxes, oils, soups, faster past the blurring cannisters of tobacco to the place in the store farthest from the counter. I climbed to the top of the ladder and sat facing away from Sohms. Turning the envelope like a prism in the light,

I tried to read the letter before opening it, but the envelope, a light blue with four stamps of Canadian ducks with ink waves going through them, was too thick. I opened the envelope and counted the pages: twenty-three. I didn't look over at Sohms, yet sensed him concentrating on the treasures in his hive in an exaggerated manner. I had seen him do this whenever he listened hard into the hidden places in his store, usually for a mouse or raccoon.

The letter was from my cousin Jenny. In black ink she had printed each word in all capital letters, though the first letter of each sentence was a larger capital. There was an equal border of white around the printing, on each page, as if she had used the first page as a guide underneath the others. I began reading. They had found an apartment in a two-storey house at 23 Olive Street, near the Kensington Market. Jenny wrote that, from the outside, the house was red brick on its lower half and red wood on top; they lived behind the wood. Then her letter toured me through the apartment, beginning at the front door. She had, at this point, included a drawing of a "silent butler" and informed me it had enough hooks to hold their winter, spring and autumn coats at the same time. The living room was to the immediate left, the kitchen to the right. Reaching the end of the two-overhead-light hall, where my bedroom would be, the letter turned me around and began to furnish the apartment. A beige sofa with wooden arms, a chair with a back "like a lyre," two floor lamps-one whose lampshade had a pattern of floating ladders, the house painters clinging to them, various hues of paint flying from their paint cans; the other was plain white and you could see the metal frame. Jenny described the kitchen table replete with locations of shellacked knotholes. She mentioned where the brooms usually leaned, that the bannister was splintery, that you could see the pipes under the kitchen sink.

Then she wrote at some length about the radiators. There was at least one in every room, and two in the living room. She thought they looked like fixed, iron accordions. They often made dungeon clanks, and spat. You could not touch the radiators, she wrote, though they did not glow or otherwise warn you of that. If you hung a shirt or blouse near one all night, the radiator would smooth it. One morning she watched the largest radiator a long time and saw the air above it waver as it did over the northern marshes on a hot day, and this made her homesick, though just once.

My mother had found a job in a nearby movie house; she took tickets and worked behind the refreshment counter. The theater owner had said to her, "This is a steady job. We never run out of movies or people who want to see movies." I hoped the owner did not ask why a woman of forty-nine wanted to ladle butter, stub tickets and flashlight an aisle for

late arrivals. Jenny did mention that the owner gave my mother one instruction: "If someone asks what you thought of the movie, just say 'Wonderful' but say it in a way which refers to both the movie and the question, as if you are flattered to be asked." Jenny wrote that my mother practiced this at home. I suspected from this anecdote that my mother decidedly did not like the owner's way of thinking. I hoped she was not too sad and that she enjoyed the movies. I promised myself to write and say I especially looked forward to seeing movies, so she could provide that. Jenny wrote, "You and I get in free," as though I were already there.

My mother had bought new copies of Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme by Paganini, Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the exact albums we had in the north. But the next day, Jenny continued, my mother bought different classical albums and gave the others away to a neighbor.

Jenny was attending a many-roomed, brick grade school a short walk from home. The school library had an aquarium. She watched the fish whenever she could; they made her laugh because they reminded her of a story I had told her years before about The Prophet of Only-Fish. Reading this in her letter, I thought how strange that a nickname could isolate from the ten million memories one incident from childhood, and name it.

The Prophet of Only-Fish was a teacher sent two summers to Quill under the auspices of the General Synod of the Church of England of Canada. His real name was Reverend J.A. Mackay. He was to teach "The Bible" and "History." His wooden schoolhouse, built by church money, had one room and three windows on the south wall. He was, I'd guess, about forty-five. He had an oratorical voice as befitted his calling, though his throat often dried during long sentences, wavered and crackled. At such moments his voice worked its way back to normal, like a stumbled mountain goat trembling, having just regained its precarious balcony. He was tall, and often pressed his lower back with his right hand to keep from stooping. I felt he was basically an intelligent man who did not belong anywhere near Quill; he was clumsy in so many ways in the village. For instance, when he tried to clean pickerel with the elder Cree women, he scraped and cut his hands, and the women feared the pickerel had been insulted in death and would purposely make themselves taste bad. Another time he vomited at the sight of a skinned beaver slowly turning over a fire, sputtering fat in tiny detonations in the ashes, its yellow teeth protruding from the skull. Such things would take time to get used to. Indeed a man of stubborn integrity, Reverend Mackay still was much like his predecessors in being largely unwilling to perceive that Christianity would be utilized cautiously, and

this use based on the Indian's idiosyncratic interpretation of it. His religion could provide, at best, an adjunct spiritual source. They would take from it uncanny things he might see as insignificant. He would continue to be tolerated as a guest, accepted by some, perhaps, as a curious guest.

I will admit Mackay worked hard to learn the Cree language. Each evening he sat with several elders, taking down words in notebooks. He began a dictionary of the local dialect. Then, each morning, he gave Bible classes, slowly assimilating his expanding vocabulary which he supplemented with cardboard illustrations of Biblical stories. But his first summer in Quill, Reverend Mackay left a month after his schoolhouse was built. He realized he was seen for the most part as a laughable character. He was largely ignored. He would not eat dog or caribou, so how could one be a proper host when he arrived on his regular afternoon visits to Cree homes? He slept in the schoolhouse. I suspect he had grown weary of lecturing to an almost empty room. One by one, each day, the children were called away: a parent's face in the window and a child was out the door, needed to learn a trapline, prepare fish, take care of babies.

On his way south, in another village, Mackay had apparently found a young Cree couple who went to live with him in Toronto. Through that winter he took language lessons of his own design from them. When he returned to Quill the following summer, his use of Cree was much improved but still clumsy.

A few days before I named him The Prophet 0/Only-Fish-that day had begun quite typically Ten or so Cree children and a few nonlndians who wanted just to watch, arrived to the schoolhouse for the morning class. As usual, Reverend Mackay's strategy was to substitute Biblical figures for those animals who, for centuries, had lived in Cree folktales. Such a tale might explain why the weasel's tail-tip remains black in winter, why the moon seldom shows all its face, or why, long ago, a woman married a bear. In these oldest of tales, animals and people spoke with each other; Mackay meticulously studied their conversations. Using a Cree tale's basic narrative, Mackay eventually maneuvered it into a moral realm.

On the morning I refer to here, Mackay turned a wolverine into the Devil. He began, "One day a wolverine became a devil " because the Cree children, quite used to metamorphosis, knew it could happen just so.

Studying a particularly popular tale, Mackay had noticed how a wolverine had hunched, undetected, under its vast garb of snow in order to

ambush a deer. The deer, on that bitter cold day, was kicking away snow, searching for ground cover to eat. Suddenly the snow moved, and blood was spilled.

Clearly the original tale was a detailed homage to the inventiveness of the wolverine. However, Reverend Mackay compared such use of camouflage to a surprise attack by the Devil. He declared the Devil was hidden in each of us. Then, quite accurately, Mackay pointed out that later in the story the same wolverine wreaks havoc in a human village, but only during crepuscular times of the day. This he equated to the dawns and dusks of one's consciousness, when one's morality wavers between Good and Evil, where the wolverine paces in mirage light.

It was a complex alignment of natural history with morality; yet that morning, in response - slowing their language down for his benefit - the Cree children worked their way back through the mental and physical terrain of the tale, straight into the cooking pot. The children instructed Mackay; they said only a deadfall trap should be used to catch the eccentric, elusive wolverine, and that the trap itself must understand distance and wolverine-loneliness. The animal must be eaten only in times of utter starvation, and then only by the man who actually traps it. The children described exactly how to skin a wolverine, and said its pelt makes excellent, warm parkas, boot trim and baby blankets. However, you must leave the pelt alone for a year; its spirit is so powerful the animal has not actually died out of it until that much time has passed. The carcass must be cut up into small pieces. Each piece must be apologized to profusely, and even then you can only hope the wolverine is in a forgiving mood.

Reverend Mackay kept notes on all of this as well, but they provided him only with an ethnography of his failings.

Over the next day Reverend Mackay's imagination fumbled with more outrageous combinations. The next morning in class he insinuated lacrosse into the Bible. He spoke of lacrosse in the context of the First Book of Samuel; he said the boy David had toppled the giant Goliath with a rock flung from a lacrosse stick. He said subsequent battlesamong the tribes of Israel-took place in the form of a lacrosse game, sometimes involving thousands of players.

Lacrosse was originally not a Cree game at all, but Iroquoian, played far to the southeast, along the St. Lawrence River. But Reverend Mackay had worked among the Iroquois and had seen the aggressive passion with which they played lacrosse. So he had a lacrosse stick sent to Quill. From its prototype several Cree men fashioned enough sticks for two teams; the stick-ends were webbed with moose sinew. In a

streambed Mackay found five smooth stones suitable for lacrosse balls. He gathered together the young Cree men from Quill and walked to an open field between the evergreens and a river. He helped them construct, from boughs, two goal nets. This completed, he instructed them in the basic tactics of lacrosse. He showed how best to pluck the rock from the ground, how to pass it to a teammate, how to score a goal. He demonstrated in turn each player's responsibility. Then he chose up sides. A few onlookers, myself included, stood at the edge of the field, well away from the flying rock.

The game began in a flurry. It began without the mental framework of rules or worry about keeping score. It proceeded with a flowing back and forth down the field, players scooping the ground and air after the rock, the parenthetical goal nets like huge, empty nests. Clearly, the rock was dangerous. Whenever it was actually gathered up, the game slowed considerably; the Cree men lobbed the rock in looping parabolas back and forth - more a vaguely organized game of catch than a competition. The consensus seemed to be that a specific skill was indeed being learned, though the skill was useful only within the game itself. But when Reverend Mackay first took the rock into the web of his stick, he let it fly-perhaps by accident or by example, and with a look of rigorous intent on his face-toward the goal in a trajectory as straight as a clothesline. The rock struck the young Cree goalkeeper in his side. He clutched over and without a groan or complaint walked toward Quill to have his badly bruised, perhaps broken, ribs attended to.

After some minutes, Reverend Mackay's face red with apology, the game started up again. There was the same staccato cadence, the same arcing tosses, the same clacking of sticks, and much laughter. The two goalkeepers were standing, deep in conversation, to one side of the same goal, so Reverend Mackay took up the defense of the abandoned net. Thus the game continued; a few players showed increasing skills, but an air of levity prevailed on the field that summer afternoon. Then quite suddenly a cousin of the rib-struck man flung the rock in a comparatively taut line toward Reverend Mackay's goal. It hit Mackay directly in the forehead, and he wobbled. Again the game stopped. The players held their sticks to the ground like hobble-canes. Reverend Mackay meandered to the edge of the field, sat down, and tucked over. After some time he said "I have headaches." Then, with a wave-away of his hand, he indicated he was all right. The lacrosse sticks were piled in the field and the players walked home. The remainder of the day Mackay could be seen sitting at the edge of the field; around dusk his mumbling began.

The next morning Reverend Mackay did not hold his class in the ordinary way nor did he hold it in the schoolhouse. He held class on the

bank of a stream quick with young trout and minnows gathered in the sun-dappled shallows. To them he continued delineating Bible stories, tracing his stick-pointer across the cardboard illustrations. The fish gilled against the current, holding still, and occasionally darted through the wavering reflections, out of the mouths and beards of Saul, Moses Reverend Mackay was pleased that his constituency returned most every morning. He stopped his evening language lessons. He stopped his visits to people all together. He went on sleeping in his schoolhouse. That autumn he left Quill by mail-plane and never returned.

Jenny's first letter had allowed me to picture the Toronto apartment, and in that respect I began living there. Except for one month that winter, when storms altered the mail-plane's schedule, a cousin-letter arrived twice a month. In May I traveled south to Toronto and joined my cousin and mother there.

Galoots

Old Helene, the stooped, eccentric florist, appeared in her shop's doorway and shouted a warning, "Galoots!" But it was too late. Besides, I had never heard galoots before, so it was the shouting itself that warned, not a definition. This took place near that corner of Olive Street where I could barely glimpse the produce bins in the Kensington Market a few short blocks away. Under their awnings were imported, winter fruits. Next to them, wooden carriages of northern fish: pickerel, whitefish, sturgeon, trout, with their cataracted eyes, splayed on ice melting as though to provide water they could breathe in again. It was Saturdayno school; I could have taken my time and browsed the market. I had a shopping list in my coat pocket. The snow was light and flakes drifted, though all week wet snow had fallen until the chute-doors of mailboxes had to be swept and letters were aimed instead of slid in, to keep them dry. Helene disappeared among her tallest plants, but where she had pointed the galoots-five men, all in their midtwenties, I'd say-stood around a smoking trash barrel. When the wind gusted into the barrel, smoke clouded their faces and they suddenly appeared headless; then, coughing, they flapped smoke away as if drawing their own faces back into existence on a slateboard, in large, confused scribbles. During their brief invisibility I should have maniacally bulled into the barrel or run into the market, but the thing those options shared was that I simply could not think; I just watched. Motionless out of the smoke, they glared at me. With their fist-faces, hunched, nervous shoulders, and lacking even the inventiveness of ambush, the galoots put a quickening terror

into my stomach. A moment such as this is self-contained; you can almost memorize it as it occurs, and it will stay inert in your consequent nightmares, like a photograph pasted to the center of a moving-picture screen. I saw the galoots quite clearly this way. "After I bought a melon, I was going to walk past the breads," I offered. I realize now that that sentence emitted doom like a scent; my hope of meandering through the market was lost. The sentence had just flown out; no such odd, personal comment about bread and a melon could change anything in their thinking. They shuffled around me - stumps protruding from an icy moat; there seemed something half-formed about them, or broken, as though I were about to grapple with torsos-even though they succeeded in getting their faces back from the barrel smoke. Of course I had simply walked into their huddled, angry boredom; maybe I was the object of an entertaining strategy they had worked out all morning, holding their hands over the barrel's rim, rubbing them together against the cold, as though that glove friction originally caused the rags and paper inside to ignite. It occured to me I had seen them before in the neighborhood, though individually and from a distance as each of them worked: one unloaded trucks in the market: another, I recalled, I had seen making keys in the local hardware. Remembering people in other circumstances, yet while they are standing directly in front of you, makes them seem both tangible and not; I solved this problem by taking the first swing, a wild punch to a shoulder. It was more or less a way to activate my fear, my resignation to the entire, useless encounter. Immediately they pulled my coat up over my head, a small mercy, though after a few punches I nonetheless felt bruises-almost bone-deep echoes-on my face. Toward the end of their punching, too, a nostril burst and blood welled up and I had to snort it out. That made me feel I was about to both drown and smother in stifling coat air. They spun me and I fell, or was tripped. Under knees I was held flat. I managed to twist and push my head free of the collar, felt my lungs gasp, then the rest of me inhale; one of them stuffed the shopping list into my mouth. I spat it out. While they scooped frantically for packing snow, I kicked at them, then heard, "Watch his feet " My galoshes were pulled off. They worked the snow around my legs, stuffing it up from the cuff-ends of my corduroy trousers, then hurriedly packed snow thickly over my chest, back and stomach-under my coat-so I bloated. They spread my arms; I heard, "The little shit won't hold still They packed snow inside my sleeves in stiff, scarecrow fashion, like splints. "Let's fucking get out of here. Two of them propped me against the side of a garbage truck idling in the cold, anchored me in snow up to my shins, packed more snow along my outlines. Already flush to the truck, I still felt myselffalling backward, and was in fact relieved to have the truck there.

They were of the neighborhood; they knew the work schedules, knew the garbage collectors were in the corner cafe, hands around coffee cups, gloves on the radiator. One galoot wiped bloody snow from his coat sleeve with long, sweeping motions, like he had just reached in and delivered a calf.

I felt soldered to the truck. I saw five blurs walk off; I thought, then, if my vision improved, through snow melting down from my hair, tears, dizziness-just to see clearly-my humiliation would somehow lessen accordingly, even though I was this ludicrous snowman grafted to a garbage truck. A red umbrella, held forward at a slant to deflect the wind, appeared: behind it a passerby, an elderly woman, who then saw me in her peripheral vision. She stopped. She closed her umbrella. Slowly turning, then facing me, she was taken aback, startled without moving; then my predicament seemed to quiz her face: Could he be in trouble? In the next instant I saw 1 had become a threat, a solid form of some myth-wind that accompanies the old into the kingdom of death, so that she tightly held closed the top of her overcoat, opened the umbrella at me and hurried away. However, she had done me a favor: the brightness of her umbrella seemed to leave an opening in the opaque minutes of my being stunned, and 1 could then see myself reflected in the opposite window of the cafe. 1 found my snow-corpulence laughable. (1 thought North, as it were, to the time a half-frozen Cree man was brought into someone's house in Quill. Sitting on a table, legs and hands being rubbed, he listened to many Indian people who had arrived to speak to him. Only the circumstances of summer were mentionedan opposite-thinking; the arrival of geese, sun glinting off lakes, brushfires, the lightning-scarred birch; spoken memories designed to help him thaw.)

This happened: snow began to fall a little more steadily. Blood clotted up in the nostril. I squinted, closed my eyes; for a moment I wanted to stay with invisible pain. Opening my eyes, I noticed the incongruent ornateness of the painted letters OLIVE CORNER CAFE on the otherwise shabby building. I stared, trying to focus, through the cafe's glass door, down the aisle-tables to either side-at the grainy, swinging door that led to the kitchen; it had a small, rectangular window in it which was steamed over. I watched the small window; when a cloth rubbed it clean, the cook's face appeared in it. I felt I was looking through the wrong end of binoculars-my focus still was not wholly clear and the window was steaming up again from the cook's breath. Yet he had seen me. We had stared at each other, through both doors, down the aisle; he did not come out, he only stared until the window steamed over. Another face moving in and out of smoke, I thought. I began to recall the kitchen behind the door, a recollection comprised of many glimpses

from the times I had sat with my cousin Jenny in the cafe and had seen into the kitchen when the door swung open. The kitchen was my summer then-l needed to think myself in there quickly, because I felt the chill sink beneath my ribs, amplify, then tremor through me: a climate of vegetable broths misting up, percolators, sinks of scalding dish suds, the cook shuttling between skillets yet I felt as motionless and helpless as I think I ever had. Through the order-window in the back of the cafe I saw the bobbing of the cook's foolish, leavened hat.

One of the garbage collectors, a large black man with a heavy gait, wearing a gray striped mechanic's smock over his coat, came out through the cafe door. When he first saw me he stopped, said nothing, then turned and opened the door again. He called in, "There's something by the truck I need help with. and the seriousness mixed with curious levity drew the three other garbage collectors out the door. They had taken their gloves from the radiator and slid them on. But the tops of their galoshes were still flared open, and they hadn't bothered to button up their coats; they just started kicking snow away from my legs. One man went back inside the cafe and returned with several knives and spoons, and they used those to help chip me from the truck.

"Let's get you inside, man."

They held me up, half dragging me down the aisle, numb, drippingwhich in itself seemed impossible, that anything of me, from me could move-into the kitchen. They sat me down in a chair. Two of them began rubbing my hands briskly, they spoke in rapid anecdotes about near-frozen fingers, toes, ears, from times in various cities. "In Chicago Lord I don't lie when I was collecting there the alleys freeze at your face just for looking down them. The smallest of the collectors, who seemed to have the largest, strongest hands, said, "Now you take this coat off, and while you at it the shirt an' trousers an' let the kitchen get at you some In arthritic movements, I managed that. "Yes sir, you ain't the only one out freezing today, I guarantee that true as I am standing here I felt the places on my face and forehead where the skin was chafed, blood scaled up, eyebones felt tilted. but I'll say this, they done a job on you, yes sir, they done a job

The garbage collectors went back through the swinging door; that smallest man, who was also the oldest of the collectors, with a sad, deeply lined, ebony face, beard flecked with white, said, "When you think you ready, come out and get something hot to drink." Then the cook said, "See that closet over there?" I nodded. "There's extra clothes in that closet. Bring them back when you can, understand?" He tossed me a dish towel, then another, then a third. I toweled my face and hair, then the rest of me. I walked over to the closet and took from their

hangers the cook's spare outfit - white shirt, apron, pants. Putting them on, I rolled up the cuffs and sleeves to make them fit. I sat back on the chair for a few minutes. I had a half-closed eye whose lid seemed to weigh more than the other lid. Still, I watched the cook ambidextrously work his spatulas, turning, arranging, flipping onto plates sausages, eggs, fried potatoes. He had a radio hung by twine like a swing against the window in front of him, tuned to popular music; mostly he hummed the melodies. He hummed along, and whenever bacon or sausages were about to sizzle loudly he would raise the volume of his humming just before turning up the volume of the radio. The dial was smudged with grease. He would erratically blurt out a single word taken from the song, even if the same word was not being sung on the radio: "Beeleeeve bee-Ieeeve bee-leeeve while the song had left believe well behind.

The cook, a stout, quick black man, who snarled up his lip when sweat bothered him there, was concentrating on toast. I finally walked through the swinging door, and when I appeared in the cafe, one garbage collector called me over, "Hey, hey, little man, over here!" I sat down with all four, squeezed around a table. They ordered hot soup, then tea, then coffee for me. "This'll get you feeling like to piss on the equator!" the large man who had first seen me against the truck said, laughing. They continued their conversation about some manikins they had picked up that morning: a stack of store-window manikins, from in front of a house a few blocks from the cafe. As they told more, I felt each sip of soup search out a cold place, and slightly singe my tongue.

"Ain't never seen nothing like that before, no sir."

"An' how many years you been collecting?"

"Twenty, mmm mmm, that's right."

"Twenty, Lord."

"Twenty, an' I never did see nothing approach what we saw that morning."

From their conversation I gathered that the previous morning, collecting garbage from metal cans in the alley alongside the same house, they had looked in a window and seen a strange sight: a man was standing in front of ten or so fully-clothed manikins, seated in folding chairs; each manikin held a different musical instrument. In grandiloquent gestures, the man waved a baton, in the silence of the window.

"We ain't got no right to stare at what a man does inside his own house and home, no sir."

"But we did just that, we did that."

"Yes we did, we did, an' we stared right on through till he was done with that particular concert he was having by hisself

"He stopped then."

"Yes he did, an' he saw us then."

"Yes."

"That's for certain."

"An' we just went back to working " with our heads down. Back to work.

"That's right."

"An' I have seen a few things through a window in twenty years

"Yes sir, and this very morning we pick up that whole orchestra from the street curb, isn't that something?"

"He left them there."

"Yes he did."

"That is something."

"That's right, an' they were fully clothed Lord."

"An' the house most certainly did look empty."

"Yes it was."

"You can tell. ."

"You can tell when a man leave his house empty You can tell even from the outside like we was

The seventh circle, from. Graven images

]ane Aumerle

Tum, 0 most gracious, most sweet Virgin Mary, thine eyes of mercy toward us; and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit ofthy womb, Jesus.

His black knight's last play had left the king vulnerable, and Keith moved the white queen two squares forward to place it on a clear diagonal. Check. He studied the board while he tapped a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. Briefly, his conscience twinged; he had been smoking too much lately. Not that it had been keeping him awake nights. Plenty of time to worry about emphysema and lung cancer when he got home. Around the angle of the hall, someone was doing something to the Coke machines. There was the low rattle of a key in a lock, a sliding of glass on metal, the door swinging shut. Footsteps receded, moving toward the other end of the barracks.

Keith frowned, trying to regain his concentration. If he moved the black queen's bishop up

What the hell, it didn't matter. Just plain fucking damn didn't matter. He pushed the board and its clean mathematical problem away and leaned back against the cushions. Turquoise vinyl and blond veneer: all the comforts of stateside. From where he sat, he could see the hills that ringed the base, prodigally green, pitched and folded at angles he had thought impossible except as brushstrokes on rice paper. Vietnam must be one of the most beautiful countries on earth, but the Chinese, the French, and now half a generation of Americans had scrawled their killing signatures across it, with no more care than if it had been a bathroom wall. And each wave of invaders had left a generation of halfcaste children. Origen had had it wrong. Hell was real, and inhabited. Keith took a long drag on the cigarette, let the smoke go slowly. Here's to the memory of U.S. Ulysses Simpson United States Grant. He should know.

So what are you doing here, hypocrite? Canada was practically in the backyard, and your draft card was just as combustible as anyone else's.

For that matter, no one forced you to quit med school. You could still be in Minneapolis, bouncing babies and charming old ladies. Kiss the whole world and make it better.

In the corridor, brisk footsteps approached; coins jingled down the slot of the Coke machine. There was a ka-chunk as the bottle slid into the dispenser, more footsteps, knocking on a door. The sounds registered only on the periphery of his attention, irrelevant intrusions.

Except that

Except that, of course, it wasn't always that easy. Sometimes you lost a patient. Some were worse than lost.

He had found Leah Ginsberg sitting quietly as she must have done for most of an hour, her fingers twined in her husband's, already stiffening; her eyes dry. She hadn't even thought to reconnect the respirator. The black rubber cord lay coiled like a snake under the socket. Later, when the police came, she made no resistance.

And Lewis Jorgensen, who until that afternoon had occupied a niche not too far down from God, had said that a doctor didn't have the right to say who would die or when, and when he stood up with the rest of his class and swore to do no harm he had damned well better mean it, because a physician is dedicated to life, boy, life and besides, there were decisions laymen just weren't equipped to make, particularly not laymen in an emotional state, and you'll see, it'll turn out all right, they'll let her off easy.

None of which explained why it had been necessary to call the police. Or why, given the stage and nature of Ginsberg's illness, ethics had made it necessary actively to prolong his dying. Let the theologians puzzle over the problem of pain if they had nothing better to occupy their time. The medical profession was in a position to do something about it.

And had chosen not to.

Keith had resigned at the end of the semester. Non nocere. Better to be an honest killer. His draft notice had arrived three days later.

And here he was, basically trained and highly proficient with the M-16, the .45 Colt automatic 'Pistol and assorted other instruments and methods of murder.

I hate this.

Around the corner, voices rose. One climbed the register to a shout. "I realize that someone put it there, Sergeant. Your intellectual achievement staggers me. Who?"

"Who what? Sir?" The answer was calm.

"Who put it there?"

Keith stubbed out his cigarette and moved quietly across the rec room. From that vantage point, he had a clear view of the corridor and

the two men standing in the doorway of the NCO's quarters. One, the platoon sergeant, lounged casually against the jamb. His shirttail was out, and his hair was at least two weeks overdue for a trimming. Men who had fought with him claimed that it grew faster and longer in direct proportion to the Lieutenant's displeasure with it. In six days with Charlie Company, Keith had concluded that displeasure was the lieutenant's permanent relationship to Herzog. Second Lieutenant (Glorious Leader) Tyler Emerson was a career officer with all the proper attitudes. He had, so the rumor went, been given a "difficult" unit and ordered to do something about it. He stood glaring down at Herzog, his fair-skinned face an ugly red, his freckles an eruption. Even his scalp, visible beneath his Marine-style crewcut, was flushed. In his hand, the knuckle joints white on the neck as if he were trying to strangle it, was a bottle of Schlitz.

"Are you suggesting," Herzog said with uncharacteristic grammar, "that one of the men in my platoon is responsible, Sir?"

"No, goddammit!" Emerson bellowed. "I'm suggesting that youyou personally - are responsible."

Abruptly, Keith stepped into the hallway and cleared his throat. "Uh, excuse me, Sir, but I couldn't help overhearing

The Lieutenant spun on him. "Yes? Chattan, isn't it? What do you want?"

"Sergeant Herzog didn't put the beer in the Coke machine, Sir."

Behind Emerson's back, Herzog's eyebrows arched halfway up his forehead. He said nothing, though, only gave a small shrug and a halfsmile that acknowledged unexpected good fortune.

"Who did?" Emerson barked at Keith.

"I don't know, Sir."

"Then how do you know he didn't?" The red blotches deepened. The Lieutenant was going to have hypertension one day, assuming that his military dedication didn't kill him first.

Keith met Herzog's puzzled gaze and mentally crossed his fingers. "Because we were playing chess in the lounge, Sir. Have been for the last hour."

"Chess? Herzog? Since when?"

"Keith has been teaching me. I'm not very good at it yet." Herzog's smile became self-deprecating. He returned the Lieutenant's stare levelly, letting the smile broaden into a grin.

"And when we ran out of matches" - Keith nodded toward the bulge in Herzog's shirt pocket - "he came back for his lighter."

"All right." Emerson glared at them both. "If you were in the recreation area, you must have seen or heard whoever tampered with the machine. Who was it?"

Keith caught himself beginning to shift his weight from one foot to the other and suppressed the impulse. "Sir, there's no condensation moisture on that bottle. So it can't be very cold."

Emerson glanced down at the brown glass, frowning. "So?"

"So it must have been put to cool in just the last few minutes. Herzog was in his room, and couldn't have seen who did it."

"I see." The muscles of the Lieutenant's jaw corded along the bone. He stared at Herzog. "I want it understood that I believe neither of you. I intend to report that opinion along with the rest of the facts about this incident. Is that clear?"

"Perfectly," said Keith.

"Sergeant?"

"S.O.P., Lieutenant. What else is new?"

Emerson turned on his heel and stalked off. His death-grip on the bottle had not slackened.

When he was out of sight, Herzog tucked the lighter back into his pocket. All the laughter had gone from his face. "What did you do that for?"

Keith shrugged, not really knowing the answer himself.

"You just made Chattan a dirty word 'round him. You know that:' Herzog said.

"Yeah."

"Yeah." Then, frowning, "What the hell are you doing here?"

"I got drafted."

"Naw, I don't mean that." A wave of Herzog's hand dismissed the obvious. "How come they didn't send you to OTS? You were in law school or something, weren't you?"

"Med school."

"And they didn't made you a Corpsman?" Astonishment flickered in Herzog's eyes, to be replaced by resignation. "Shit. Goddam Army gets dumber by the day."

"Not their fault. They tried. OTS, too."

"Oh," Herzog said. Keith waited for the inevitable questions, barely banked anger still smoldering inside him. They never came. Instead, Herzog hooked a thumb in the direction Emerson had taken. "He's gone to wave his 'evidence' under the Captain's nose and find the keys. Give me a hand here, willya?"

"Sure." Keith followed the other man back to the lounge, then watched, fascinated, as he slipped a length of wire into the Coke machine's lock slot, wiggled it, and swung the door open. "Hey, where'd you learn that?"

Herzog grinned at him. "Basic survival course, Lower East Side." He extracted the remainder of two six-packs, piling Keith's arms high with

bottles. They were just cool; moisture on the glass soaked into his sleeves.

"Jesus. What'd you do, buy the brewery? Where are you going to hide all this?"

The grin became wider, quirking up unexpectedly on one side. "The only place old Piss-face can't get to it. Unless he sends for a stomach pump, that is. You gotta help, you know."

A little hesitantly, not quite sure what he was getting into, but suddenly certain that whatever it was, he wanted into it very badly, Keith smiled back at him. "Any time."

It had been raining. The quonset hut that served as a chapel smelled musty, of incense and candle wax overlaid by the pervading odor of wet earth. The green canvas curtain that marked off the booth showed a streak of mildew along the hem. Shadows crowded close; the face beyond the grille was a featureless, inaccessible blur.

Keith craned his neck to watch as another squadron of Phantoms shrieked over the ancient city of Hue, swinging low above the slopes that harbored the VC gun emplacements. The steady pounding of bombs and missiles made a single vast rumbling deep in the earth, bass harmony to the sharper exchange of automatic weapons fire. It was all the lost souls screaming in all the locked wards of the world down through time, the wolf unchained and running free at last, dress rehearsal for Ragnarok. And it never let up.

Mondo cane.

Except that dogs had more sense.

The planes disappeared into the smoke that shrouded the surrounding highlands. Keith moved carefully, rifle slung across his arm, slipping from the meager shelter of a garden wall to the corner of a house somehow left standing intact. It bore the mark of flame, black streaks faded to gray across the pale stucco. The acrid smell of burning still lingered, mingled with the stench of death. He tightened the bandana over his mouth and nose, eased his helmet back from his forehead. The webbing was soaked with sweat.

If I live to get home, I'm going to be a clean freak, shower after every meal and four times on Sunday.

He hadn't had a bath in-he couldn't remember the last time he'd been clean. His body was caked with dust and pulverized plaster and its own oils; the state of his socks and underwear was something he refused to contemplate.

Grime served a useful purpose in war. Its minor discomfort kept your mind off other things.

To his right, movement caught his attention as two men crept across the ruined garden. Independent of thought, his body tensed, hands tightening on his gun. Then he relaxed. The newcomers were Americans, from his own unit. One was the Corporal, Bernie Dancause, whose dark mestizo face made a strip of living brown between his helmet and camouflage-cloth mask. "Cu{date, rubio," he called softly. "You still owe me a bundle from last Saturday's game."

Keith flashed him the V. "Peace, brother."

"Vaya, got you Viking types beat all to hell."

Crouching, Bernie scuttled across the narrow enclosure and hunkered down beside Keith. The space had been an herb bed; the smoky fragrance of bruised coriander coiled like a ghost along the air. "Listen, rubio, Sarge says be extra careful. There's a guy in an NVA uniform a couple streets over-got a hatchet or machete or something right between the eyes. Been dead like around a day, since before we got into this part of town. No tellin' where his buddies are."

Another flight of jets streaked overhead. Their payload fell near the edge of the city, rocking the ground. Bernie's companion made a wild grab for a length of upright pipe that must once have served a fountain, just balancing on his heels. Chunks of mortar, jarred loose from the wall, shattered across Keith's boots. A fine white powder sifted down over his shoulders. "Jesus," he said when he could make himself heard. "No wonder they put up such a fight."

"Yeah. God knows what they got up in those hills. We ain't gonna be through here anytime soon."

"If they've got regular Army dug in up there, we may never be through here."

"Tell me. Herzog said the brass have called in for more air support. Don't know if we'll get it, though." There was a pause. Then, "Keith, where's Mick?"

Keith looked away, futilely trying to shut out the vision of torn flesh and thinly splintered bone ends, the white cord of tendons hanging free. Trying to shut out the fierce longing for the cool aseptic world of medicine and its certainty of purpose. He swallowed hard. "Med station. We ran into a booby trap a couple of hours ago. Old guy lying in the middle of the street, still breathing They think he'll probably lose his right arm."

"Shit."

"At least he'll be going home alive." The flat Boston vowels identified the second man as Sullivan, Bernie's partner. "There's something to be said for that."

"I guess so," Dancause agreed. "Look, Keith, you'd better team up with Larry and me. Herzog'd skin you alive if he knew you were running

around alone. Not to mention what he'd do to me for lettin' you Christ!" A mortar shell whined over the house and exploded in the next street. "Let's get out of here!"

The Corporal pushed off from the wall and sprinted down a winding alley that led between rows of once-elegant homes. House-to-house fighting had reduced most of them to gutted hulks. Stones lay tumbled to the paving, broken glass glittered like sequins sprinkling the black velvet of an opera cape, shone among brilliant silks spilled over the tiles from the open wardrobe in one corner. The scent of Emeraude pervaded the room; its flask lay in crystal fragments, heavy lead glass belligerently sharp-edged as natural quartz. Outside, an AK-47 stuttered, gouging a neat line of white-rimmed hollows across the delicate peach-tinted plaster. Keith crouched to the side of the French window opposite. It led out onto a balcony, where a potted rubber plant stood, still oddly untouched. Lightly he traced the outline of a leaf; a waxy deep green trail appeared in the dust behind his fingers. He could see the street below through the wrought-iron railing. Only one door in the neighboring house offered an unobstructed line of fire into this room. Downstairs, there was a short rifle burst, then Larry's voice raised in a Celtic war-whoop. "Yowee, got the cocksucker!" Weariness flooded through Keith's mind and body. No use, no use at all If there had ever been any point of contact between this time and place and the rest of his life, he had forgotten it. Or ceased to care, he wasn't sure which. Vaguely, as if from a vast distance, the thought came to him that that was wrong.

Which was something he couldn't take time to worry about just now. The sniper had priority.

Automatically-he had done it so many times by now his hand knew the pattern as well as the frets of his guitar- Keith unclipped a grenade from his belt and pulled the pin. He held it as long as he dared, counting off the seconds.

His aim was a little off, but good enough. The grenade struck the jamb and bounced inside. The roaring shock split the bureau mirror from side to side. Its splinters showered onto the floor with soft chiming sounds, intermixed with continuing secondary explosions as the enemy gunner's ammunition went up. When Keith looked out, his nest was bathed in

flame lit the night, brilliant as day, raining down onto the hills until the sky glowed blood-colored from horizon to horizon. Keith lay staring up at it, watching as pale billows of smoke scudded across the crimson. The jets that screamed overhead at intervals seemed strangely at home, mechanical demons, dark-seeing eyes winking red and green,

undersides fish-belly white. Artillery fire had damped down to a constant deep growl.

Travel poster by Hieronymus Bosch. Visit the scenic Seventh Circle.

In spite of the heat, a chill ran through Keith because 1 dread the loss 0/ heaven and the pains 0/ hell I wonder how many men I've killed today. He shut his eyes against the lurid glare. I wonder why.

"Hey." Herzog's voice intruded on his thoughts. "Somebody ought to go tell the neighbors to quiet it down a bit." There was a soft, obscene muttering, mixed with the dull scraping of metal on metal as the squad downed their field rations. A hand tapped lightly on his shoulder. "How about it, Chattan? You've got the prettiest manners in the outfit. You could go up to Hanoi and knock on the door and say, 'Please, Uncle Ho, us poor working boys -'" He broke off, snapping his fingers in frustration. "Naw, us poor proletarian folks are trying to get a good night's sleep because we've got to get up and go to work in the morning, and would you mind to turn the volume down a teense?"

Wry laughter rippled around the circle. Even the Lieutenant, bent over a map spread out on the well cover in the center of the courtyard, smiled faintly. In the light of the Coleman lantern, his face was haggard. The lines that bracketed his mouth had not been there a week ago; the flesh across his cheekbones looked bruised.

"You're nuts." Keith spoke without heat. He covered his eyes with one arm, trying to ignore the rankness of his shirt. It was easier to do, every day.

"Keith?" Herzog persisted.

"Yeah?" He didn't move.

"You eaten?"

Keith's stomach turned over. "I'm not hungry."

"Didn't ask if you were. I asked if you'd eaten."

"No. Haven't had time."

There was a sound of rummaging, and a small packet landed in his midsection. "You've got time now. Fall to."

Keith set the rations aside. "No, thanks."

"Hey!"

Herzog spoke softly, but his voice carried an edge that cut cleanly through the buzz of general conversation. Bernie was halfway through another in his seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of Texas Aggie jokes, Emerson was calling off measurements on the map to a Captain whose lapels bore the double towers of the Engineering Corps. Some of the men had already stretched out on what was left of the grass, or on bedding left behind by fleeing residents. Others talked or smoked quietly, the orange-red ash of their cigarettes like sparks kindled from the blaze above. Here and there a match flared, picking out the curve of a cheek that had not yet shed its baby fat, incongruously obscured

under ten days' growth of beard; glinting on bloodshot eyes whose depths held nightmares, preserved in clarity through all tomorrows. No one was paying any attention to Herzog, or to Keith. His awareness of their courtesy was a fragile and brittle thing.

Keith sat up. "What?" "Eat." Herzog pointed to the packet. "I told you I don't want "Hey, look, I don't give a damn about whether you want it. I'm not going to have you keeling over on me and maybe getting yourself or somebody else killed. I don't like losin' my men, and particularly I don't like losin' 'em for dumb reasons. Ya got that? Somebody fainting on his feet 'cause his delicate sensibilities have been offended is one goddam dumb reason, dig?" Herzog's eyes met his and held; he was as angry as Keith had ever seen him. "Now" - he tossed the rations back into Keith's lap - "you gonna feed yourself or do I do it for you?"

Inside Keith, the tensions of the last two weeks broke free. "Just what I've always wanted," he snapped, "a nanny. You going to wipe my nose for me, too?"

The dark blue gaze held his steadily. "Up to you." "Try."

Herzog was on him so fast he didn't even have time to brace himself. Keith went down heavily under the flat lunge, Herzog's weight on him squeezing the breath out of his body and pinning his legs. Air tore at his throat, his heart banged against his ribs and screamed to be let out. Miles away, someone was shouting; boot leather rang on stone pavement. Nearer, something was pulling alternately at his shirt and Herzog's arm, pleading, "Hey, you guys, knock it off, huh? Hey, c'mon." They shook Bernie off, rolled a couple times to fetch up against a crate of ammunition. For a second that seemed to stretch into years, Herzog held him there, shoulders jammed to the rough boards, hands immobilized in a grip that could have been painful but wasn't. The dark face and its mass of curls loomed above him, blotting out the sky. It crossed Keith's mind that Herzog was trying very hard not to hurt him. The pressure eased a little. "Had enough?" The shadows ran, congealed like scabs over gaping fissures in street and walls. He went neat-footed, picking his way through rubble delicately as Kali among the skulls. A hot wind slipped past him. Smoke rode on it, and the heavy rottensweetness of decaying flesh. A dead child lay sprawled in a crumbling doorway, limbs swollen and black-purple. As he approached, a cloud of flies rose from her open mouth. The sound of their wings made a high, thin whining. Nothing else stirred, only the faintest movement of black cloth. It might have been the wind. Sullivan raised the muzzle of his rifle

so that the gun seemed an extension of his own arm and emptied the magazine into the scrawny body. The corpse jerked convulsively with each impact; blood and gouts of flesh spattered the bottom and sides of the ditch. The face down there in the shadows was frozen in a grin that might have been defiance; the eyes were black and liquid. Beside the dead man lay a battered Chinese rocket-launcher and a three-foot-long machete. "Goddammit to hell, Larry," Bernie shouted, "stop wasting the goddam ammo like that!" Keith spun throwing himself down in the dirt beside Herzog. From beneath the rim of his helmet he watched as the explosion toppled the mortar in one direction, picked up its two operators and sent them flying in another. The shock rippled through the ground under Keith, rattling the tools still neatly stacked along the potter's workbench. Herzog smiled without humor. "Well, I guess that cancels the motherfuckers' mortgage."

Two hours ago, a mortar shell had sent Bernie Dancause out of Hue on a Medevac chopper, an IV in each arm and a flat spot under the blanket where his left leg should have been. He had lost a lot of blood. The Corpsmen had been optimistic. Keith knew they had also been lying.

He pushed himself up. The outbuilding was lost in flames, shadows like nightmare shapes dancing along the walls. Nazgul. Herzog and Bernie went back a long way. "Hey," Keith said softly, "maybe he'll make it."

Herzog glanced at him sharply, firelit eyes pale slits in the grime that coated his face. For a long moment, the gaze held; measuring, judging. Then he said, "Yeah, Bernie's a fighter, never did know when to quit. He's gonna take it hard, though. Won't be easy, just take it easy, sweetie, hold still, none of that, now."

The place had been a fish market, once. The smell still lingered, soaked into the walls and timbers. A scale with flat pans lay in disorder on the floor, together with shallow straw baskets and the delicate feather shapes of bones. Living quarters for the proprietor and his family had been on the upper floor, served by a narrow stairway. Keith took the steps two at a time. Briefly, he regretted that he had not taken the extra second or so to call Herzog. Apart from the obvious, he had no idea what he was getting into. Or, apart from the obvious, what he was going to do about it.

Blood under the bridge.

The woman lay slumped in the far corner of the bare room. She was pretty, or had been, before the bruises and swelling. They made it difficult to guess her age, but her hands were young, her long hair

unfaded black. Her head rested against the wall at an unnatural angle.

A man knelt before her. pulling her toward him by the ankles. separating her legs at the same time. She moaned softly. The man ignored her. His fly gaped open on a bulging erection; Keith caught the gleam of a maple leaf on his collar. "Hey!" he yelled. "Leave her alone!"

Momentarily distracted. the officer turned halfway toward him. He had not started. nor reached. for the automatic rifle a couple feet from his hand. "Take a hike. Sonny."

Keith moved slowly away from the stairwell. There was a hollow place inside him. as if all feeling had been suspended. He was thinking very clearly. and he spoke carefully and distinctly. as if trying out an unfamiliar language. "This lady is a civilian. She's hurt. Rape is a court-martial offense." Unobtrusively. he shifted his grip on his gun. It was slick with sweat.

"O.K .... said the grin. "you want a go on the gook bitch. that's all right with me. But you wait your turn like a good little soldier. savvy?" He reached under the long tunic of the woman's ao dai, fumbling for the trouser waistband. She cried out sharply.

The stock of the M-16 caught him across the chest and upper arm; the magazine impacted square against his teeth. The blow jarred Keith's wrists. reverberated up his arms and through his collarbones. Blood ran from the Major's mouth. bright scarlet staining his black beard and filthy uniform. He fell back on his side. scrabbling for purchase on the smooth tiles. "God damn! What the fuck you think you're doing?"

"Get up." said Keith. "Get over there by the window and put your hands flat against the wall." He still held the rifle like a club. Don't threaten the son-of-a-bitch any more than you have to. only make him more dangerous.

"If I don't?"

"I'm not offering you a choice. Move."

"My leg's hurt. I don't think I can."

Keith reversed the gun. "Move."

"O.K .• O.K." Deliberately. as if in pain. the Major pushed himself onto his hands and knees. "Jesus." he groaned. "I think it's busted."

"You'll get medical attention if you need it. The Judge Advocate's office is very understanding about things like that."

"Yeah. aren't they." The officer began to get to his feet. His name. stamped in faded laundry ink above the left pocket of his shirt. was Stephens. H. "You know what it'll mean if you take me in? My family will hear about it. no way to keep it from them. Wife. two boys. It'll tear them to pieces."

Keith said nothing. fighting down a mixture of pity and disgust. He spared a glance for the woman. She was still breathing. but shallowly. in

rapid gasps that meant trouble. Otherwise, she had not stirred. Only her eyes still tracked, following Stephens' movements, and his own. Their flat surfaces held no expression, a numbness beyond pain.

Oh Christ, her back's broken. Or maybe her neck. Herzog, where the hell are you?

"I mean," the Major went on, "think how you'd feel in their place, if it was your old man."

Francis Chattan's cool, self-possessed smile floated up from Keith's memory To save his soul, he could not imagine his father engaged in anything so declasse as rape. Especially when it was patently unnecessary. But that was old hurt, long since dealt with. He forced it aside. "Can it. If they meant so much to you, you'd have thought of that earlier. Are you going to get up, or not?"

The other straightened slowly, still favoring his leg. "Yeah, kid, sure. I'm going to stand right up and take my medicine like a man, you bet. And you can go to bed at night thinking how you did your duty and how that makes you so fucking much better than the rest of us-Jesus God damn!" The injured knee gave way, bringing Stephens down on the flats of his hands. His weapon lay under his palms. His fingers closed around it, swinging the muzzle up to rest a bare six inches from the woman's head. "O.K., kid. My turn. Drop it."

Keith complied. "If you fire that thing," he said calmly, "my buddy will hear. You won't make it out of the house." His mouth was dry, but he felt nothing he could identify as fear. The lack registered as a kind of shock.

Again teeth flashed in the black beard. "Sure I won't. If your partner were anywhere within shouting distance, he'd have been here by now." The grin widened. "On the other hand, maybe he's got the balls to know a party when he sees one. Go to the stair head and call him." "No."

The Major's knuckles were white where they gripped the gun. "Yes." Keith said nothing. He tried to blank his mind, to clear away the sliptime image of the woman's ruined body sliding down against the wall, the light that ran like water along the tattered silk of her tunic, the frayed edges of the embroidered collar. Tried, most of all, not to imagine the blood or the blue-sheened shards of skull, the pink-flecked brain matter spattered across the stucco.

All of a life, reduced to a few lumps of spongy gray stuff and the sharp, iron smell of its passing.

The rifle barrel shifted, nudged against his belly. "Yes," the Major repeated. "No."

"Gut-shot man can take a long time to die." A bomb fell to the north;

the overcast sky framed in the window flashed dirty red. The metal pressed harder. "Hurts like hell."

"No." Keith spoke softly. It had been made easy, after all.

Then the pressure was abruptly gone, Stephens toppled heavily against him as the floor rose up and hit them both and Herzog stood in the doorway with his own rifle leveled. The sound of his shot died slowly in the quiet room. He moved toward Keith and the man sprawled prone across his legs. "You all right?"

Keith nodded. "Yeah." He sat up and pushed the Major off him, rolling the inert weight onto its back. His hands were shaking with the onset of reaction.

The bullet had taken the officer precisely between the eyes; he was unequivocally dead. Blood gurgled in his throat and ran from his nose, spilled over the stumps of his broken teeth and onto his beard. Foulness rose from his voided bowels. Grotesquely, his erection continued to stiffen and swell.

Herzog giggled, a strangled sound suddenly cut off. "Persistent bas, tard, ain't he?"

"Spinal reflex." Keith ran his tongue over dry lips. "It's not uncommon in certain types of violent death."

With the words, training and half a lifetime of purpose reasserted themselves. He turned to the woman. Close to, he could see that she was half-caste, with the cloudy blue-gray eyes of her European father. "Madame, je ne suis pas medecin, mais He struggled with the fragments of long-unused language; nothing in the polite pattern sentences of French 10 1 had equipped him to deal with this. "Si nous pouvons vous aider, mon ami et moi He laid one hand reassuringly on her shoulder. With the other, steady now, he sought the pulse in her throat.

She must have felt the touch, because she tried to shrink from it. As Keith watched, her pupils dilated until the irises formed only thin pale rims like sickle moons embracing night. Her back arched, arms and legs stretched taut. When the rigor passed, her fingers curled inward, rnaking soft almost-fists like a sleeping child's. "Ah, Sainte Vierge," she whispered, and was dead.

In the heavy silence, Keith tried to pray for her. But the confident phrases, so assured in their intent, eluded him. They were part of another life, lived out under dispensations that had no meaning here, the forms and gestures of some alien level of reality. Dead to him now. Eternal rest grant unto them, 0 Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.

Herzog knelt beside him. "Keith, you sure you're all right?" "Yeah."

"That creep didn't hurt you?"

"No."

Herzog rose, extending a hand to help him up. "Better get on back to the rest of the guys, then." He grimaced. Sweat ran across his forehead, leaving tracks between his helmet rim and eyebrows; he swiped at it with grubby knuckles. The gesture was curiously childlike. "Our Glorious Leader's gonna shit a brick."

"About what?" Abruptly Keith's mind cleared, fog scattering ragged before a high wind. His fingers locked around Herzog's wrist like a manacle. "Man, you can't tell him! It'd be a court-martial for sure-the best you could get off with would be a dishonorable discharge. You want that on your record for the rest of your life?"

"But he was going to kill you, f'r chrissake "

"But nothing." Panic he had not felt when his own life was threatened washed through Keith, leaving him hollow and aching. "Herzog, listen to me. They'd hang you out to dry. He was an officer, buddy, it's not going to matter what he did. We could swear ourselves blue, and they'd still come down hard on you for the good order of the service. They'd have to." He held Herzog's gaze with his own, willing him to agree. "Think, man."

After a time, the other glanced away. His grime-streaked face was defeated. His voice matched it. "Yeah, 1 guess you're right. So what're we gonna do?"

Keith allowed himself a quiet sigh of relief. Gently he disengaged his fingers. "Nothing." He lifted the Major's rifle from where it had fallen, checked the magazine. The weapon had been fired. Satisfied, he laid it across the woman's dead hands. "Nothing at all."

"You have to understand, son. War, and the things men do in war, are special circumstances. They are exceptional but permissible remedies to intolerable danger or oppression."

"I don't understand."

There was the sound of weight shifting on the other side of the grille, a yawn or sigh stifled. Settling down to a siege. In the pews beyond the curtain, boot soles scuffed against the floor; thin pages whispered and snapped as someone leafed through a missal. The organist, running lightly through a rehearsal of the Benedicite, omnia opera Domini, repeatedly flatted the G natural. "All right," said the priest. "Isn't there anything or anyone you could kill for without feeling guilty? Or do you believe that the Fifth Commandment is absolute? St. Martin did, and refused to fight. If you agree, why are you here?"

Keith leaned his forehead against white knuckles. The bezel of his class ring cut into the skin between his brows.

The room was decorated in Western style, with a pattern of rose-beige flowers on blue wallpaper and Louis Quinze furniture. Light from the single lamp glittered along the edge of its fluted glass shade, ran shimmering over mirror and crystal perfume flasks and velvet upholstery. It lay serenely across the small altar in one corner, where a plume of wistaria wilted at the feet of the Bodhisattva Quon Am, the Great

Compassionate One, the Lord Who Looks Down, the Lord Who Sees Within. It limned the calm, androgynous features, the lotus blossom in the outstretched hands, the fine detailing of the bronze where the robe joined the petal base. And it showed, with brutal clarity, the marks of a man's hands and teeth on the flesh of the woman in the bed. She was asleep, finally. Smudged lipstick and something else, darker, blurred the outline of her mouth, her tears had left trails of mascara across her cheeks. She lay very still.

Keith pushed open one of the pair of tall windows that gave onto the courtyard. Outside, the darkness smelled of roses and gardenias, heavy on the damp air. Somewhere a bird roused, whistled once, and was still. A full moon rode low in the sky, bright enough to cast shadows. It was the sort of night they made songs about.

Some enchanted evening.

Hello, young lovers, wherever you are, I hope your troubles are few.

Keith flexed his shoulders, wincing as the lacerations that scored his back broke open again. The blood ran cool over his skin. Some of the scratches were fairly deep. Some of the bites were bad, too.

Suppose I should see a doctor, get a shot of penicillin or something. Should probably do that anyway.

Impossible.

Unthinkable to face another person, the sympathetic or the slyly knowing eyes.

I'm not like that.

He wanted to shout it, out of the aching emptiness inside him, to cast out the pain with the sound. His breath caught in his throat, almost strangling him.

I'm not like that.

He had had too much to drink, of course.

Not that that was any excuse.

Keith closed the window and crossed the room to where his clothes lay neatly folded on a chair. He dressed quietly, flinching again as he pulled the singlet over his head, thrust his arms through the long tan sleeves of his uniform shirt. He knotted the tie carefully, buttoned the coat with its recent corporal's stripes, set his cap at the proper angle. The mirror gave back his reflection, crisp green and buff picked out with brass, shadowed face.

Soldier boy.

He still had a little over three-quarters of the money he had started out with that evening. He slipped it, four stiff one-hundred-dollar bills, under the silver-backed hairbrush on the dresser. Gabrielle would find it there when she woke, in plain sight.

He closed the door behind him without sound.

Keith pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. The small slope behind him bordered on the officers' quarters, the ground in front fell away gradually so that the fence that sealed off the base perimeter lay yards below him, almost in a gully. On the other side, a flat cleared area stretched away to the hills, alive with all the shades of green that had ever been. Here there was only himself and the small life, creeping or waxing blindly toward the light. Above him, thunderheads floated in the hot blue sky, ponderous as galleons. He watched as the rounded top of one suddenly swelled and began to roil, spilling out over itself in an endless slow avalanche of white to form a mushroom shape, then flattening, drawn thin, into the storm anvil, breeder of lightning. The sun, reflected off millions upon millions of ice particles, dazzled his eyes. Deliberately, he thought about nothing.

There was a stirring in the grass beside him. Feet. A voice: Herzog's, undisturbed. "Hey, I thought you were goin' to church."

Keith looked up into the open face between himself and the cloud. He felt no sense of intrusion. "I did."

"Oh." Herzog sat, legs straight out in front of him. The late afternoon brightness struck red highlights from his hair, glinted off the ring on his left hand.

After a time Keith said, "It didn't do much good. Some things-the anonymity is supposed to help, but it doesn't always. You can't talk to a shadow, or expect it to understand."

"Yeah." Herzog raked his fingers through the grass, absently chasing a fat tiger-striped caterpillar the length of a poppy leaf. "I noticed that something's been bothering you all week, ever since Saigon."

An aura of the futility he had felt only an hour before came back to Keith, but vaguely, as a half-forgotten dream. Not just a good-times roll in the hay, Father, I hurt her wanted to hurt don't know why, it didn't seem to have much to do with sex Herzog's face held no curiosity, only a calm waiting. Keith talked.

It came slowly at first, then with a growing urgency as a week's tension uncoiled. When he had done, Herzog was silent for a long moment. Then he said, "Well, I guess they don't teach you much about that kind of thing in med school, huh?"

Keith smiled a little in spite of himself. "That's different."

"Yeah, I guess. I mean, I know you're upset, and you probably scared yourself pretty bad, but it's not all that big a deal. It takes lots of guys that way, just coming in out of combat." The caterpillar began to climb the poppy's flower stalk, relentlessly pursued by one long, fine-boned finger. Herzog's eyes sought Keith's, held them. "One time don't make you some kind of monster. Quit beatin' yourself over the head about it. You're O.K."

"But -" Keith frowned.

"But nothing." Herzog regarded him levelly. A quickening breeze rippled through his hair, ruffled the crimson petals against his hand. "Look, I saw that shirt you threw out. She gave as good as she got, right?"

Keith was quiet for a moment, remembering. Reluctantly, he nodded.

"And she didn't tell you to stop, or yell for the MP's or the hotel fuzz, did she?"

"No."

"And she could have done any of those things if she'd wanted to." It was not a question.

"Yeah." Keith's own whisper was so low he could hardly hear it. Herzog reached over and gave his head a gentle shake. "So. How come it's all your fault, huh? Maybe Gabi had something she needed to get out of her system, too."

"But -" Keith forced the words out. "I've never done anything like that before. Davy, I didn't think I could."

The other man's mouth curved faintly in a smile centuries older than his twenty-three years. His arm slipped around Keith's shoulders, offering comfort and the gift of his presence. Keith leaned against him, his own hand just under the collar with its overlay of dark curls. Some of the weight he had carried over the last few days left him. "Hey," he murmured, "thanks for listening."

"Anytime." Herzog's embrace tightened into a hug, his smile became a lopsided grin. "Welcome to the human race, Babe. Don't know how we got along all this time without you."

They had been searching for a day and a half when they found Sullivan. Or what was left of him when the VC had done.

Keith knelt in the long grass, supporting himself against his rifle and trying not to be sick. The stink gagged him. Get hold of yourself, Chattan. You've been in ER, this is no worse.

It was infinitely worse.

There was a black, oozing hollow at the crotch, two more in the skull.

Sullivan's cock, obscenely swollen in the heat, had been stitched into his right hand. The balls were in the left. When they opened his mouth, they found his eyes.

Blind terror brought Keith to his knees again fifty feet away, with no clear idea of how he had gotten there. Behind him, he could still hear the others, quieter now that they had apparently got the corpse covered. He heaved until his sides ached.

He was alone.

No one came this way. If we don't find them tomorrow, we'll have to turn back."

Keith scattered the remaining tobacco from the stub of his cigarette over the dried bamboo stalks under his feet and began shredding the filter. The twilight laid long shadows like bars across the ground and the standing grasses. Something unseen rustled the underbrush, hunting the night. He said quietly, "They still have three of our men. If we turn back now, they'll die the same way Larry did."

"Or we'll goad the enemy into killing them. Maybe an exchange can be worked out later."

"Lieutenant, we don't have anything they want. They've got a seller's market all the way.n Patience. Reason. He forced calm on himself and went on. "The Viet Cong aren't going to go to the trouble of feeding Herzog and Quint indefinitely, much less keeping a watch on them. If we don't get them out now, assuming they're still alive, they're not going to get out."

"Look, Chattan." Emerson scratched furiously at his three-days' stand of beard, caught himself at it and stopped abruptly. "I know the Sergeant is your friend. But I can't risk what's left of the unit for him. Or for Haas, either. I'm sorry. But that's how it is."

"Wrong."

"What?"

"I said," Keith repeated as the last of the white filaments disappeared under his boot, "that's wrong. I'm going to keep looking for as long as it takes. I'm going to take as many of the men as will go with me. Most of them probably will."

"That's insubordination, Corporal." Emerson's voice was flat. It occurred to Keith that the man had been expecting something like this. He said, "You got it. But unless you're prepared to shoot me, there's not one damned thing we can do for him. S'pose we should bury him here, Keith?"

Keith stood staring down at the red wet mess that had been Tyler Emerson. Bone splinters protruded from it at odd angles; blood and

pieces of charred flesh lay scattered for three or four yards in every direction. Close to, the smell was overpowering, iron and burned meat. Dulce et decorum est pro LBl mori. A hot wind stirred the top fronds of the banana grove. The birds and monkeys that inhabited it were still. Keith tried to find some vestige of quiet in himself, tried not to be glad or to think about the choice the mine had saved him. Bastard.

"Cabr6n." Rios spat and patted one of the grenades at his belt. "Well, that's another little surprise package we can save for Charlie and his buddies. What about it, rubio, turn him under or leave him for the rats?"

Keith shook his head, coming back to the problem at hand. "No. We haven't got time to bury him properly. Just drag some of those fallen branches over him and mark the spot with a couple of rocks or something. We'll send somebody later to collect what's left."

"At least," said Langner, "we know for sure we're a day behind 'em, maybe a day and a half." Rfos scrubbed his bandana across his face, reached for his canteen. "There's clear sign over by the stream. If we keep on this trail " He unstoppered the flask and drank, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. " we ought to come up with them sometime tomorrow, late afternoon, maybe evening. Best time to hit 'em would be then or next morning, before full light "Adan?" Keith interrupted him.

Rtos halted in mid-spate. "Eh?" Dime, hombre."

Keith paused, silent for a moment. He studied the wide brown face minutely, the familiar quick eyes and perpetually amused mouth, the white ridge of a scar, relic of Arizona Street, that ran from temple to eyebrow on one side. Nothing changed, nothing ambiguous. Rios' dark gaze met his steadily, betraying only attention and mild curiosity. A chill slipped down Keith's spine like glacial runoff.

Danger.

Finally he said, "Exactly what did you find down there?"

"Oh, well." Rfos shrugged. "There's a ring of ashes where they made a fire, some footprints on the bank where they went to get water or take a piss, broken grass. You know, like that."

Sudden clarity, faint glimmering gone nova in his brain. Obliterating everything but itself. You know. Like that.

Larry Sullivan, dead. Like that.

Keith pushed past the other man and flung himself down the bank of the stream. He ran blindly, heedless of the pounding feet behind him,

the voice shouting his name. Once he turned his ankle on a stone and pitched over onto his hands and knees, another time he sidestepped a gnarled tallow root and caught his foot in a trailing passion vine instead. He scarcely noticed.

Please, no.

All of a universe, everything in it that mattered, in two words.

The body lay just at the water's edge, near the reeds. The late sunlight dripped molten gold along the blades, glittered off the creaming ripples where an outcropping of limestone made a small rapids. Overhead, a bird took flight, a flash of teal blue and scarlet against the sky. Behind him a voice calling, empty.

Oh please God, no.

The dead man had been tall, six feet or near it. He had been lightly made, with the slenderness that came of fine bones. The hair under its mat of dried blood and dirt had been brown. The skin had been fair. There was no face.

Haas and Herzog were of much the same build and coloring.

Keith let out his breath in a long, shuddering sigh. He shivered as cold swept through him, moving with soft steps like the wolf at the world's end, trailing night like a shadow at its heels. He forced himself to move forward, to kneel beside the corpse. To be sure.

The skull had been crushed under repeated blows. Welts on the wrists and ankles showed where ropes had bitten into the flesh. Over the thighs and abdomen the unreeled guts lay heaped, blue-white and fester, ing, thin opaquing membrane and clotted black blood, coil upon coil. The man's identification tag, together with whatever personal jewelry he might or might not have worn, was missing.

It is or it isn't. Fiftv-fifrv chance.

Heads you win, tails I lose.

A hand touched his shoulder. He shook it off. Slowly, he got to his feet.

"This is war," Rios said quietly. "Things like this happen all the time. You just have to get used to it."

Keith stared at him. Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there "No. I don't."

There was an awkward silence. Then, "So. What're we going to do now?"

"Find them," Keith said.

"And then?"

"We do whatever is necessary. Whatever that may be." Keith caught the other man's eye, held the long look until Rios glanced downward. Motions to be gone through. He felt nothing. Numb. "Satisfied?"

"Yeah." Rtos raised his head. "Hell, man, yeah. You're good enough for the Sarge, you're good enough for me, any day."

"Good. Keep it in mind." He turned and made his way deliberately up the slope, not looking back. He could hear Langner calling, just over the ridge. Behind him

a man screams, a high, thin keening like a rabbit's.

Abruptly the sound ceases. A woman appears in front of him. Blood runs from a jagged gash in her forehead, drips from her eyesockets like tears. She holds a knife. He shoots her and steps over the body. Without turning, he can see three more black-clad men prone in the white dust, dead or dying, staining the earth. Another bursts suddenly from cover nearby, streaking away across the clearing to the shelter that has been hurriedly lashed up against the hillside. A bayonet gleams in his hand. Keith raises his rifle and stitches a row of dark wet blotches across the Viet Cong's shirt, just at the level of the eighth ribs. Very neat, very precise. Surgical. The impact carries the body backward, off its feet, crumples it doubled under a juniper bush. He smiles, sights and kills another.

And then there is nothing between him and the hut and he sprints across the empty space, running for his life, ducking under the low, pinescented entrance into sudden darkness blinded and Keith? is that you?

soft whispers and suddenly he is warm again, impossible weight of ice, of stone rolled away, melted, and he crosses the room unfettered and slits the thongs, slipping the knife carefully between the raw flesh of the wrists, sinewy, bruised, alive it's all right all over Babe we're going to take you home voice broken arms around him clinging laughing crying crisp curls springing under his fingers never been so scared in my life I knew you'd come I knew always

It was late afternoon when they reached the base, the freed prisoner and the ten men remaining of those who had rescued him. They marched through the gate in good order, two abreast, singing. Herzog ignored the sentry's challenge. When the MP persisted, he gave name, rank, serial number and an emphatic finger. Craning backward, Keith could see the beleaguered private as he reached for the field telephone. Then the forms of the men behind him blotted out the guard. Keith leaned a little harder on Herzog's shoulder, grinned and sang.

Oh, Godiva was a lady who Through Coventry-town did ride; A-shamelessly a-showin' off Her gorgeous lily-white hide

There were sixteen verses, each one more obscene than the last. The remnants of C Company ran through them all and started over again as

they trudged past the Commandant's quarters, past the chapel and post office and flagpole. Faces appeared in doorways and windows, blank or knowledgeable: shocked, relieved, puzzled, speculative. Keith waved at a redheaded WAC and fought down the pain in his festering leg. Almost home. It had been a day and a half since he had stepped into the booby trap, it would keep a few minutes more. Should have seen the damned stick, anyway.

Somewhere ahead a flashbulb went off. Smile for the folks at home, boys. Give us a good frame for the six o'clock news, something besides squalling, napalmed kids and monks pouring gasoline on themselves. Eleven footsore and louse-ridden GI's to testify to the inherent nobility of the American common man. Real patriots. Bearded, filthy, longhaired, most of them shirtless, all of them rank and afflicted with amoebic and other exotic dysenteries.

When Johnny comes marching home again, hurrah. Glory, glory hallelujah.

Sweat ran down his face and over his bare chest. A breeze ghosted past. It didn't help much.

Hot, so hot.

Dim voice. "Hey, Keith, you O.K.? Gonna make it?"

Sure, make it just fine.

Mouth dry, hot.

Somewhere just short of the hospital, he fainted.

Still hot, and tied down somehow, sharp pains in his arms when he tries to move them. lV's, clear plastic tubing snaking upward, glittering in the fluorescent haze. Gold beads on a silver string, I'm on Tom Tiddler's ground. At the foot of the bed a green man stands and drones. Another holds an oblong black box.

Four stars on each shoulder. Turn, flash, music of the spheres. Extraordinary initiative, gallantry in action. Buzz. Great risk of his own life. Buzzz. Grave injury. Courage above and beyond. Bzzzzzz.

Closes his eyes.

Up yours, sweetie. Go tell that to the Spartans.

Black man next time, and a black book. Keith can you hear me.

Hear you.

Murmured words. Candle flame, gentle light with himself at the center. Strip of purple flowing over the narrow dark shoulders.

Angry at the Lieutenant, hated him, might have let one of the guys frag him or done it myself. Swore at my men. Punched Langner when I thought he might chicken out, he bought it a couple days later. Haven't written home in.

Something else? Something Drifts away.

Slight frown don't you have something else to tell me.

That's all Father.

Dry wafer between his lips. Go forth Christian soul out of this world. Darkness.

Hot. Forever. Hot.

Fingers, different, wrapped cool around his hand. Sergeant you shouldn't be here. So throw me out.

And after this our exile a long floating time swinging safe at the compass of his anchor.

Three poem.s

William Heyen

The new American poetry

It is the poetry of the privileged class.

It inherits portfolios.

It was born in the Ivy League, and inbred there.

Its parents filled its homes with bubbling Bach, silver and crystal brightnesses for its surfaces which do not sweat to wring meaning from paychecks.

It does not hear the cheap and natural music of the cow.

Its vases hold platinum-stemmed roses, not ponds with logs from which turtles descend at our approach, neckfold leeches shining like black droplets of blood.

It swallows Paris and Athens, tracks its genes to the Armory Show.

As it waits by their coffins in the parlor, it applies rouge to Poe and Beau Brummell.

Its father is Gertrude Stein, not Whitman, who despises it, though it will not admit it.

Old women with children do not live in it.

It does not harvest thought, or associate with farmers.

It does not serve in the army, or follow a story.

It revels in skewed cubes, elliptical appositions.

It is inviolate, buttressed by its own skyhook aesthetics.

Ultramarine critics praise it, wash their hands of subject matter.

It is tar-baby without the baby, without the tar.

Its city is not the city of pavement or taxis, business or bums.

It dwells on absence and illusion, mirrors refulgent flames.

Deer that browse beneath its branches starve.

Its emotions do not arise from sensible objects.

It passes rocks as though they were clouds.

It sustains itself on paperweight petals.

It does not flood out its muskrats.

It does not define, catalog, testify, or witness.

It holds models before the young of a skillful evasion, withering heartlessness.

It lifts its own weight for exercise, does not body-block, or break up double plays, or countenance scar tissue.

It flails in the foam, but has no body and cannot drown.

In his afterlife, Rimbaud smuggles it along infected rivers.

Over this winter

After the sudden October storm: snow-outlined raspberry leaves and canes.

The berries had warmed their way through first: that plump, sun-stored redness.

I ate some for you. I know how this sounds, but I ate some for you:

they were cold, juicy, studded with tiny seeds, and stained my fingers

If there is anything between us, then this taste of raspberry light

over this winter. I was just lucky to be there where berries melted the first snow, so I ate some.

When you are in a place where you can do the same for me, please do.

Memorial Day, Brockport, 1981

We stand under cemetery maples. The high school band has played Keyes' questioning anthem. Seven veterans stand at parade rest, the oldest from WWI, the youngest from Vietnam.

A minister prays aloud for the dead, for those who survived, for peace for us all. I close my eyes, inhale scents of flowers on the graves, drift in remembering shadows through the day.

A wavery trumpet remembers "Taps." The vets fire blanks. Our small town shivers in the sound. Then, a minute's silence while an undecided sky goes on with sun and clouds

as though for this, for something here impossible to say, as soldiers raise our flag again. God bless these living soldiers, and the dead. Sometimes, we needed them. Now, we live with what they've done.

On phorojournalism

My interest is the event, the situation! I prefer the naive approach, I want to learn from the situation and I want my photographs to reflect what I've learned. Photojournalism is a poor description of what I do, but then the term "photojournalism" is not very precise. Since my work is often for news publications, I'll accept the title. I often find the act of taking photographs embarrassing. It can be an unpleasant task, especially when your purpose is obviously superficial. However, I feel strongly that the photograph is a wonderful learning device. The picture can reveal ourselves to others, and to ourselves. It is a personal document which lives outside the world of notebook facts, close to our soul. This is why I'm a photographer.

I've been lucky, I began my career twenty years ago. Then nineteen, I took a position with a newspaper which still insisted on the four-inch by five-inch negative. It was the old style of "Speed-Graphic" newsphotography and a good experience. Jobs followed at newspapers in the youth of 35-millimeter, available-light photojournalism; it was fresh and exciting. A contract with the old Life, the weekly Life, followed, and while it was not as perfect as I dreamed, it was better than I realized, and soon to end.

As the picture magazines failed, publishers commissioned designers to create publications which might succeed in the new, electronic-media age. Visual design became light and glossy, tuned for an eye becoming accustomed to the television image. Photographs played an important role, but they had to fit the design.

Inflation became an important factor in the economics of success. The publisher was less willing to risk the cost of awaiting the "decisive moment." "Time is money," was the rule, and editorial expense decisions became the responsibility of the accountants. Magazines were always businesses and as such they have experienced the same change in atti-

tude concerning investment and return that all businesses have undergone. Chances are the new publisher is a business entrepreneur, and his assistants have MBAs from Harvard. The quarterly report became the standard of publishing success.

Photographers wishing to succeed with magazines learned to practice what might best be called "editorial photo-illustration." Assignments are given with strong editorial guidance. An important assignment, such as a cover, might include an art director's sketch of the desired image, with the photograph fitting the editorial direction and design, and produced on a tight schedule. The picture editor relinquished power to the art director and became an organizer and photo researcher-a "gopher," getting photographers and pictures for the editorial conference.

At the same time that magazines changed, the attitude of the public was also changing towards the press. The realization that we live in an age where information is power, combined with an explosive growth in media, fueled a natural distrust of the press. People became concerned with their privacy and with the simple human dignity so fragile in a superficial public arena. Subjects became less open to the photographer's intrusion. In the public world, a desire to keep the photographer at arms' reach, combined with the magazine's desire for quick, illustrative photographs, encouraged the concept of arranged "photo-opportunities" so popular today.

But the situation is not as bleak as I seem to be implying, and I shall not lament further the demise of the large picture-magazines-they were not as good as we remember. There remains, still, opportunity to publish good photojournalism and, I suspect, there always shall.

Photojournalism is a young craft, and it has had to suffer through a rapid decompression of its environment without the opportunity of maturity. The photojournalist's survival will require an ability to photograph independently of the fads and trends of the marketplace. The glamor and the glory are gone: reward must come from the sure knowledge of the future value of one's work.

Captions

1. Vietnam/Cambodia Border, 1970; U.S. troops interviewed by an NBC correspondent during pullback.

2. Vietnam DMZ, 1970; U.S. soldier rests on tailgate of an armored personnel carrier during patrol along DMZ between North and South Vietnam.

3. Khe Sanh, Vietnam, 1971; a U.S. soldier sits on the edge of his trench after a night-long attack by North Vietnamese sappers, during which he lost a close friend.

4. Woodward and Bernstein, 1973; the two Washington Post reporters watch President Nixon announce the resignation of his top aides, H. R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman (April 30, 1973). They watch the resignation on a TV set in a Washington Post office.

5. Watergate Hearings, 1973; John W. Dean III, with his wife, awaits the opportunity to testify at the Senate Watergate hearings.

6. Watergate Hearings, 1973; Attorney General John N. Mitchell confers with aides during his testimony at the U.S. Senate Watergate Hearings.

7. Watergate Hearings, 1973; former top presidential aide John D. Ehrlichman during his testimony at the U.S. Senate Watergate hearings.

8. Oval Office, 1973; President Nixon during a bill-signing in the Oval Office at the White House.

9. Resignation, August 9, 1974; President Nixon says farewell to the White House staff in the East Room of the White House.

10. Congress, 1974; a portrait of George Washington, in the House of Representatives chambers at the Capitol.

11. Nader, 1976; Ralph Nader at a Congressional hearing.

12. Campaign '76; Governor George Wallace at a Boston TV studio interview during the Massachusetts presidential primary.

13. Campaign '76; Ronald Reagan at a campaign rally in New Hampshire.

14. Campaign '76; Jimmy Carter campaigns in a New Hampshire living room during the presidential primary.

15. Campaign '76; interested citizens await Jerry Brown at a Maryland primary campaign rally.

16. Bert Lance, 1978; Lance testifies before a Congressional hearing concerning allegation of wrongdoing while he was a bank president in Georgia.

Two poems

Ray A. Young Bear

The king cobra as political assassin

May 30, 1981

About two miles east of here near the Iowa River bottom there is a swampy thicket and inlet where deer, fox and eagles seem to congregate every autumn without fail. When I am hunting there I always think: if I were an eagle bored by the agricultural monotony of Midwestern landscape, I would stop, too. This morning I dreamt of a little-used road going from an overlooking hill down into their divine sanctuary. I tried to drive through thinking it was a short cut towards the tribal homeland, but stopped after the automobile tires sank into the moist earth. I walked down the ravine and met two adolescents and inquired if the rest of the road was intact or passable. A bit wary of me they indicated that they didn't

know. A faceless companion rolled down the car window and spoke in Indian.

"Forget them! They shouldn't be here, anyway."

I walked on. Further down I met a minister and began to chat with him about the tranquil scenery, how far the road extended into the land founded by the Bov-Chief in 1856. (I avoided the personal question of whether the dense timber reminded him of South America.) He turned and pointed with his black arm to a deteriorating church mission in a distant valley. "Yes," I said. "Mamwiwaneka's wishwhen he purchased this landwas a simple one."

Soon, a hippie with an exotic snake wrapped decoratively around his bare arms and shoulders joined our polite and trivial conversation about directions. As we were talking the hippie released his hyperactive pet. For a moment we watched it slither over some willows. We did not think too much of the snake until it slid towards a nearby stream, stopping and raising its beady-eved head intermittently, aware of prey. Following it, we discovered what held its attention: a much larger snake was lying still and cooling itself in the water. I told the hippie,

"You better call your pet." With a calm face he said, "I'm not worried; watch the dance of hunting motions." And we did.

The larger water snake recoiled into its defensive stance as the smaller slid into the water. Before they each came within striking distance, the hunter-snake struck. They splashed violently for a few moments.

Decapitated, the water snake's muscled body became lax in the sunlit current. I thought about this scene today and the events which led to it many times over, analyzing its discordant symbolism. I finally concluded this dream had nothing to do with would-be assassins, cinema-child prostitutes, political decisionmakers or anything tangible. In Journal of a Woodland Indian I wrote:

"It was a prophetic yearning for real estate and investments; something else, entirely

Wadasa Nakamoon, Vietnam memorial

Last night when the yellow moon of November broke through the last line of turbulent Midwestern clouds, a lone frog, the same one who probably announced the premature spring floods, attempted to sing. Veterans' Day, and it was sore-throat weather. In reality the invisible musician reminded me of my own doubt. The knowledge that my grandfathers were singers as well as composersone of whom felt the simple utterance of a vowel made for the start of a melody - did not produce the necessary memory or feeling to make a Wadasa Nakamoon, Veterans' Song. All I could think of was the absence of my name on a distant black rock. Without this monument I felt I would not be here. For a moment, I questioned why I had to immerse myself in country, controversy and guilt, but I wanted to honor them. Surely, the song they presently listened to along with my grandfathers was the ethereal kind which did not stop.

Six poem.s

Bruce Weigl

Elegy for A.

Four years since the morning you leaped Out from under the waves of pain Into which you had to awake One day in the middle of your life. I think of you Nights my own confusion Runs away with itself, Darting in and out of the dark Possibilities like a spirit.

I don't know if I can speak to you, I don't know why we long so for the dead Who can do us no good, eventually, Like you, a flood of stars will drown us all.

You jumped because at three a.m. You passed the open balcony door And for the hundredth night you couldn't sleep. That day in your bed I'd tried to hold you, To drag you back to us But I didn't understand the way you Floundered with your arms, The way you gulped for air. Inside you something was shaking out of control, Something was wrong.

Four years already. I wanted to tell you that my son Who bears your name into the world Is strong and sure of himself; That your wife has found someone else, someone Remarkably like you In your gentle time, And that sometimes, friend, I close my eyes And see you descend on the wings of your bathrobe, Speaking, I imagine, some warning in the instant it took Before you smashed away The hold the dark had on you.

Paper moon

For the way your straps fell off your bare shoulders

When you danced slightly drunken circles away from me

I am a better person.

The Benny Goodman band played hot and the papier-rnache

Landscape designed to resemble Hawaii was sufficient

To lift us away to a place that was not our lives

And for once in a million times I could let go

The knots inside me and spin across the sawdust floor.

I'd just walked into the first air-conditioned bar

I saw lit up that hot summer night

And found you inexplicably alone with your beer.

We danced to the swing of another generation's music.

We danced

But the band stopped playing and the red-haired waitress

Stretched on her toes and pulled down the paper moon

And just like that you were out the door,

The blue lace handkerchief waving behind you

For whoever lifted his face from the bar

To follow.

Snowy egret

My neighbor's boy has lifted his father's shotgun and stolen Down to the backwaters of the Elizabeth

And in the moon he's blasted a snowy egret From the shallows it stalked for small fish;

Midnight. My wife wakes me. He's in the backyard

With a shovel so I go down half-drunk with pills

That let me sleep to see what I can see and if it's safe.

The boy doesn't hear me come across the dewy grass.

He says through tears he has to bury it, He says his father will kill him And he digs until the hole is deep enough and gathers

The egret carefully into his arms

As if not to harm the blood-splattered wings

Gleaming in the flashlight beam.

His man's muscled shoulders

Shake with the weight of what he can't set right no matter what, But one last time he tries to stay a child, sobbing Please don't tell.

He says he only meant to flush it from the shadows, He only meant to watch it fly

But the shot spread too far

Ripping into the white wings

Spanned awkwardly for a moment

Until it glided into brackish death.

I want to grab his shoulders, Shake the lies loose from his lips but he hurts enough, He burns with shame for what he's done, With fear for his hard father's Fists I've seen crash down on him for so much less.

I don't know what to do but hold him. If I let go he'll fly to pieces before me. What a time we share, that can make a good boy steal away, Wiping out from the blue face of the pond

What he hadn't even known he loved, blasting Such beauty into nothing.

Noise

Next door the newlyweds

Scream at each other, three a.m.

I hate your fucking guts he says

Through the open summer window

To the sky crowded with stars.

Freight trains at the roundhouse

Shake the windows, shake the house.

Just please get out she says And someone throws something Glass against the wall.

This is none of my business

But they've waked me with their noise.

The clots of stars or the full moon

Could be behind this because I feel the same

Anger and the trains make so much noise tonight.

Everyone lies and cheats and says hateful things.

The newlyweds next door

Spit the words out at each other.

From room to room I see them move

In their underwear, the windows

Open, she is lovely, she is Wringing her hands

And he is pacing in another room then disappears

And she is standing by the window, crying, The trains so loud tonight

And the trainmen shout the couplings into place­

A triangle of nervous noise

Because the noise is in my head too, The noise is always in my head.

Regret for the mourning doves who failed to mate

I passed the window and saw their lovely flash of wings

In the ivy all tangled and fluttering. Something about gravity is deeply important

To whether or not it works for them

And gravity keeps these two from mating. Even in the rain he tried

His small dance up her back

As she clung to the ivy

Easing the angle for him.

But I'm sorry,

I'm here to say they didn't make it.

Their nest stays empty

And the wind eats it up bit by bit

The way they constructed it together­

Some twigs, some brown grass woven, A bit of color from a scrap of paper

Returned to litter the street.

And the winter keeps us locked indoors

Where we peck at each other, Our voices thin and cold

Saying always what we don't mean, Our hearts all future, Our love nearly gone.

Amnesia

for Lee Childress

You tell yourself no and cry a thousand days. You imagine that the crows calling autumn into place Are your brothers and you could If only the strength and will were there Fly up to them to be black And useful to the wind.

If there was a world more disturbing than this Where black clouds bowed down and swallowed you whole And overgrown tropical plants Rotted, effervescent in the muggy twilight, and monkeys Screamed something That came to sound like words to each other Across the triple-canopied jungle you shared, You don't remember it.

Three poems

c. D. Wright

Wages of love

The house is watched, the watchers only planets.

Very near the lilac a woman leaves her night soil to be stepped in. Like other animals. Steam lifts off her mess.

They have power, but not water.

Pregnant. She must be. The world is all that is the case.

You can hear the strike of the broom, a fan slicing overhead light. At the table the woman stares at a dish of peaches, plums: The black ants filing down the sill to bear away the fly.

Everywhere in America is summer. The young unaware they are young their mind on other wounds or the new music.

The heart some bruised fruit knocked loose by a long stick aches at the stem. It's not forbidden to fall out of love like from a tree.

As for the tenants whose waters will break in this bed

May they live through the great pain; may their offspring change everything because everything must change.

The man joins the woman in the kitchen. They touch the soft place of their fruit. They enter in, tell their side and pass through.

The world is all that is the case.

Elements of the night

Cold food, homework and hair. Rooms with a radiator and no magazines. Moths like flour. Venetian blinds. Mascara. Wallets tossed from cars. Fish do not slow down. A good robe. Pencils. The back of his head. Breeze. Scene in another language. Beds hard as boards. A girl climbing fences. Like a vine. Records left out of covers. Cleaning women. Clocks. Moving furniture. Unpublished number. A praying mantis in a jar. Barns blown over. Her rainy underarms. Faith hope and hypocrisy. Trees growing old. Boats in fields. Guests. A box on fire. Ice trays. Ironing. Velvet. Genitals like underwater fruit. People drinking out of a bottle. Urine. Crimes of passion. Valet parking. A small, college green. Even the way she holds her neck. Trailers. Slamming doors. Baby grand. Change for the phone. A podalic version. Jobs taken on the lam. Radar. A bad mole. Houses you can't see from the road. The Seven Sisters. Television. The glory hole. IV's. Musicians on break. A novel like a neighbor. Dog on the shoulder. Vestibules of mirrors and light. Sprayed on a wall: Leo dies alone. Also: 1981, Where is my beautiful daughter.

Treatment

for the children of Atlanta

this is a 16mm film of 7 minutes in which no words are spoken.

but for a few hand-tinted elements: the girl's dress, the sax, sky at church the color is b/w.

the camera reports in the all-knowing third except in hand-held shots it reveals the driver's field of vision.

The bus rocks out of ruts and over creek rocks at pre-dawn. The driver hasn't picked up any children. He has the radio on and a cigarette lit. Isn't paying attention to either. His headlights are on the road, and webs in the trees as if they were searchlights. His mind is bent. As his posture and his face reveals. A girl dresses in purple in the dark. She feels along the wallpaper to the kitchen, fixes oatmeal, warms coffee to which she adds globs of honey. She makes a sandwich for lunch. She starts to eat out ofthe pot on the stove. Stops and gets a bowl from a high cabinet and sits at the table. She keeps tap with her foot to a tune she hums only inside herself. When she goes back upstairs to comb her hair and make an irregular part; to tinkle, she hears her parents. Their bedsprings. A shot of them under many covers. Apparently her mother has told her she is a love child. She understands so her listening isn't upsetting. She steals in her younger brother's room and leaves a bird she folded from one sheet of paper on his nightstand. When she hears the bus shifting at the foot of the hill she grabs sweater and tablet and flies past the lunch-sack on the banister. The driver greets her with Hey Princess. That look. She sits close to the rear. The driver climbs the hill and puts it in neutral under an elm stand. He jerks the handbrake. The camera is in the back and shooting forward as he comes down the aisle, it is behind her. He looms larger than he is and walks as if the bus were in motion. The rape is explicit. The camera shoots out the back and side windows every few seconds to see if anyone, another vehicle, approaches. There are no more shots of the girl.

The parents' house is shown from the yard and from the foot of her window. Light breaks in the trees, a cool sun. You hear the bus grind, the children, as the bus fills and proceeds. Then a field of high grass, a white church. No roads leading there. No cars parked nearby. Slight quality of a different world. A saxophone is played. A full choir accompanies. A silent congregation, all stand, motionless. All adults. Pharoah Sanders stands in front of the choir stall in white robes. He plays with his eyes shut. He plays a curved soprano. His foot taps to an interior beat. Clearly he's an Angel. With the horn he lures. Accuses. His solo has a timeless aura. The doors of the church blow open. The driver falls onto the aisle. He begins to squirm on his belly toward the Pharoah. It's a long journey. The Pharoah wails controllably. The choir sways, claps, the congregation keeps quiet, light breaks in the trees and indistinct voices of many children fill the nave as if they were boarding a bus.

Two poems

Dennis Trudell

Isthmus

I have one way to imagine the poverty in those countries: A son goes off to join the rebels, or is seen talking with a girl whose brother is suspected of having listened to some students who later may have become rebels And the son is killed - one evening cut in half, and morning is three friends holding his mother from two directions she must not go. Three hungry women gripping the wild grief and thin arms of their town as a woman, of their country as hell, black and tear-pasted strands of hair against cheeks and their bone And gripping their neighbor, whose name they know, whose son they had fed; and the shack among the shacks shrieks his name, and God's, as the town murmurs their names. So the box comes from two directions and the priest takes a chance and comes, and it goes into the ground, half her soul. The son was sixteen and had his picture taken once. This is where the poverty opens in me; the children from haciendas are also portraits in frames

of starting school, of First Communions, soccer teams, formal dances slides of grinning in opulent, bizarre lobbies at Miami Beach, films of diving board antics at a U.S. fraternity, of grandchildren refusing to smile, to stand still, in new clothing-holding their Bibles. The parents watch these with the glow from projector bulbs in the soft, tiny hairs along facesto the tinkle of ice cubes and amusement of friends. Around them the walls are higher than last year, and they run the images backward and laugh at the blue, Caucasian blue-eyed water unsplashing a grinning young, nose-holding man to a board. In a shack a woman will stare at the new glaze of distance that one afternoon seems to cover the small picture she holds. She is careful-but has she touched it too often? Her son had it taken by a machine in the capital city; he did that instead of eating two meals. And now has she looked there too often? The face is the same, but-are dried tears pulling her sight after them? She must put it away, and she will, and knows she will touch it again the next day. One picture. Does the light make it fade? Do her eyes? Does the blackness under the dirt where she sits when the soldiers come to search? She is careful-but the water is scarce and she cannot clean her hands every time and cannot not touch the face each day. She touches it. The air is mute. The camera was in a booth whose flattened walls are now part of a home for a dozen people.

If it dies

from a photograph by

Susan Meiselas

I am thinking about how purely a young man's hand fits onto his wristand the flow of wrist, forearm, elbow How lovely. And the curvatures, muscle and tissue and veins softening twilight to amber on a right arm, say, holding a pistol. On the street of a city.

The light muted by the smell of unnatural things burning: tires, plastic the smell. The arm rises to slope abruptly at "shoulder" in English. And the shirt which smells like Central America, like Chicago on a pleasant September evening with the housing project rising like "manana."

A small pistol, for instance; no larger than a hand or piece of fruitand how complex and innocent the biology in each finger. I am counting lines. Seven for each stanza. The constant rub of human flesh along time and possibility.

The swim. You are not in love with your own or anyone else's arm right now, probably. As the softest rest for your gaze against the chatter of weapons and sheen of torn streetsIn a city I pronounce incorrectly. The way one day becomes another

like a voice entering and leaving words. A young man's arm leaving and arriving in the sleeve of a shirt. We say "shirt." They say-something else. They crouch there in the streets against my fear of disorder. Against our weight of "class." As the arm dies,

if it dies, something like the shape of fingers into palm and wrist and forearm into elbow - we call it "elbow"-snaps between your eyes, my eyes, and the luminous fruit of our brains. Snaps forever. And yet here is another. And another. Another

Two poem.s

Ray Murphy

One song

I'm sixteen and standing falldown drunk in the corner of the Park Bar, Missoula Montana, broke for the first time in my life. I watch a Mexican kid with a turquoise earring wander around the loggers at the pool table, and over to a crippled man at the bar, begging quarters for the jukebox. A little later, I see him crawling on the bathroom floor, running his hands over the sticky tiles, groping for dropped change.

When finally he gives up on charity and chance, he starts hammering the flashing glass to break into the records and steal a song. Somebody yanks him away and he falls, roaring stoned. On his hands and knees, he wipes the hair out of his eyes and stands clumsily, as if he were going to leave. Then he turns and sprints at the music again, his shoulder ramming the metal and glass, slamming it against the wall, skipping the record that's playing and rattling the coins inside. He gains his balance, stands back, and kicks wildly at it, shouting Stay the hell back you motherfuckers. He wraps his arms around its sides and rocks it back and forth obscenely, shouting and spitting, Jesus fucking Goddamn fucking machine.

The rest of us stand and watch, all of our born anger venting itself in the shape of his rage, feeling the blood in our hands.

The son of man wants one song for free.

Genesis

With cheap martinis on the back porch, my father and mother sit in a corner of late evening sunshine, their twinned shadow lengthening out over the lawn, their whole lives shaped by their work; that shape is my shape.

The wind comes up to scatter their arguments over money, and I'm standing behind them, bitter, waiting to say I've lost my new job.

They turn to look up at me, the ice in their glasses catching the sun; eaten away by gin, their worn bones lack patience, can't afford sympathy.

I want to tell them I didn't make all this or make it this way: all their years of money and sweat and I've got nothing to return. But it's not just money; I could have loved them more, the debt owed by shadow to substance.

And now, all that remains are my hatred and fear of more broken promisesa wife or myself roaring away in the family car, a child growing up in the fury of resentment, and that child's years of returning as I return now, to wait until dark and settle for a lie.

The hooded legion

Gerald McCarthy

Let us put up a monument to the lie. Joseph Brodksy

There are no words here to witness why we fought, who sent us or what we hoped to gain.

There is only the rain as it streaks the black stone, these memories of rain that corne back to usa hooded legion reflected in a wall.

Tonight we wander weaponless and cold along this shore of the Potomac like other soldiers who camped here looking out over smoldering fires into the night.

What did we dream of the summer before we went away? What leaf did not go silver in the last light? What hand did not turn us aside?

Two poems

Walter D. McDonald

Hauling over Wolf Creek Pass in winter

If I make it over the pass I park the rig, crawl back to the bunk and try to sleep, the pigs swaying like a steep grade, like the last curve Johnson took too fast and burned. But that was summer. His fire spread to the next county.

It doesn't worry me. I take the east climb no sweat and the rest is a long coasting down to the pens in Pagosa Springs. It's the wolves I wait for. We never see them any other way, not in this business. Sometimes five, six hauls before propped on one arm, smoking, I see them slink from the dark pines toward the truck. They drive the pigs crazy, squealing as if a legion of demons had them. Later, when I start up and go, the pigs keep plunging, trying to drive us over the cliff.

I let them squeal, their pig hearts exploding like grenades. The wolves are dark and silent. Kneeling, I watch them split up like sappers, some in the tree lines, some gliding from shadow to shadow, red eyes flashing in moonlight, some farther off, guarding the flanks. Each time, they know they have me.

I take my time, knowing I can crawl over the seat, light up, sip from the steaming thermos. I crank the diesel, release the air brakes like a rocket launcher. Wolves run in circles. I hit the lights. Wolves plunge through deep snow to the trees, the whole pack starving. Revving up, the truck rolls down the highway faster, the last flight out of Da Nang. I shove into third gear, fourth, the herd of pigs screaming, the load lurching and banging on every turn, almost delivered, almost airborne.

Storm warning

A tiny funnel cloud comes on the screen. Hail and high winds are giving it to Dickens County, moving toward Lubbock. The tornado that killed my cousin missed me twelve years ago. What was I doing in Vietnam that night in May? Airlifting wounded, jogging around the track at Da Nang, myself a slow twister in hot unstable air.

Tonight, a prophet fearing the worst since his surprising conversion, my son cites Daniel like a weather vane, chapter and verse proof of war, of the last storm building in Babylon. It's coming, he says from the lions' den, I'll live to see the world burn.

Not daring to confess my dreams, I offer history, prove Babylon was ages ago destroyed, Daniel fulfilled, Israel back in Bethlehem in time for Christmas.

Thunder bombs the east windows. The drapes swirl like writing on the wall. He knows he has me. History, he points at the screen. What can I say? If I turn off TV there's still the dream of bombs and missiles, funnels, red telephones that may not ring in time.

Shopping in Ferney with Voltaire

Maxine Kumin

Wearing a flowered nightgown under his frockcoat, Voltaire comes down the avenue of oaks a basket on his arm. Looks four ways at his poete-philosophe likeness in the square that velomoteurs dive toward careening off to either side and walks into the crowd of tidy genevoises who swarm each Saturday across the line to stroll along the cobblestones choosing among a hundred cheeses sandbagged sausages dripping Breton artichokes oysters olives almonds dates.

A little chitchat seems appropriate. I ask him how he feels. Fingering the fringy cornucopias of black chanterelles (les trompettes de la mort) he quotes himself: qui veut voir une ombre?

I've read that in the Besterman biography. Also about the colic on demand. Also the fainting fits to dispatch hangers-on. 124

We rummage among the burly roots fresh dug from local plots. He chooses small white turnips to tuck around the Sunday roast. I tell him his remains were exhumed thirteen years post-mortem. Someone stole two teeth and his left foot. He shrugs. - A useless passion, necrophilia. About that stupid recantation: remember that I never took communion! Let's be clear on that. I told the Abbe, you will note I'm spitting blood. We must be careful not to mingle mine with God's. He grins. We stop at carts of citrus fruits collect a dozen clementines and pay with clanks of old-style coins.

One booth away Amnesty International has prisoners for sale. Handbills cry aloud the murdered and the disappeared, the tortured in before, and,after photographs; a self,improvement course run riot in reverse.

Anyone who cares to can adopt a prisoner of conscience. The list Voltaire signs up for runs longer than schoolboys' Latin scansions.

In my day - he sighs reliving the stench of paintorture was a public act. Before they killed a man they broke him on the rack.

The main thing was to die courageously. It's different now. No longer personal. His sharp fox face so like Max Adrian's Pangloss as if he had just caught out of the corner of his eye the murderings en masse. The nuclear juggernaut. The Great Beast lumbering past. The labor camps, the stripping off of civilization's mask.

We walk together toward the border at Meyrin. The sky goes yellow as old corn shucks. Rain will drench the ancient hills, thorn-fenced, these stubbled fields, the cows kneeling along the ridge. Behind us, Ferney brims with light. -Adieu, he says. -Take my advice. Always live close to the edge so that when sudden flight is called for, you can put a foot down on the other side. We embrace three times, a la suisse. I cross the douane, then turn to watch the old philosophermushrooms, roots, and tangerines in hand, limping back to the Enlightenmentdisappear.

A gallery of epigrams

Elder Olson

Returning a knife to a "friend"

Here: this thing belongs to you - A favorite tool you must not lackSharp, bright, and clean, as good as new, Quite undamaged by my back.

Birthday poem

Who am I, to be alive, Hale and sound, at seventy-five, Breathing air that should have been Breath in the lungs of better men?

A just man would not speak or laugh

But save all his remaining breath To curse the winnowing-fan of Death That takes the good grain, spares the chaff.

Finis

This is the worst, the bitterest of all ends: Those whom you thought your friends were not your friends.

Epigram against an epigrammatist

(unfinished because the poet could not think of a rhyme)

Manure is not enough, You need the seed of wit; Your poems lack the seed, Are merely heaps of

Self portrait

A dust blown up from Europe's dirty floor, Part this, part that, and mostly neither nor.

Revenant

The ghost who came back to terrify Fled in horror from our world.

Fable

The dwarfish king looked all around And finding no one smaller Ordered all others' legs chopped off So that he could be taller.

Mad girl

Because I shrieked out "Murder! Rape!"

You called my terrors dreams, and you Locked me in a windowless cell

So that such dreams should not escape Into a world not half as true, A thousand times more terrible.

City streets

Even in these constricted ways Each walks within a private maze.

Mermaid and sailor

She held him fiercely, breast to breast: Now leave me, lying clown, Desert me if you can; Enough of pretty lies: Not my beauty but your lust Lured you here to drown. I know as every woman must Whom sorrow has made wise The one way to be sure a man Will love until he dies.

R.L. Barth

To the lady who refused to purchase my book of war poems

Yes, ma'am, "the Vietnam War is outdated"Just like the pain in legs they've amputated.

Definition

The epigram is not artillery, Blockbusters, automatic weaponry, Napalm or rockets; but, hunkered in mire, The sniper-scoped guerilla's small-arms fire.

For any Memorial Day

Observe the rites, now: politicians And Legionnaires, all rhetoricians, Declaiming from the dais glories, They've sucked from war's nostalgic stories. Here's what Christ meant when he said, "Let the dead bury the dead."

"Confiteor " •

Once, I was certain That, having exorcized him Satan was Other. I never recognized him.

The disappearance

Where is this modern poet? come to grief?

Numbering the flower's lines, and lines of lines, He disappeared beyond these tangled vines, Abstracted among the atoms of a leaf.

Marilyn Monroe, a note to mail her and others

A miracle! See scribblers made Men of great substance by your shade!

John Ciardi

for Muhammad Ali

You are the greatest in every way That ever began as common Clay.

Miller Williams

The man at the station where I go to buy gas cares more for my car than my doctor does for my ass. Nobody says when I say this, "How can you say that?" and they don't know my doctor or what station I trade at.

]ohn Frederick Nims

Crutches and canes

Feisty old men, their battle cry a cough, Waggle their sticks at earth, to fend it off.

Old age

Harder to flex the knees and touch that clay That still comes closer, closer, day by day.

Theology

Know what I want this moment, cozy girl? Your own flesh apt to mine, curl warm on curl, Finger enfumbling finger, tongue with tongue. "Honey, your own idea?"-the words half sung, Half snuggled from half sleep-"you dreamed it, you?"

No, the Wild Mind they heave cathedrals to.

William Harrell

The first decade, the babe is mom's and dad's. The second's moot-who belongs to whom?

The third, they're gone, you miss the goods and bads. When they come back, they'll show you to your tomb.

CRITICK draws back from everything that lives; his learning's crammed and stained with negatives. He feeds on the hope that nothing will end well, antenna'd and eight-eyed inside his shell.

Mary Kinzie

The various envies

When you next on our despising Feed, darlings of our devising, Forget that in a thick, wet spot By urchin hope were you begot.

Timothy Steele

The skull at the crossroads

Disparage, if you will, the life you live: It's preferable to the alternative.

Guessing game

"A ponderous bird of prey who on the living And on the dead is parasitic." Might that be Vulture, sir, or are you giving The definition of a Critic?

Social reform

A prince of rational behavior, Satan informs us that our Savior Remarks we'll always have the poor, Which moral saves expenditure. We'll always have the poor? Okay. Yet, looked at whole, the text will say Something more lenitive, and truer. We'll have the poor: let's make them fewer.

X.]. Kennedy

Conformity

after Baudelaire

The Belgians don't just copy. If Drink is in style they'll drink to drench Their drawers, and when they catch a syph They'll double-dose, to be twice French.

On

a given book

I slumbered with your sonnets on my bosom: The net result of trying to peruse 'em.

Sappho to a mummy wrapped in papyrus

Dull Pharaoh, rot in pride. Each stately line Of your strict form lies packed in one of mine. By priests regaled, by scarabs ravaged, sleep Until time tells whose leftovers will keep.

A poet who loves obituaries

What's the good news? Some rival bard expires?

Nog drinks himself a health in jubilation, Expecting the attrition of his peers

To leave him Number One Bard in the nation; But, waxing corpse by corpse, does Nog not slight What fleshing out his dream requires in lives?

Nog shall remain mere Nog till he ignite

A holocaust that Nog alone survives.

Raymond Oliver

Seventeenth century gravestone for a child

Chelmsford, Mass.

The Resurrection must take place, As promises take shape in deed. Before the years of rain erase This slate, finally, let us read The best these parents could afford, To claim or tenderly imagine: Not merely "she is with the Lord" But "she is in her Father's mansion."

The body politic

the late sixties

High on its wind, and regal, Scanning the earth for food, The screaming U.S. eagle, In an expansive moodHard straining to embrace The globe, with generous Disdain for creed or race, Desiring all of usSuddenly pops apart. The left wing, then the right, Free of the body, start Flapping in lonely flight; And burdened with self-worth

The rest plunges to earth.

Pay �e que vouldras

"And how am I by self-indulgence diminished?"

"Try it. You'll have the answer when you're finished."

"What is our life? A play of passion "

Someone switches us on, and starts To tune us in, till we can hear Ourselves and do the tuning; at length The signal comes in strong and clear; Slowly it fades, at times we doubt The message; then-over and out.

William Wilborn

On welfare

We have two ways to aid the poor Down here in Jackson City: A white-draped basket at the door; A similar committee.

Turning out

Gayle Whittier

"Pliel" The pink and black line at the barre drops down.

"Releve!" The line lifts, more unevenly.

I am scrabbling for leverage, parts of my forgetful body tilting out of art back into nature. At last, late, I rise too on a brilliant point of pain. I am upheld mostly by the sinew of my mother's gaze. From across the hall she stares fixedly through me to the ideal daughter alive only in her dangerous maternal mind. Inside my staved toe shoe, a specific pressure reopens last Saturday's blister.

"Plie!" We begin again.

The hands of the schoolroom clock on the far wall have frozen at two of twelve. If I watch they will never move. But when I look away, "Time!" Sergei dismisses us. Although we dance in spellbound, mispronounced French, we begin and end Group Ballet in a wide-awake and daily English.

"Time!" As the clock's hand darts across noon, the mothers discreetly check their watches to make sure of every paid-for minute. They smile, if at all, only at their daughters. They are as still, as grim as the face of a priestess casting bones.

My own mother wears even disappointment well. "Go on, Bonnie, take your toe shoes off. We haven't got all day." A towel, the admonitory smell of Lvsol, come towards me. "Well, go on."

Turtle-shaped, my foot sticks, then springs suddenly free, the toes still invisible inside their protective "bunny pads." Worse is about to come. However gently I peel these cusps away, moist strands of rabbit fur clump where my flesh has oozed or, sometimes, yielded blood. Hair by hair I draw off the whistling pain. "Ow-w," "Shh."

"Well, it hurts."

"I know it hurts. Here," she slips me the phial of iodine powder. "Be

brave." But she is gazing elsewhere. "Just look at Gillian, will you. That girl never stops."

Away from the barre, Gillian, our class hope, poses in command of all the eight anatomical directions of the dance. Fatigue has not touched her. Her body arches and her torso tightens for a final budburst. She unfurls upward in a perfect entrechat; tries the circumference of space, a cabriole. Then the whole staff of her body blossoms, deft porcelain, ivory, not our common stuff. She turns and returns in the gyres of an almost endless pirouette. Faster she spins, the boundaries of the legs going; faster, her bright hair streaks into her scarf. Faster, she revolves, spotting, fixing an air-mark before her. Above the blur of arms and skirt and legs, her face seems still: she has been beheaded, reassembled by magicians.

"Well, Gillian shouldn't be in Group, it's not good for morale," my mother's judgment falls.

Now Sergei has paused to watch. Our elderly pianist revives too, scattering a few rosy bars of "Amaryllis" into the blank air of the studio. Even the other students watch, observing in her the reason why they practice every day, what they will turn into if they do.

"Your plie will do," my mother turns away, "but only because you're helped by gravity. But you'll have to work on elevation," a great discipline in her voice as Gillian leaps, grand jete, grand jete, grand jete. Then Madame, massively caryatid, emerges from the office in her magenta satin class dress, flamethrower hair, thighs muscular with varicose grapes. Gillian, her raddled face says, has more than placement, extension, line, those brief commodities: Gillian has a future.

Applause, dropped beads, and "Bravo!" dries up quickly among the odors of talcum and sweat. Gillian resumes her place among us. Madame smiles and beckons to her mother.

"Marie Ravert may be my best friend," my mother tells the walls, "but sometimes I think she's just a stage mother after all!" For it is understood that Gillian dances to fulfill her mother's "ambition," while I, more penitentially, dance for Grace. "Shh!" My mother strains to hear what Madame Orloff is saying. The word "exceptional" unrolls towards us; next, magic names, "New York London," ascend to "Rome, perhaps," and consummate in "Paris, the Ballet Russe!" All the mothers start, look up as if they have heard their own names called.

But Mrs. Ravert's short arms crowd over her bosom. Her head bows no, no, no.

"You must get the money somewhere! Borrow it!" Now Madame booms whole sentences across the studio, but Mrs. Ravert's shoulders bend towards humiliation on a pulse of No, I'm afraid not, No.

"Why, the girl's a natural!" Madame informs everyone in earshot. "Steal

if you have to, but get it somewhere! Kill for it!" she carries herself away, all Slavic extravagance. "Kill!"

"If there's one thing I can't stand, it's favoritism," my mother says. I sprinkle the iodine powder on my blister and wait for the reassurance of a local burn. "Bonnie, fluff your hair, it's stuck to your head."

"I can't help it."

"Group Class for now, then," Madame gives up on a hyperbolic gesture, vou-can-see-what-l'm-up-against, to everyone who cares to watch. "But it's a shame!" On "shame," she turns towards us.

"Hold still while I tie it back with a ribbon, anyway," my mother says. "I wish you wouldn't twitch so."

Then it is certain. Madame is approaching us, a half-smile wired to her face. Is she going to ask us for Gillian's lesson money? I wonder.

"Mrs. Brent, could I see you a moment ?"

"We're already paid up through next month. I've got the receipt right here

"Oh, no. No, that's not what I wanted to talk about. In my office, please? You too, Bonnie. This concerns you."

We follow her at a distance. People are leaving now, and the studio resumes its great emptiness, to be filled by other classes today and, on Wednesday nights, the Bingo games they hold here.

"I bet she's giving you the 'Sugar Plum Fairy,' what do you want to bet?" my mother hisses. "Now act surprised, Bonnie."

In the smaller side room, over a table strewn with snippets of costume fabric, hundreds of younger Madames look down from glossies on a red velvet board: Madame as Pierret, with rakish melancholy, hand under chin, and painted tear; Madame as a large-featured Giselle in Black Forest bodice; and, of course, Madame as the Dying Swan.

"Mrs. Brent, I've made myself sick over this, just sick," her accent slips as she begins.

"What is it?"

"But I believe in being frank, lowe it to you, it's your investment, after all. There is" - her hand surrenders the room to fate - "no other way."

"But what's the matter?" My mother's Sugar Plum Fairy smile lingers, dead, on her face.

Madame, steadying herself, gazes into the wall of mirrors opposite us. Before them, a light oak barre runs prairie smooth. This is where I danced until my father "put his foot down," before I discovered, in the cheaper democracy ofGroup Class, the lie of my talent. This is the room for private lessons. Our glances meet in triplicate on the silver surface of the mirror.

"Where should I begin?" Madame wonders. Plunging, "It's my sad responsibility to tell you, Mrs. Brent the truth flows free, "that

Bonnie's future in ballet is well, limited. Believe me, I am sorry." Madame's hands ward off a protest my stunned mother cannot, as yet, make. "Truly sorry."

"What exactly do you mean by 'limited'?" she asks at last.

"You know," Madame sidesteps, "even two years ago she was nudging the height limit for a ballerina." She smiles hurriedly. "Bonnie's not exactly prima ballerina size, if you see what I mean."

In the mirror, my mother sees what she means, and I do too, my random, changing flesh flashed back at us.

"Oh, she's shot up." My mother cannot deny it. "But she won't keep on growing, will you, Bonnie. Anyway, I have no illusions. She may not become a first dancer, but I'm not a stage mother either. As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing wrong with the corps de ballet."

"My dear." Madame takes my mother's hand. She clears her throat of something worse. "I'm afraid Bonnie would unbalance the line even there. Exactly how old are you, Bonnie?"

My answer and my mother's intertwine.

"I'm sure she's reached her full height. I reached mine early."

"Fourteen last April," I confess.

A faux pas. In the Dance, your exact age is never calculated. "Teen," especially, evokes panic, for everyone holds her breath as you skid across the perilous mud of adolescence, Nature finger-painting you with hormones, blurring the artful line of years of lessons. For many Mothers of the Dance, a daughter's change of heart or bone may synchronize with their darker "changes of life." We dance in a time of endings.

"Only fourteen!" Madame seizes on it. "What, some girls keep on growing until they're eighteen!"

We all close our imaginations, not quite fast enough, against the spectacle of me, a dancing giantess of eighteen, demoted, year by year, from the Ballet Russe to the sideshow.

But my mother rallies. "You don't mean to tell me that it's only a matter of size, do you? Didn't you say it yourself, last year, Bonnie has talent? How can you have talent one year and not the next?"

"All my students have talent. I never accept a student who doesn't," Madame testifies. "But talent's not the whole picture. There's structure, too. With les petits rats, the babies, who can tell? The older ones well, one needs light bones, strict muscles, a long torso, so, and ." A complicated gesture cancels me out. "Time decides. What more can I say except that I am truly, truly sorry !"

The fact upon her, my mother flattens into a chair. "You mean she should stop dancing?"

"Did I say that? Did you hear me say that, Bonnie? Of course not?" Madame laughs palely. "Haven't I always said that Bonnie's the most

most industrious dancer I've got. She will dance!" Color and confusion brighten my mother's face. "She should just shift to tap, that's all."

"Tap." The sentence is pronounced. All of us know that ballet is the Dance, an art, unlike the dazzling, double-jointed trickery of tap daneing, or, one more fall below, acrobatic "routines" and "baton lessons."

"Oh, she'll be striking in tap, just look at her! Why, a few weeks of private lessons and she'll catch up in time for the Christmas recital."

"Private lessons? Oh, I don't know.

"Wouldn't you like a solo, Bonnie?"

"Who, me?"

"A solo spot," Madame promises, right hand raised to the portrait of Pavlova. "I give you my word if she applies herself."

"A solo in five months? Is that really possible?"

Madame looks offended. "Do I know my own business or not?"

"Of course, of course. I didn't mean to suggest "

"I accept your apology," Madame declares, her accent now back in place. "Now, what would be a good time for this little one's new lessons? Thursday? Friday?"

"Either. Well, Thursday."

"I hope we can fit her in." Madame consults her big ledger. "Fourthirty? Five? And you can apply the Group Lessons already paid for, of course. Bonnie, you are a very fortunate young lady. Practice every day now, don't disappoint us."

"Oh, don't worry. I'll see that she does."

"And thank you, Mrs. Brent, thank you for being so reasonable. You would not believe some of the people I have to deal with!" She rolls her eyes for heavenly help.

"Stage mothers." My mother understands.

Madame starts herding us out of her office. "One of these days," she consoles my mother, "you'll have a swan there. You'll wake up and see a swan!"

We emerge beside the sign INSTRUCTION MUST BE PAID FOR IN ADVANCE. The next hour's crowd of mothers and daughters swarms around us on their way to Group Tap. Theirs is a noisy, glossy craft, carried in round red or black patent-leather hat boxes. One tiny fiveyear-old wears, despite the heat, a leopard-skin coat. The Mothers of Tap have hard, bright faces, red nails, lips wide with Revlon's Fire and Ice.

Mine is a small, very elegant mother who has made a lifework of her good bone structure and her Good Taste. Good Taste directs that petticoats match skirts in one of three colors only: black, white and beige. Good Taste defines the brief season for white shoes (not before Memorial Day, not after Labor Day); it even measures and colors the rim of

our company china, which may be white or cream with a "classic" gold border, but painted flowers only if they are "dainty." Daintiness, in fact, is one reason my mother has befriended Mrs. Ravert, whose humility is rubbed smooth and small like a pebble, and whose Scots accent my mother thinks "refined." Also Mrs. Ravert wrestles skittishly with many small, but manageable, worries, a good sign in a good mother. "Oh dear, I hope Gillian doesn't become too American. Her manners put me to shame! What do you think, Ida?" and "Oh dear, Gillian uses so much slang I hardly understand her! Ida, what. ?"

The staircase clears. Marie and Gillian Ravert are waiting for us in the vacant entry below.

"Now just smile," my mother directs, sotto voce, "as if nothing's happened. There's no reason to be ashamed. Everybody knows only one or two girls ever make it."

"Only one or two will make it," Madame warns the mothers ritually. Each nods, though disbelieving that she has not earned, with her arnbitious love, with the hard-saved dollar-fifty's for Group or the three dollars for a private lesson, a daughter's opportunity. Most of the mothers look plain and overworked, starved, like Mrs. Ravert, on American dreams. A startling number of them have, by some special curse, hatched peacocks, the challenge of uncommonly pretty daughters. Only my mother and I upend expectation. She walks, concluded, in a fading and ungiven legacy of beauty. I, it is charitably understood, am "still growing," not quite done.

"Only one or two" explains why silence so often covers the older students like a purifying snow Yes, Barbara Cross actually tap-danced on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, remember? And Judy Scolini almost got on the Ed Sullivan show with her Toy Shop ballet. But where are they now?

"I heard Barbara met somebody in New York, she got married."

"Is he rich?"

"I heard he's a millionaire!"

Of course. Because in every mother's mind fame flows to roses, red, red for the blood-pulse of the audience and for the passion of strangers. Millionaires all lined up outside the stage door just about to open. And if the scholarship dancer should come home quietly, failed, or pregnant, if she should be worn down to selling tickets, "Only one or two will ever make it

We have always known.

Outside Madame's studio, late summer thickens, bright and alkaline.

"I'm so embarrassed, Ida. I suppose everybody heard," Mrs. Ravert murmurs.

"I didn't. What did she have to say?"

"Well, she said Gillian ought to have private lessons, the way she used

to." She adores Gillian with her eyes. "She says she's talented, a 'natural.' "

Gillian walks with us milkmaid-sweet, apple-breasted, arms a graceful birthright, joints that must move on golden pins, not bone. Her feet turn out without being commanded. She steps over the sidewalk cracks without a downward glance.

"I just don't know. What do you think, Ida? Do you think she's got talent?"

"Anybody can see that."

"What did she say to you, Ida? Madame."

"Exactly the same thing. Madame told us Bonnie's talented."

"You don't say!" Mrs. Ravert's amazement checks itself diplomatically.

"I do say. She's been watching her and she's decided Bonnie's got a distinct talent for tap. Fix your barrette, dear, it's slipping."

"Tap?"

"That's where the real money is, you know, like Eleanor Powell, vaudeville she finds at last, "the Rockettes! Not in ballet."

"Bonnie is quite a strapping lassie."

"She's not big, she's statuesque. Bonnie's a long-stemmed American beauty."

"Hey, Bon." Gillian's elbow cuts into my side. "You really gonna do tap?"

"I guess so."

Gillian's jaws move up and down, plie, releve, on her chewing gum while she considers this. "Well, jeez Louise," she says.

"Of course I'm just thrilled!" my mother's voice is practicing behind us. "Tap's so much more natural. Did you know, Marie, that ballerinas never menstruate?"

"They don't? Oh, that can't be true, Ida, is that true?"

"It certainly is. I read it in the Reader's Digest. It's from starving themselves all the time, that's why."

"Imagine that!"

Gillian pushes me ahead of our mothers' lowered voices. By now Mrs. Ravert is or soon will be confiding how her husband came home drunk again and hit her-"right here"-her nylon glove touching her cheek as if to re-imprint it with the color of the bruise. "You ought to just walk out," my mother will advise, as usual. And Mrs. Ravert will agree that yes, she knows, she should leave that man, she would leave him if it weren't for the children, the children

Gillian walks faster. "Guess what! Guess who asked me out?"

"Who?"

"Fred Vargulic! He's a senior! It was right after Earth Science, he comes up to me, see, and he goes, 'You wanna go out next Saturday?' 'I dunno,'

1 says, real cool, 'why should l?' He says, '1 might take ya 'round the world, that's why!'"

"Where're you going?"

"The drive-in. Only my mother," she giggles, "she thinks it's a dance. They say Fred likes to French kiss." She is distracted, for a moment, by a passerby's stare. People often forget their manners in the face of such unexpected beauty.

"Bonnie! There's our bus!" my mother calls.

"So if anybody asks you, say it's a dance, O.K.?"

"O.K."

"We'll have to run for it!" my mother warns, running already. Lost girlhood strives inside her stiffening matron's body. She bunches up her skirt, against the wind. Her hair whips out weed tall, a graying ashblond paradox around her profile, fine and eroding. Still further down, pink laces of an invisible corset hold in the first dark place where once we blended into common flesh, a mother and a child. She runs awkwardly, wholly en terre. She runs to make me come true.

"You almost missed it, lady," the driver complains, impatient as she sorts out change. "1 ain't got all day." My mother drops the exact fare for two into the slot and turns to find seats together for us.

From our window we watch Gillian, unhurried, unperturbed, ascend the steps to the bus. A veil of glances falls over her, and she smiles. The driver smiles back, turning her dollar into coins, lingering a little over her hand. The light changes to red, but no one cares. Time has paused for her.

"Beauty like that," my mother says, "it's a burden."

But 1 do not believe her. The faces of everyone, both genders, young and old, smile or stare in wonder at Gillian, the way sunflowers track the sun.

"I only hope Gillian's grateful for what her mother's trying to do for her. She's taking in wash to pay for those lessons."

"Other people's wash?"

"Yes. You've seen all those baskets of it, haven't you? Did you think it was theirs? Personally "-she settles a summer hat on her curlsI've always had a suspicion she was a housemaid back in Scotland. There was some scandal, that older husband and all 1 bet Gillian's a love child!" She nods at her own thoughts. "That would explain it."

"Explain what?"

"Why she's so beautiful. I mean, otherwise it's really a mystery, isn't it?"

Gillian's loveliness, surely immoral, poises hummingbird static and

swift in my mind. "She's going out with Fred Vargulic. He's got this awful reputation!"

"How's that?" She is asking herself whether her hat looks right.

"He puts his tongue in your mouth when he kisses. Yuk."

"There!" My mother stabs her hatpin through the straw. Below the lacy brim her face shadows with remembered beauty. "Let's get going, Bonnie, I just dread this, but we better get it over with."

That afternoon we-Gillian, her mother, me, mine-all sit on the scratchy, royal-blue, velvet seats of the Bijou Theatre while the matinee performance of The Red Shoes lurches, whirrs and skips from frame to frame. Before us Moira Shearer leaps up close, wafts away, at the commandment of the camera. Once, the projector jams, the picture clots to a stop, "Ohhhh!" Our disappointment brings it back in pink and purple burned spots to the exhaled relief of the mothers and Gillian's small solitary cheer. "Yeah!"

But Gillian is bored. Her flawless hand browses steadily from the popcorn box to her mouth, up and down, keeping its own time over the romantic crescendos of the movie score.

"Hey, Bon, you want some popcorn?"

"No thanks."

"Yeah, I shouldn't either. Gotta watch my figure Guess what! Didja hear about Marsha Norris?" "No."

"She went all the way. Honest! I got it from Marge Donaldson and Marge, she got it from Marsh herself. So it's true all right."

"Who with?"

"Chuck Schultz. They're getting married, Marsha says, maybe this Christmas. A Christmas wedding."

"Shh!"

"But how old is Marsha?" I ask quietly.

"She's sixteen, a girl can get married at sixteen in this state without her parents' wanting her to, it's the law

"We are here to watch this movie, not to listen to you," my mother announces as if to strangers.

It's the denouement. Poor Moira -Shearer drops suddenly, still in her demonic shoes, before the machinery of an oncoming train. The impact jars through the women, doubling on their shocked and indrawn breaths. Mrs. Ravert cups a cry back into her mouth. "Oh, look at that, Ida!"

Against a soiled pavement the dying dancer's fractured legs splay, still en pointe. Wind plays at the corolla of her skirt. The pale-pink gauze of her stockings darkens to the sound of Mrs. Ravert's weeping. She is sopping up tragedy in her fresh handkerchief, saved for this moment.

"Hey, Bon, where can you get stockings like that?" Gillian nudges me. "Do you know?"

"Quiet, girls!"

Out of the dancer's legs a darkness keeps flowing. It seeps through the pearly silk of her stockings. It stains the lighter satin of the Red Shoes. Blood, but moving more gently than blood really moves, and fading from black to purple to a thoughtful blue, the color at the heart of a poppy. "Take off the Red Shoes!"

We leave the theater, silent, for the glare of half-deserted Sunday streets.

"Wasn't it sad, Ida? I thought it was very sad."

"There are sadder things," my mother understands.

Mrs. Ravert tries to gather up all her feelings in something poetic"She danced herself to death!" Her glance seeks out Gillian, tender, bewildered, watchful. "Oh, ballet is a cruel art, isn't it," she says, "but it's so beautiful. Isn't it beautiful, Ida?"

"This sun is giving me a headache," my mother answers.

"Did I tell you, Ida, I'm taking Gillian to Scotland next year? To my sister's in Aberdeen, to study?"

"You told me, Marie."

Gillian smooths the petals of her nine-gored skirt over crinolines. She sighs, mildly exasperated, then draws me back to confide, "Bon, guess what! I got into Secretarial. Next year I get to take typing, Typing I."

"I thought you were going to Scotland, to your aunt's."

"Maybe. Maybe not." But in the shimmer of her brilliant eyes, sky color bound by darker blue, slyness cannot take hold.

"Your mother says."

"Yeah, well. My mother works real hard and everything, you know? I mean, she's really sweet. But she's not too practical, know what I mean?" She blows a pink, fruit-scented bubble. "If you take Secretarial, you can always get a job The bubble rounds out dangerously, but just before it bursts, she sucks it back in. "I'm gonna get a job and save up for my wedding. I already got the gown picked out, you know," she taps her skull, "in my head. White satin, or white velvet if it's winter. My cousin, she wore blush pink. You can wear ice-blue, too, only people don't, much. Anyway, I want real lace, not fake, down here on the neckline and on the train. A six-foot train. Sleeves cut like so Her hand describes a fallen triangular wing, vaguely medieval. "What about you, Bon? What's yours like?"

"Maybe I won't even get married."

"Sure you will. Everybody does, almost. And I wanna have three kids. She pauses, almost conscious of a golden pollen of male glances. no, four, real close together, you know, so's they can be

friends. Two girls and two boys. Well, a boy, a girl, a boy, a girl," she conceives them on her fingers. "I'm gonna call the girls Dawn and Candy. Do you like 'Dawn' and 'Candy' for names? I don't know what to call the boys, though. I guess their father can name them."

The light changes to green just as we catch up to our mothers. Sinking into the softening asphalt, we four stride forward as if to merge with our images, closing in from the plate glass window of a furniture store across the street, in Darwinian enigmas. Somehow Gillian came from her small, speckled mother, a glorious mutation. But in me my mother's silver blondness has been thrown back to mouse-brown. A triumphant moment has declined. We both know this as she walks forward in her reconstructed dignity, and I walk in my body of original sin.

"Turn, dear." I turn. "A little more." I turn a little more. Mrs. Arcangelo talks around a slipped moustache of straight pins, held tight between pursed lips. She is fitting my costume, but her mind is on her masterpiece. "It's got hundreds of tiny little rhinestones, each one I got to sew by hand. 'Starlight effect,' that's what they call it. 'Starlight.'''

"I'm sure it's beautiful." My mother fingers the expensive slipper satin of a half-made sleeve.

"Mrs. Ravert, she's working extra just to help pay for it. Well," the seamstress lowers her voice, "she'd have to, it's costing over two hundred dollars!"

"Two hundred dollars!"

"And that's not counting my work. Well, it makes you wonder Turn, dear." I turn for her. " what with all the starving people in the world! But Mrs. Ravert says it's an investment, the girl's dancing the Dying Swan and only the best dancer gets to do it. It's in a ballet now, what did she call it? Blank? A ballet blank?"

"Blanc," my mother corrects. "It means all in white."

"That's right. Well, Gillian! You could put your two hands right around her waist and touch your fingers, she's such a dainty little doll. They're taking her to Scotland, to study

"Hold still, Bonnie, You're making it harder for Mrs. Arcangelo to do her work."

A straight pin just misses me, waist level. Mrs. Arcangelo turns, too, on her massive knees, and sets her yardstick up from the floor to my thighs. "Look at that, it's got to come down another quarter-inch! When is she going to stop growing?"

It is night; my mother is tired, but, "Bonnie's a long-stemmed American beauty," she defends me. "We expect her to audition for the Rockettes someday. When she's older, of course."

"What's that?"

"You never heard of the Rockettes? Why, they're famous for precision kicking. All over the world."

"Mmmm."

By now I know Mrs. Arcangelo's rhythm and turn without being told.

"You have to be over five-foot-seven just to tryout for them!"

"My, my." Mrs. Arcangelo sits back on her haunches, finished.

"If you ask me, that waist's still not quite long enough," my mother reflects.

"There's nothing left to let down. Just step out of it, dear."

"Careful, Bonnie, don't step on the hem."

Almost negligently, Mrs. Arcangelo picks up my shed splendor, and I stand, unmasked before myself in her oval mirror, a startled, biscuitcolored shape in a cotton slip, slouched between girlhood and whatever else is coming.

"Beautiful material," she says, "a pleasure to work on."

"That's the best satin money can buy. Bonnie, put your clothes on, you'll get sick for the recital." A suffocating cape of Blackwatch pleats snaps shut on me until, with one sharp tug, my mother lets me breathe again.

"That Ravert girl, now I emerge to see Mrs. Arcangelo sketching in air, "she's got a cap of feathers, each feather's threaded on separately with a seed pearl at the base.

"Put your coat on, Bonnie, It's late. When's our next fitting?"

Outside, after the bitter wind, we settle onto the cold seats of the car. She starts rummaging in her purse: makeup, bankbooks, comb.

"Where's my pocket calendar?"

"The recital's the twenty-second, Mom." Who does not know his date of execution? "Eight o'clock. The Moose Hall."

"Oh, I know that. But when's your next period? The twenty-fourth? Later?" she hopes.

"I'm not sure. I don't know."

"What do you mean, don't know? Don't you keep track?"

"What for? It always happens."

"Bonnie, you're hopeless. Now where's my calendar? I didn't leave it home, did I? Did you see me leave it somewhere, on the kitchen counter maybe?"

"I think it's January second."

"That's next year, thank heaven. You wouldn't want to ruin your costume We swing out into the November night. "Your father, of course, he doesn't understand anything. Wait'll I tell him what Gillian's cost."

My costume has already spoiled a dinner. "Forty-five dollars! What the hell, do you think I'm made out of money, Ida?"

"It'll last forever."

"Sure, in the attic. Half a week's pay packed up in a goddamned box!" Above my head the swords of failure poise: an outgrown metallic-gold tutu I wore two Christmases ago, as a Marigold in the Waltz of the Flowers, also last year's tulle skirt, dirty-white, to turn me into a Snowflake.

"I just don't have forty-five bucks."

"Use some of the vacation money."

"Oh, Ida."

"Please? It would make me happy."

"No, it wouldn't, but sure, go ahead, take the shirt off my back."

"I'm very surprised at you, John, denying your daughter like that. Bonnie's talented. In just four months she's gotten a solo routine."

"Solo racket."

Now every afternoon between four and five, to the ratchety Voice of Music victrola, I practice without hope. It is like lying, to drag the cargo of a half-willing body through my Military Tap, cleats scratching the linoleum, eyes on the slow redemption of the clock. Where ballet required lightness, ballon, tap demands crispness, firecracker smiles, "bounce." To make me bouncier, my mother bobs my hair and ties it up in rags, but within moments it too falls limp.

"More life! Put more life in it!" She drives me, a dying horse, to the outpost of performance. "All right, all right, start over. Start from bar thirty." And when the phone rings, "Tell Gillian you can't talk long, you're working on your routine."

"Bon, listen." Gillian's voice comes to me conspiratorily soft. "I gotta see you. I've got something to tell. You won't believe it!"

My mother replaces the needle on the record. A few vacant grooves turn while Gillian urges, "After rehearsal tomorrow? O.K.?"

My mother gestures that time is up.

"Sure. I can't talk now."

My march starts. "Hey, is that yours?" Gillian asks, "Is that your music?" and starts singing,

'Oh be kind to your web-footed friends! 'For a duck! may be some! body's moth-er!'"

"Bonnie, hang up."

"I've got to go."

'And if you! think that this! is the end Well it is!'"

Gillian hangs up first.

In bed that night the first black sweetness of my sleep breaks open. A

dot of light is widening inside me. I lie still, as if listening, as it feathers, turns. A ribbon of cramp winds upwards through my belly. I swing out of the covers to start for the bathroom.

Outside it has been snowing, it still snows, wide steady flakes like petals falling off a peony. A seam of chill runs at the baseboard. Even the braided rugs feel cold to my bare feet. But from beyond my halfopened door quick air stirs in my parents' room. They are not asleep, but speaking softly, their voices distinct in the night darkness.

My mother's yields, "Oh, I'm not blind, you know. I can see it's over. Madame's right."

"Maybe she's wrong."

"She's right." The whole hall grows colder at the soft sound (f(weeping. "Hey, it's not the end of the world."

At my window the georgette curtain lifts and falls in a current of thin heat. Below it, the radiator spits, then whistles. Perhaps I should make a noise, call out for somebody, stop them, my instinct for self-preservation tells me.

"You take things too hard, Ida honey. If you'd just stop wanting so many things, you'd be happy."

"Like you?"

"Well, yes, I guess I am, happy."

"No, ever since I knew you, you've been contented with what you have. Not like me. Sometimes it really makes me wonder."

Inside me fresh warm blood slips. Then out of a calm too good to last, her girl's voice, downy with wishes, speaks, "John," his name.

"What is it, honey? Let's get some sleep."

"John? What if we had another baby?"

"What?"

"I'd like that, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you?"

My father lengthens a silence around the house, its lonely shape in winter night. "Oh, Ida, we're too old for all that stuff."

"I am not, I'm not too old. John, we could start all over."

"Is that a threat or a promise?"

"Don't laugh at me."

"I'm not laughing, honey. Honest. Everybody likes to dream," he says. "It's nice to think about, anyway."

"I've always wanted another baby," my mother's voice rounds, rises in the darkness. "I always wanted to try again."

"Let's go to sleep now."

"John?"

"Let's go to sleep."

For a while I sit on the edge of the mattress. Brightness slips past the window shade. The dancer in the Degas poster on my walls blurs into a

snowflower. At last water retreats banging down the radiator pipes, so that even the small heat vanishes. My bare feet have gone mineral-cold. I pull myself between the bedsheets, cold too now, draw my legs up into a smaller self beneath the wide, indifferent quilt.

They must be sleeping now. Blindly, my heart tells itself over and over. If I don't get up, by morning the sheet will be stained. "I always wanted to try again." If I do get up, my mind will work on what I overheard. Still bleeding, knowing it, I fall asleep.

"Dress" rehearsal, everyone in old leotards anyway, "Hey, Bon," Gillian leads me to the back of the auditorium, glances around for eavesdroppers, and announces, "This is serious. First you gotta promise never to tell. Like swear "Swear."

I gesture over my heart.

"Promise? O.K., then. Well She tries to delay dramatically, but her pride races forward. "Well, Fred and me, we went all the way the other night."

"You didn't!"

"I did." Offand on her starry eyes blink. "Well, we're really in love, you know, so it's all right and everything."

"It's not all right." Doesn't she know about V.D. and Pregnancy, my mother's big deterrents? "What happened? Did he get you drunk?"

"You shouldn't never drink," she admonishes, "it's bad for your skin." Her gum clicks and sloshes in excitement. "We just, uh, couldn't stop, you know." She chews faster, new juiciness.

On stage the baby swans, Beginners' Class, troop out in their soft bottoms and soft shoes, the random shoreline of our Swan Lake.

"But he won't respect you," the third reason Not To comes to me, "I mean, no boy really wants a girl somebody's "Nobodv's laid me, only Fred. Besides, your mother just says that so you won't. You know mothers."

Slowly I recognize that I am in the presence of an initiate, a living sourcebook. "Did you bleed much?"

"I didn't bleed at all. I bet they lie about that, too, huh? But I got worried, maybe Fred thought I'd been with somebody else, before, you know? I didn't say nothing. I just hoped he didn't notice."

From the stage Madame makes a scooping gesture toward Gillian.

"Hey, I gotta go."

"Wait. Does it hurt?"

"A little. Yeah." She half-turns her graceful back to me; it's her cue.

"But, you know," her hand leads my glance downward to her feet, their perfect turnout, the slender pink cylinders of her toe shoes, "not as much as this "

Recital night, someone has strung dressing rooms with flannel-blanket walls behind the Moose Hall stage. Decibels of laughter and trouble travel the central aisle. Unseen nerves snap to tears. The curtain's up. Excitement burns among us.

"Hold still." My mother strokes solemn pigments on my face. A towel tied around the neck protects my glossy soldier's costume. Above it, her compact mirror shows me in savage colors, desiccated peachskin base, woad-blue shadow, a lipstick orange enough to turn my teeth yellow. Not for me the wingswept ballerina's eye, the cold still red dot for a tear duct. In the small space between what my mother draws and the lines of my naked cheekbones, I feel a thin yet absolutely crucial margin, by how little I miss being beautiful. My mother's fingers move, electric with determination.

"Mom, I feel sick."

"That's just nerves. Hold still." She squints. Her sharp fingernail pares off a minute edge of paint. Up close her face terrifies my own, lipliner generous around her mouth, pores craterous with rouge. Resemblance hardens into me. "Don't look anywhere and don't blink, Bonnie, it'll smear." Then my eyes are on.

They have clamped me somehow into the white satin dress with its boy's bodice. My flesh pushes against Mrs. Arcangelo's French seams, a squash growing through rock.

"Please hold your stomach in." Her hands flatten her own to show me how. "If you don't, you'll look pregnant. And don't sit down, you might rip a seam."

"But I feel funny. Honest."

"Stage fright," she heads me off. "Everybody gets it. It's a good sign," though she knocks on the nearest wood, a cigarette stand upholding blocks, jars and sticks of makeup, its own Chinese-red lacquer peeling off.

"I think I'm getting the curse."

"Oh, you're not due for a week yet, more." Briefly her face clears into candor. "Please just don't get sick now, Bonnie, this means so much to me. Just keep calm, will you, and do a good job? Just this once?"

Applause, a slow match striking, comes to us through the blankets. "O.K." The aisle makes way for three belly dancers in sparkles and finger-chimes.

"Who's on now?" she whips back the flannel wall to ask them. "Nina Martin? Nina's your cue, Bonnie! You go on after Nina! Now get out

there," she rights one of the purple plumes on my helmet, "and break a leg!"

Behind the hot must of the velvet curtains, I stand breathing in all the other performances of that and other nights. Overhead the pulleys creak, the curtain lifts enormously on a socket of hall. I am poised on my chalk-mark, a white X center-stage, saluting hundreds of invisible onlookers, families and friends, while the moment crawls on and on and on. In the crescent of the footlights one dead spot interrupts the ring. "Never look right at the audience!" I remember. Because if you do, your own fear and commonness stare back.

In the stage wings my mother's presence keeps getting bigger and bigger with everything she has to lose. Her hands are fixed slightly apart, as if she holds some breakable commodity, and she starts counting-numbers whisper across the boards, "One, and, two, and my march rasps in its grooves, "three, and, four AND " my foot takes over from her. In a noisy rush of turns, I come alive. There is the first naked awkwardness, the fear of tripping or forgetting, then my "routine" meshes with my body, takes me in.

Gradually I dance the rows of seats into shape out of the darkness. Out of the darkness wildflower faces come up, solitary, to the now,and, then blue dart of a camera pinning me to this place and this moment forever.

Hurtling out of every turn, I sight my mother. She mouths, "Smile! Smile!" Her hand tightens my salute. Her arms are waving "Arm move, ments!" and with the startling gesture of a woman garrotted, "Head up!" By the finale she is flailing too, and as the curtains close on our farewell smile a loud, obligatory slap of applause says it is over.

"Oh, baby, I'm so proud of you!" she tells me, but she wilts into tears. I touch my own face to see if the makeup has come off. On one satin cuff an orange stain recalls my last salute.

"Now clean up and come down and sit with us it's Row B, seats six and seven."

"O.K."

In my cubicle I rub my skin fiery to coldcream everything away except my simple, earlier face. Aftermath flattens out in me like the end of a birthday, like the daily texture and pallor of the street clothes I will be putting on for the rest of my life. Headed toward the audience, I walk past islands of ballerinas waiting for their cues.

"Bonnie!"

In the wings Gillian twinkles, two hundred dollars worth of light leaping and staying among the subtle rhinestones in her skirt. On her perfect, floral face worry hesitates, accepts the diminished form of puzzlement.

"Oh, Bon, am I ever scared!"

"You? You've got stage fright?"

"It's not that." Her eyes assess the cygnets on stage, pretending to swandom in uneven bourrees. "Denise's out of step again," she says, "as usual." While I am looking, "I'm late, that's what's the matter."

"No, you're not. It's not even your cue."

Her violet eyes roll upward. "Late. Late," she repeats, " 'my aunt was coming for a visit' and she's late. You know?"

"1 bet it's the recital. It's made you nervous or something."

"Oh, no, it's not. I'm real regular, Bon. And anyways, there's other signs."

"Signs?"

"Oh, Bon." She lowers her eyes in perfectly practiced shame. "I'm expecting."

It is the worst thing a girl could do, but even that, 1 sensed, you could do with talent, skill of some sort. "You're not?"

"Yeah. I'm sure. I got knocked up."

"Who?"

"Fred, who else?"

"Are you sure?"

Her glance shows damaged trust. Did I think she was one of those girls who "didn't even know the father"? Did 1 think she was an amateur?

"Does your mother know?"

"Bon, really. I mean, Fred and me, we'll tell her later. We're gonna get married right away, so it's O.K. Just don't say anything, promise?"

I start to cross my heart but the gesture feels foolish, childish. "But she'll find out. What about Scotland? What about the Dance?"

"Well, I'm certainly not gonna dance anymore!" Gillian puts on a matron's indignation.

"Oh, Gill."

"You gotta quit sometime, I mean, look at Madame." Her face pouts and she begins to cry, though carefully, a little wad of Kleenex damming up the tears to keep her mascara from flowing. "No. This is the last time."

From the stage a sharp crack of applause finishes the little swans.

"Oh, Gillian, that's awful."

"What?" The little cygnets, Beginners Class, giggle past us and she pulls back to preserve her fluted skirt.

"It's awful, you not dancing again."

"Oh. I mean, what I'm really worried about is maybe this could hurt the baby, mark it or something?" We hear the restless public murmur of the audience. "Well, me next," she says. "Cross your fingers, huh?"

"O.K."

Daintily Gillian pulls out a pink nubbin of gum and sticks it to the frame of the stage. A moment later she has assumed her place at center stage, legs effortlessly in the fifth position, arms en couronne.

In Row B I wedge past my mother's knees and sit between her and Mrs. Ravert, Seat 7, as the first bars of the Dying Swan draw a hush across the audience. On stage a wide confetti of pink and blue spotlights combine, settle on Gillian. The sweet soreness of her beauty, recognized, stirs in me, in everyone who watches. On our many drawn breaths she comes to motion.

Light plays on her rhinestones, bees on the living skin of flowers. The drafts catch and turn the feathers in her swan cap, until she trembles into something more than human, like us but also winged.

Beside me my mother holds in her disillusioned lap, eyes bravely forward, like a schoolgirl undergoing punishment both rigorous and undeserved. I reach for her in the darkness and am surprised by the readiness of her answering grip. We sit hand in hand.

From the audience a ripple, half cooing, half regret, says that Gillian, in a temps d'ange, has taken a bowman's arrow and now is slowly folding back into mortality.

In a few moments now she will sink into the sharp shape of a swan's outstretched throat, trembling to her silent death. The space between perfection and applause will seal her off. Then, resurrecting on the beats of acclamation, higher, higher, she will rise and curtsey, will make her reverence to Madame, the throats will fill up with "Encore!" as Sergei offers her an armful of red roses. "Encore!" until the dream cuts some other onlooker to the heart, roots there, and it begins again.

Downbent, my gaze catches the gleam of patent leather, Mrs. Ravert's cushiony small feet crammed into the pony hooves of her new shoes. She wears opaque elastic stockings, new too. Between the lapels of her Sunday suit, a cheap lace quivers. Her gloved laundress's hands are moving in small, possessed gestures to the music of her daughter's body on the stage. But I am afraid to look higher, to witness her face in all its bright intensity, the stale hair netted in a dancer's knot. Motherhood is the cruel art. If I look I will have to see her spirit burning in her eyes, the rapt and unsuspecting love of the only innocent among us.

In praise of chocolate

Frances Kuffel

Michael calls me at two in the afternoon. Dorsey's agreed to spend the day with him if he treats for videos and at Thomthum's Chocalatiere.

"Martha, you simply have to meet us. It's Saturday-do you work tonight? Good, then there's no excuse, you can come. We're at Zap's Arcade now, so let's say three o'clock at Thurn's, right? I promised Dorsey he could eat there and if you love me you're going to show up."

I am not at all sure I want to go. First of all, my name is Rachel, not Martha. And Michael just woke me from three hours of needed sleep; I don't feel like seeing anyone for a year. Including Michael and especially Dorsey.

"No I can't. I love you and I won't." Without arguing, without good, byes, Michael hangs up.

Maybe I can clear the taste of rust from my mouth and walk up to Prospect. Buy the papers on the way and get a headache from reading in the sun. That way I can feel sick but not guilty for sleeping through the afternoon.

The phone jangles again. It's the only object in the living room besides a desk and a chair, purchased from St. Sebastian's charity basement. Michael again.

"Martha, I won't say you're failing me as a friend." His voice is very reasonable. I remember it from the day he bilked the desk out of the Daughter of Isabella volunteering her time and limited sympathy to the poor. Michael thinks he can get anything with that voice. "I will say, though, that I'm hurt by your refusal to help me out today."

"Michael, whatdoyouwant? You can't want me around really. You and Dorsey have your own messy little affairs to take care of. Why do I have to be involved?"

"He's running me ragged. All he does is eat and play video games. He won't drive anywhere. We just walked from the University to Capitol

Hill. I'm exhausted. You can eat all you want, just come." Tomthum's is one of those new places on Broadway, all cocoa-colored vinyl and linen, mirrors and handwritten menu cards. They only serve chocolate: candy, pastries, ice cream-you name it.

"You didn't actually promise him all he could eat? Michael, he's fifteen. Do you know how much a fifteen-year-old can eat? This is going to cost you a fortune."

"I'll hock my mother, just get up here."

Dorsey has straight black bangs. He's unnaturally pale, a sign of bad eating habits and no outdoor activity, which I tell him every other week or so. It's a studied look: leather trousers that could have been painted on, a torn Tvshirt. He sprawls toward the aisle and the contrast of his black and white clothes at the narrow waist is so sharp I blink involuntarily. He laughs at me over his sundae and waves me into a chair with his long ice-cream spoon.

"Great, great, you came. I made Michael promise to get you. I love it here, don't you? Zit City," he laughs. "Really cool, even the coffee comes with chocolate straws. So what are you showing at the Czar this week? I want Michael to take me to the Bin tonight and I thought we could stop in for the dirty parts, if there are any. When should we show up?"

I met Dorsey at the Czar during a Hungarian movie about headlightfactory workers. He got bored and waited in the lobby with five dollars worth of candy bars, quizzing me for forty-five minutes about my salary, the owners, how we choose films, whether my hair is naturally curlyanything to fill up the dead space of the untrafficked lobby. I don't even know why I took a liking to him except that he has a voice that's shrill and husky by turns, like a berserk harmonica, and a liveliness that's remarkable but not enviable. After that night he'd stop in once or twice a week. I'd give him free Almond Joys and he'd tell me about the latest bands on the Avenue. He amused everyone at the Czar, sort of a fixture in the Art-Deco lobby. Unfortunately, I introduced him to Michael and Donald. When it comes time for accusations and names, there'll be a face to go with them. Michael has been careful about that.

The movie that started last night isn't what Dorsey wants. It's Austrian: a Viennese gardener in the 1890s. Not even a storm trooper, just rosy policemen who tip their hats and say comforting things about the time like "entzuchend Tag, entzuchende Damen." Dorsey doesn't mind. "Oh well, maybe Michael has art books. I knew a guy with art books once, really cool. " And he wanders off to the pastry casco Michael looks relieved.

"Doesn't he make you feel old? God, all that chatter. I don't know how he does it," Michael says wearily.

Michael has summoned me here to share the excursion, and to listen. I order coffee and ask for cigarettes. The woman at the table next to me watches me light up. She disapproves of my smoking, my stuck-up hair. "I must look like Ma Kettle, Michael. Maybe we should go to Jack-inthe-Box or the Woolworth's luncheonette. Everyone here"-this pointedly - "seems to have just had their hair done." I am careful to flick ashes carelessly to the floor. Some drift to my cracked leather shoes. This could be my lucky day. The woman turns back to her book of poetry in disgust.

"What's wrong with you? I didn't want to say anything but you look really awful, Martha."

"Well since you mention it. Eddy gave a party for the new movie last night and ended up cutting lines for the whole staff. You woke me up."

"Is the film any good?"

I am tired again, the sugary air oppressive. "I don't know. Wait for the review tomorrow, if Smith's passed first-grade grammar in time to write it. He was there."

Dorsey is back, proffering three chocolate pretzels. One for each. He raises one to his face and peers through the holes. The pretzel makes him look like a brindled cat. Or cat burglar.

Michael and I refuse. Dorsey sits down and busily breaks them apart so that little sticks of coated cookie roll around his plate. I look at Michael. "Quite the bull in the china shop, here. Are you going to be able to get him out on the street again?" Michael frowns. "Of course. You'll be hungry for dinner soon, won't you, Dorsey?" Dorsey dips a pretzel piece in my coffee. "Where are we going? We could go back to Zap's and play Space Daggers first, you know." He turns to me. "I scored high on Space Daggers up here. My luck's better on the Hill than at the University. Wanna watch?"

It seems like my exit line.

"I'd love to watch, really, but I think I'll Michael has gripped my arm at the elbow and I swear I can feel at least the frailer veins giving way to a bruise. "Dorsey's counting on you, Martha dear. Spend the afternoon with us-there's not much of it left." He leaves off on my elbow, a relief as painful as the squeeze itself, and drops two bills to the table. The reader-of-poetry next to us has watched this scene and shrinks from us as we move up the aisle to the door. I put on an anguished face as I pass through her periphery.

I blame that woman for everything. Nasty little person making mental notes for her nasty little Sunday night awareness group. I despise her and it's my hatred that prompts me to go ahead with an afternoon with these two.

I breathe the warm, real air of Broadway with new appreciation after

the chocolate ether inside. It's getting on toward Saturday rush hour, the feeling of weekend plans in the air: restaurants preparing for big crowds, shops closing early, shouted "we'll see vou's" across the street. This isn't the right time for Space Daggers, by Broadway standards. But then, it's never the right time as far as I'm concerned, and Dorsey is happily oblivious to such false morals.

The arcade is nearly empty Two ten-year-olds are whooping it up over little yellow blobs that absorb little red blobs, and aside from this noise the place is quiet and empty. Just meaningless squawks and test patterns on the machines. Michael buys tokens for Dorsey and I look around for a place to smoke. Signs indicate this is outside. So now smoking implies indigency as well as cancer? Michael laughs and goes over to Dorsey to tell him we'll be outside. "I've got to make sure Martha's not arrested for vagrancy." Dorsey is hunkered into the tall machine, which dashes eerie lights and pings, nearly stifling his impatient, "Yeah, yeah, O.K. Michael. Ciao."

It's noisier and more private on the ledge where we perch off the sidewalk. I ask Michael what he's heard from Donald off in the icy wilds of Alaska.

"He's fine, what else? The project is ahead of schedule so he should wrap it up in about two weeks. He calls me every other day or so-he asked about you."

"What makes you angrier-that he went away or that he's coming back so soon?"

"Don't be catty, Martha. I'm so bored I could scream. That's why I called you."

"And because Dorsey insisted."

"So he insisted. The hysteria was mine."

I snub the cigarette out on the sidewalk, rolling the butt into the grating with the toe of my shoe. Broadway is quieter now, most of the shops have closed and people are going into bars for Happy Hour. I realize I could use a drink. Whiskey or bourbon. Something that tastes of another season and different place. 1 squint at Michael who is sitting haloed by the sun. "I really hate Seattle in the summer, you know. It's too beautiful, like living in a postcard when 1 don't have a postcard kind of life. Donald's lucky to be in Alaska now." Michael hops off the ledge, pulling me to my feet.

"Donald took that job to get away from me, not Seattle, and I don't want to talk about it. Will you please come in with me while I fetch Dorsey? I'll buy you dinner if you do something with your hair first. You could use some food, couldn't you?" He is swallowed by the churchy dim of the arcade, offering himself to the twinkling votive lights controlled by the acolyte Dorsey.

We travel from Capitol Hill to the T'sing Gate to Second Avenue without pausing for digestion or discussion. Dorsey makes this impossible with his peripatetic darting from place to place. He compensates with attentions that don't occur to Michael, complimenting my hair over the excellent swordfish Michael has ordered for me. And in fact I have pulled myself together rather smartly in the short time allotted my toilette while Michael backtracked to retrieve his car. I am wearing the black trousers of a routine we did at the Czar during the Chaplin festival in March, an emerald green 'Tshirt and the man's satin tuxedo jacket Donald gave me for Christmas. One of the boys, I assure Michael, as I bow my legs in my best Chaplin shuffle.

Michael insists on drinks someplace quiet before going to the Bini he chooses a tavern on Union that is nearly deserted at this odd twilight hour after the warehouses close and before the clubs fill up for the night. I sit with Michael in a circular booth, rotating a sleepy candle in a netted glass holder between my hands. Dorsey has left us at the door to play pinball, and his proficiency rings out across the bar with banging bells and the clicks of steel balls in their gates. Michael tells me about the new office he's rented, his plans for starting out on his own from the law firm he's practiced in for three years. Our whiskeys arrive, and Dorsey appears with a White Russian he must have lied to get. He crowds into the booth, on my other side, squeezing me between them.

"Isn't this great? It's what I love, being close and comfy," he chatters, while stirring the creamy drink in front of him. He drops the straw and sips. "I love I just love this place, Michael. It's so local. I didn't think you knew about it."

I try to keep from laughing. "Oh Michael knows a lot, Dorsey. Give him some credit." Dorsey turns to me, striking a ninety-degree angle with our knees to watch his profile in the mirror behind us. He fluffs the shock of bangs that hangs out over his eyes, then twists the buttons on the upholstered booth. "Are you getting up any new numbers at the Czar?" I arrange what Eddy calls "interludes" before and between showings, fitting them to the themes of the films. Musical comedy, jazz, light opera, pantomimes. Once, a Chinese juggling act in which Jasper and Susan tossed baby dolls around like two crazed Jerry Lewises. They introduced the film Women of China during a twenty-four-hour festival of documentaries. Eddy loves giving film festivals-our own little Cannes, as he puts it.

"I just finished a ten-minute production with the eidelweiss song and a Tyrolean dance. Lots of swirling red skirts and clogging." Dorsey beams and grabs my hand in mock passion, like the heroes on the covers of gothic romances. "Oh Rachel, please I want to be in a show. Can't I be in this one?"

"How do you look in red dirndl skirts, Dorsey?" I turn to Michael. "Maybe we could get away with it, what do you think?" He grimaces and calls for another round. Dorsey jumps to one knee, bouncing on the springy booth couch and waves both hands in front of his face excitedly. "I know I could do it, Rachel. I could be really cool in costumes and wigs. Halloween is my favorite holiday." He tugs the lapels of my jacket, then tucks the stray hairs that have drifted from their braids back into place. "I just love dressing up and I look so good. You'll see."

Michael pays for the drinks and snorts as the waitress walks away, black seamed stockings drawing his eyes after her. "Maybe not." He pulls his attention back from the woman as she goes behind the bar. "Maybe you should wait for a John Travolta week."

I push Dorsey's drink to him, hurriedly. "Michael darling fails to understand the allure of the stage, so ignore him." Dorsey settles down into the cushions again and sips. I watch his eyelashes that star his cheekbones like those Spanish feather fans that Olivia de Haviland fell in love with Errol Flynn over. He's too frantic to think about Michael's remark, I think to myself. He didn't get it. He looks up from the frothy liquid and smiles. "Still, I could wear red knickers and pass out wreaths of flowers or something. I wouldn't even have to sing."

"Oh Christ." Michael puts his glass down with a heavy thud on the table. "Dorsey, I hardly think the theater is quite your line, unless they create a slew of punk musicals. Which I doubt. Not big money-makers." Dorsey leans his head on my shoulder, childishly. "Could you make a punk number for me?"

I have visions. This night a disaster movie: Dorsey dressed up in leather britches as the lonely goat-punk, me as Ziegfield-curn-Snow White's stepmother. "It's time to go. I'll walk you to the Bin or the car or wherever you want, and then I'm going home."

We have six blocks to walk before getting to the club. Gusts of hot air, small winds that the city creates itself of buildings and traffic and narrow channels of open space, push from the alleys as we turn south. From the intersections we can see ferries glowing weirdly green under their lights as they chug toward Bremerton. Their whistles soothe me; I feel less lonely when I think about their plodding journeys back and forth across the Bay. Dorsey slips an arm around my waist. Michael sees but doesn't mind; he slides his arm around from the other side so that he and Dorsey hold each other, hold me. I put my arms around their shoulders and kiss each of them once, on the cheek, Michael first.

I am surprised that it is nine o'clock already. It seems like we've been rushing about for ages, and so we have. The Bin is filling but not yet overflowing, and from the door we can see band members fiddling with wires and testing their instruments. The feature act at the Coal Bin

tonight is the Slash. I have seen them before with Michael and Donald. They are vaguely funny and quite handsome in their various costumes, vintage certain sixties sitcoms. I peer in, craning my neck around the bouncer to see the kind of crowd assembled, then straighten to shake hands with Dorsey and Michael.

"Vi parro. I leave you. This is my stop. Good luck and have fun in there."

Michael kisses the top of my head. "Thanks for wandering with us, doll. I'll call you tomorrow."

"Don't corrupt the child. Or don't let him corrupt you."

Dorsey chimes in, "Michael is a terrible Space Daggers player We'll have to see. Don't you want to come inside and dance? This is a really cool band-they use sparklers and one of them can do these really boss splits. You should see, and besides I've been waiting to dance with you all night. I love to dance."

I look to Michael for help. "No. Please, Dorsey. I'm tired, I want to take a calm bath and go to bed. My next sentence will be a whine, so let's leave it at that, O.K.?"

Michael has that puckish look on his face I don't trust. "Martha." He's being reasonable again. "Martha, corne inside. I've seen you go three days without sleep and you're fine. Do you want to go horne to that empty apartment? Do you enjoy missing George?" George, as of two months ago Thursday, is now residing in a rectory in Renton as he prepares to enter seminary. I converted him by my contrary example. He's also responsible for my name: George and Martha.

"Michael, you're a swell guy. Thanks a lot." I think of kicking him in the shins, but at the moment I consider that an act of maturity I am incapable of.

And he's right. The prospect of my new, empty apartment is wretched. Even George, loving me despite my badness, could have made it bearable. St. Francis and the whore.

Dorsey puts his arms around my middle and swings me around, all the strength he must have. "C'rnon, Rachel. I want to see you dance. I'll order you a drink I know: creme de cacoa, rum, vodka, Kahlua and soda. You'll love it, I promise." My stomach turns: the drink or the swing or George intruding like the low-grade fever he is. But I go in, letting the bouncer stamp my hand with the violet shovel that is the Bin's insignia. Michael gets us a table and, with difficulty, I convince Dorsey that I do not want a "mine shaft," as he calls them, and 1 ask for a double bourbon instead. Michael looks at me, a steady look that measures my intent to get drunk, and orders. "I suppose I deserved that?" he asks. "I suppose so." And 1 turn my attention to the band as they leak half a song and then quit, like bagpipes huffed by wind. Dorsey is off making

the rounds of other tables to greet friends, pointing back to us, the unhappy couple ringside to the dance floor. I open a new package of cigarettes and light one, breathing in deeply.

"Marth. I'm sorry."

I turn my head to Michael. "Skip it, Mike. Just forget it and get ready to dance, because I want to dance, all right?" This is the voice I use on bums and pimps in Pike Street. I always mean it and Michael knows that.

The band filters back from the bar and the lights dim. They pick up their instruments and the lead singer steps forward. Tonight he wears buff-colored suede trousers and a black T-shirt ripped over his heart, "so you can see it beating as we make music for you." Dorsey slips back in his chair and takes my hand, kisses it, and holds it lightly on the table. Michael watches this and I note he knocks back a good quarter of his scotch. The music begins, a steady beat I find monotonous and stupid except that tonight I want it that way. You don't have to think to dance to that music. The song is a version of "The Mocking Bird" and Dorsey has closed his eyes, pursed his lips and sways his head with the rhythm. His hand flutters slightly where it lies loosely on mine. 'And if my baby don't cry tonight Dorsey leans back and the shock of bangs stands in the air. "'Don't cry tonight, don't cry, don't cry '" The words punctuate the song like stabs. Dorsey stamps one booted foot with the song. "'Daddy-Daddy!'" the band cries in unison and the music stops fully for a second or two. The lead singer steps to the microphone and holds it in both hands to croon, "'Daddy gonna buy you a diamond ring.' Dorsey has leaned forward in his chair for this quiet announcement, intent on the singer's face, more a pout than a promise. Michael reaches to lift Dorsey's hand from mine. He holds it briefly, then drops it, still watching the open-mouthed Dorsey. The audience is clapping and the band halts a moment between songs. Dorsey grins crookedly at Michael. "Gonna buy me a diamond ring?" I laugh, and pat him on the back. "Poor old Dorsey, getting drunk and wanting a diamond to go with it."

Michael relaxes and laughs too. "Let's dance, Martha. lowe you a dance, don't I?"

Dorsey has taken to the floor also, dancing with a young man in black trousers and a narrow tie. Michael points them out over my shoulder so that I turn and watch. Dorsey moves rigidly, not fluid and easy like Michael. Michael bows his head to my ear and shouts, "What do you think? Is he a good dancer?" I bellow over the music. "Too tense." The vibrations blast us from the speakers we dance next to.

We are working up a sweat and it feels good. People are filtering in

from all over, sometimes racing back and forth between clubs. I wonder if Dorsey does this. It's the kind of nervous pursuit I have observed in him for months. Michael and I go back to the table, tired and ready for another drink. He gets hold of a waiter and orders, while I leave for the rest room. The drinks are on the table when I get back. No Michael. I watch the dancers for a few minutes, but they are a solid, shifting mass, without interest at this close range, so my eyes fall to the glass in front of me: the beads of condensation that spring to the surface, swell and then run down the ribbed sides, catching the lights from the dance floor. Michael and Dorsey edge away from the crowd, call to me and wave. Their styles are a distinct counterpoint to one another, almost ludicrous to watch. They don't leave the floor when the song ends, so I dance with someone else. This music is all new to me, not like the dances when I was a kid and on the radio I listened to the same songs they played at parties. I have to fake it while I try to catch the beat and gist of the tune. When the number ends, my partner grins and leaves. Michael comes over as I turn toward the table. Dorsey, he gestures, is off with the black tie, and we dance, relaxed and familiar. Soon Dorsey cuts over and it's all three of us together, turning our attention first to one, then to the other. Dorsey smiles broadly and struts back, watching me, measuring my pace. His eyes light when I spin a precise 180 degrees; he answers by dancing sideways, like a knife pulled through a rare steak-finely, deliberately-then turns to Michael and holds his shoulders. They move together, pumping alternately, as though they are machine gears, then move apart and we are a circle of three once again. The song ends and Dorsey shouts over the ringing in our ears, "This is great! We all dance so good like this!" Michael nods, ready to shout a reply, but the music starts again and we are walled in by shifting elbows and hips and mounting heat. It's a slower tune, almost lyrical for a band and a club like this, and we dance separately, without attention to each other. I open my eyes when my heel is stepped on; Michael is gone, claimed by someone behind us. Dorsey drawls a sleepy smile at me and moves closer, taking one hand, and we dance like that, sort of lazy in this slower rhythm, nothing fancy, just closer and closer, circling our way into that rhetorical embrace we called slow dancing back in high school. We even try cheek-to-cheek, but I get the giggles and our skin is so clammy it feels awful and feverish, like a dream you can't wake from or turn off. The music ends and so does the set. I hold Dorsey there a moment. He hugs me briefly, then kisses me, a dry, pursed, old lady-ish kind of kiss. We turn to go back to the table. Michael has watched this, as I knew he would. He isn't pleased, so I hold Dorsey's hand on my hip, where he'd held me from our embrace, as we make our way off the floor. I sit down

and pick up my drink, watery with melted ice, and hold it against my forehead. The ringing in my ears dims slightly, and finally, when I finish the bourbon, Michael taps me on the wrist.

"It's hot in here. Why don't we take a walk? It's got to be cooler outside."

"What about the tablet

"We'll get another or Dorsey can save this. I want to talk to you where it's quieter."

"Shouldn't we ask Dorsey - or does this concern him?"

"Martha, let's just get out, O.K.?"

I twist around to get my jacket off the chair back, but Michael has stood up and swept the coat from behind me. "C'rnon, we're ready." I wonder who's ready and marvel at Michael's convenient royal "we."

We walk silently for a few blocks, turning down toward the ramparts ofthe Market that look out over the waterfront. The ferry bays are lit up and the shore twinkles as it sweeps its long crescent in either direction. I wish that I was on one of the ferries, letting the breeze crumple my hair and watching the skyline grow as the boat turns its corner from Winslow or Bremerton. Michael leans on the wall, looking around at the deserted marketplace, rank with the odor of rotting vegetables and urine.

"What if we went down to the waterfront, Michael? The air is fresher there."

Michael shakes his head. "No, I just wanted out for a while to talk to you. I'm with Dorsey tonight, remember?"

"Oh yeah. So who am I with?"

"That's what I'm trying to figure out."

"Oh that's right. Nursemaids are supposed to stay single."

Michael's throat works, a spasm around the adam's apple I've always wished I could reproduce. It says so much. "Meaning?"

"Meaning I've been dragged around all day to watch you track your game and I hate myself for sticking it through just in case Michael falls off his horse and needs bandaging. I feel like your goddammed nannyeven Dorsey treats me like I belong upstairs."

"So what's wrong with today? We had a nice time, didn't we? Dinner, drinks, dancing: city life in 3-0. Lots of laughs." He pauses. "Why are you coming on to Dorsey?"

I let out an exasperated sigh. This is getting stupid, and I am tired again, removed from the frenzy of the Bin and kept away from the sea air one long flight of stairs down.

"Why are you coming on to Dorsey? Dorsey is at least as interested in me as I am in him-or hadn't you noticed? And at least I'm doing it for my benefit, not Donald's." This comes out a hiss. My hands are splayed

on the warm stone behind me and I can feel the fine dust of worn-away cement coating my palms.

"I told you I didn't want to talk about Donald."

"And I'm telling you I do. Feeling any guilt? I'm not betraying someone tonight, kiddo."

"No, that's all past, isn't it? Father George prays his nights away now instead of playing them away."

Through my teeth: "Michael, go to hell."

"I could say the same thing, Martha."

"My name isn't Martha. Please stop calling me that. I don't call you Huey or Dewey because of Donald, do I?"

The argument hangs suspended in the air between us, bobbing like a cue card so that we can see how far from the subject we've drifted. We've both been fighting so much lately that accusations and arguments have become arts for their own sakes, losing much of the point and direction they begin with.

Michael sighs. "I don't know what to do. He's a kid."

"Yes."

"Donald's probably taken up with some fisherman and I'm dating a fifteen-year-old kid."

"There are nastier names for it, Michael."

"Do you realize I wasn't allowed to start dating until I was sixteen?"

"Do you realize I went out on my first date when I was eighteen?"

We smile into the darkness-or rather, I smile. But it seems like I can feel Michael's smile, a dove-gray softness like his eyes.

He puts his arm around me and squeezes. I pat his hand.

"Here we are, each other's best friend and we're fighting." He clucks his tongue. "Do you want to go back? We're still stamped and there should be music for another hour or so." The weariness I've kept shelving all day has caught up with me. The smoke and growing intimacies of the Bin are too much to face.

"I think I'll just go home, Michael." I yawn. "God, I could sleep for a year and I have to work tomorrow night."

"I'll drive you, Rachel. I'm through for the night if you are."

"Dorsey?"

"He can take care of himself. If I stayed, he'd probably make us walk home anyway."

I walk with him to the car, feeling more comradery than I've felt in days. Michael tells me about the garden he and Donald are planning to put in next spring, a small Japanese plantation, very peaceful in the racket of Capitol Hill. Donald's had help from a co-worker in the construction firm he's an architect for. They're even ordering trees from Hawaii. I tell him about the jazz ensemble coming to the Czar for three

concerts in August, the cool, hot and blue hors d'oeuvres I plan for the parties before.

His car purrs toward the hill. The version of"My Funny Valentine" on the radio is sweet and sadder without words. At a stoplight, without looking at me, Michael asks quietly, "Do you miss him?"

I think to myself, repeating the words, do I miss him? Mostly I hate him and often I laugh at him. Going off to Holy Rosary in Renton-it could be an Italian movie any week at the Czar.

"I think so. Without him, I seem to rattle around. Like today. It'sstrange," I finish lamely.

"Are you ready to get more furniture?" In a fit of something, I sold or dumped all the furniture from our apartment near the University when I moved. I didn't want to sit where he'd sat, sleep where he'd

"Drawers would be nice. I can have a piano in this place and I really want one. It would mean not having to go downtown afternoons or begging a practice room at the Institute. And a rocking chair. A bed sometime." My list grows more enthusiastic as I think about the comforts I've given up and not missed for six weeks.

We crest the hill. "Come home with me, Rachel. The house is empty these days too. You can have a bath and borrow a robe and I'll open a bottle of wine. We can make oatmeal for breakfast or go out - it'll be fun."

I press my forehead to the cool glass of the windows and feel my eyes burn and my hands shake from talking about George, the nervousness of being too tired to fight being tired.

"O.K. Sure. It'll be fun."

Their Victorian house is smartly punctuated with antiques and steelframe chairs, lots of hanging ferns and glass tables next to pioneer oak chests or peeling trunks. I have always thought this a House Beautiful ad for casual urban living, perfect for after-the-theater suppers or sushi feasts. Still, it is comfortable, even luxurious, in its soft lighting and humane clutter of books and papers. Michael opens a bottle of burgundy and fetches glasses as I come down from a shower in his white robe.

"Hey, whereja get the monogram, girl?"

"Where'd you develop a taste for them, boy?"

The robe's hem is uneven the way I have fastened it around me. I would look like a hospital goner, if only I had the flappy slippers. I shake my head: I run too much toward costumes in my thinking.

I sink in the opposite corner of the sand-colored couch and lift the stemmed glass to toast Michael. He clinks his goblet against mine. "Here's to our abandonment."

I answer sourly, "Cheers:' The wine is good, rich and heady on my tongue as I hold it there, savoring. Michael watches me. "Chew."

I am startled into swallowing. "Whatr-

"Chew before you swallow. It disperses the flavor." The instructions of a wine master have crept into his voice. I thrust my tongue into my cheek and mime a horse gobbling an apple, mocking, "Full-bodied, Quite an equine aroma."

Michael rolls his eyes and sets his glass down, reaching to pin my ankles with one hand and tickle my foot with the other. I squeeze my eyes shut, hard, biting my lip to keep from laughing. 1 will not, 1 will not.

"Not ticklish? You're working hard at it, aren't you?"

1 finally kick free and spring to my knees to tickle back-1 know just how from the Thanksgiving he hid the wishbone from Donald and me to "cure it" - but somehow it's more of an embrace, an awkward one with my arms pinned under his, clamped so I can't tickle or get away and his hands holding my shoulders in place, neither pushing nor pulling me closer. A pause.

"Checkmate, Rachel,"

''This is silly, Michael. Do we fight or not?"

"What if we don't?"

"Play cards?"

"I'm not into competitive sports."

"Sure. Like Alexander the Great, right?"

"We could finish the wine."

"We could."

He still doesn't let go and I slide back on my legs to wait this out more easily.

"Where should we finish it?"

"It's a big house."

"Upstairs?"

"Oh." 1 swallow. So this is where it's going. He pulls me closer and kisses me slowly, still not releasing my hands. Alien territory, I think to myself with the shock of this new mouth finding its way from my chin upwards. The faint stubble gives way to his warmer, softer lips.

"Did 1 ever tell you who I went out with when I finally turned sixteen? Emily Swift."

I put my face very close to his so that the tips of our noses touch. "Was she a cheerleader?"

"No. She went to the girls' Catholic high school. She was a chemistry whiz. Dark and shy. 1 don't think she knew what to expect either."

"Did she play in the marching band?"

"Rachel, do you want to go upstairs?"

"Yes."

I wait in the cracked red plastic booth of the Tenerife Cafe on south Broadway. Sunlight streams through the windows that look down the hill to the industrial areas of the rail station and stadium. The Cafe is getting more and more crowded as men stop by on their way to work for coffee and the almost ritual eggs and hash browns. This is the workweek clatter of dishes and voices, the smell of toast and coffee. I am smoking and drinking coffee from one of those wonderfully round cups, a doll's awed "oh" of roundness, such as diners stock. Michael has promised to meet me at seven-thirty, in time for breakfast before he goes to the office. He's now fifteen minutes late and enters flushed with hurrying. Michael hates morning, a fact I learned with new vividness on Sunday.

He throws his gray cotton sports coat into the corner ofthe booth and slides in after it, looking around for the waitress. "You've been here a while? Got coffee? Will she make it fast?" This is Michael-the-lawyer: all business, a man who knows what he wants and how to get it. Get the right person to do it for him. I ask for another cup while she scribbles his order for English muffins, no butter, and juice.

When she leaves, I say, "Good morning, sunshine. Sleep well?"

Michael growls, reaches for my package of cigarettes, takes one and lights it. "My, my. We really do hate Mondays, don't we? Smoking is pretty drastic, Michael."

He breathes the smoke in deeply and I note the slight blush and closed eyelids the nicotine rush produces. This should bring him around. "Better? See-here's the coffee too." Our waitress nearly drops the cups onto the table, yet she manages not to spill anything. I admire her dexterity; she could be a juggler or a gymnast with such grace. The cream swells in my coffee, the swirling patterns that only half-and-half makes. I look up to find Michael as intent on my coffee as I am.

"You're charming in the morning, Michael. Really-a prince. I'm glad I don't have to wake up to you more often."

He sighs and picks up the juice in front of him. "Think they squeeze it here, fresh? No. I thought not." Three men behind us begin to argue about layoffs at the Boeing plant; I drift into their conversation, not noticing how our own lags. Finally: "You're not such a big talker in dawn's early light, either, Martha. What's new? How was work yesterday? What did you do after you got home?"

I shift my attention back to our breakfast. "What did I do? Oh not so much. Read a little. I called George on a stupid whim. He was out. It seems he's become an altar boy and was serving mass. I can just see him in little black and white vestments, pot roast for dinner with Father Joe and Father Mike."

"What else did you do?" He's not laughing at George's new career. He isn't planning on a change of jobs either, is he?

"It was Sunday, what can one do? I took a long walk by the waterfront and looked in shop windows and dangled my feet off a pier for a while. I thought a lot." He swallows the last of his coffee and keeps his eyes on the saucer. "Yeah? What'd you think about?"

"Taxes."

"In July?"

"Well, my mother always said you have to pay the piper, and I never knew what the piper was, so I thought about paying taxes instead."

"On what?"

"Not being alone. Maybe they're too high. You're a lawyer, what do you think?"

"We're talking about Saturday night, I suppose."

"You wanted me to bring it up, didn't you? So now I have. I want more coffee." He twists around again to get the waitress who resignedly brings the coffee pot over with her.

"What are your conclusions? About Saturday night, that is," he says.

"It was good for me, but I don't think it was good for you, was it? Or just too new at it to tell yet?"

Michael shakes his head impatiently, a small toss. "O.K., be funny. You're very good at being funny. Do that if it makes you feel better. I'd just like to know what you did yesterday, and how you feel about things."

"What I did. How I feel. How do you feel, Michael? Maybe that's what I thought about. We didn't exactly get up yesterday ready for the circus and a trip to the zoo-at least you made it clear you weren't."

"Sorry. I had to think it out."

"I figured. You always do have to think things out. What will make the best impression? What will Donald think? When will I tell him? How will he react? What should I feel? You're like an artist at sex, Michael. You know every shade of the spectrum, every iota of color and you have all the right names."

"I'm not proud of Saturday night, if it makes you feel any better."

"It doesn't. I'm proud. Jesus, at least I wasn't in bed with a madman. A narcissist, yes, but one of God's chosen I managed to avoid."

"I mean I didn't want to hurt you or Donald." He hunches over the empty dishes in front of him, his arms bowed around the camp of plates and silverware.

I smile wanly at him. "Let's be philosophical. It's like winning the lottery: it feels good for about an hour and then the IRS shows up for their slice. Payment in guilt by check or money order."

"What can I do now?" Michael looks at me pleadingly Take his guilt away, let him sleep nights. "I want to make it up to you if I can."

"What do you mean, make it up to me? A hundred dollars? That seems about what Pike Street whores make if they're clean, which I am. Or do you just want to pick up the breakfast tab?"

"I don't want you to feel miserable. Or guilty."

"Meaning you don't want to feel miserable or guilty. Listen, I could find you a good confessor. I have connections in the trade now."

"Martha, I'm concerned about you." This is more of a bleat than a statement. "I'll do whatever you want

"What? Get lost? Is that what you want me to say? O.K., Michael. I never want to see you again. Is that better? I don't mean it, you know. It's not that easy: I'm not Dorsey and neither of us is going to pretend it was just a case of mistaken pederasty."

Michael winces. I was hoping for at least that. He clears his throat and leans toward me across the table. "Can't I do anything? I hate this."

"I hate it too. I hate saying the same things everyone in this place says when they sleep around on their wives. We're not being original and I detest not being original. Can't we bring in a Dorothy Parker script? She'd know how to send five dozen roses in tall baskets that would cure anything from lovers in seminary to the common cold. But you've missed your chance with the roses, so screw it. For myself, I think I'll just muddle through the way everyone else in this place must."

I stalk out, slamming the glass door behind me and walk up Broadway thinking about the better exit lines in all the movies I've seen. Clark Gable. Humphrey Bogart. For the moment, alII can remember are the men's.

After a few blocks Michael's blue car pulls up. He reaches over to open the passenger's door. "Please get in."

I stoop to peer inside. "No, I really don't want to."

But I get in and he drives toward my apartment building. He stops at the door and turns to me. "I am sorry it came out that way. I wanted to reassure you" - his words are as precise as a schoolboy's recitation - "that I love you and admire you. If there was a girl for me well, that would be a problem, because Donald probably feels the same way and then we'd be rivals, he and I. And he'd win: I've never seen one of his grand gestures fail yet. You must see - we are both so very fond of you. I hope this doesn't end in ruin."

"Thanks. I don't see how. Can I go in now?" I think to myself: I must have cancer, my throat hurts horribly, I want to go inside and shut all the curtains and run a cool bath and stay in the dark forever where my throat and eyes won't hurt like this.

Michael takes my hand in both of his. "I do love you dearly, Rachel,"

"O.K., but now I really have to run. You have clients and stuff and I open the car door with a jerk and stumble out. "'Bye. Talk to you soon."

And I run up the stairs to the dark halls, the ancient elevator and my three rooms that I darken with the snap of the blinds.

It's hard to tell if the weather's cleared. Union Lake is visible again, gray and calm as a nickel. The clouds do not hang as low as they did yesterday and once in a while a shard of sunlight gets through. But I still can't see the mountains and the neighborhood dogs have kept that dark watchful look, preferring to stay under porches rather than risk the muddy gutters, when I walk home from the Institute with a portfolio of Cole Porter under my arm. I am arranging a revue for a church group in Rentonmy throat tightened until they identified themselves as Methodists-that's doing a fund-raising benefit. They need someone to direct. Enter Rachel: have sheet music, will travel. I also carry, as a reward for myself-the new job I am grateful for-a whole pound of Godiva chocolates from the mirrored and arranged cases of Tomthum's. A source of warmth and companionship, I reason. Renewable energy: better than solar power.

The dark brick of my apartment building looms from its corner where Dartmouth Way curves downtown. There is a moving van pulled up to the curve in front of the door, white with red print: Karnway Piano Rentals. The super waits on the stoop, one hip thrust out with irnpatience, and points at me as I cross the street. A large man in overalls comes from behind the passenger's side.

"Are you Rachel Saund, ma'am? We got a delivery for you."

He hands me a yellow receipt for an upright piano, rented in full for twelve months. Donald's name is scrawled across the bottom. I look up at the man, feeling my eyes wrinkle in perplexity.

"Mr. Derning made these arrangements? What did he say?"

The deliveryman shakes his head. "I just haul, Miss. I don't talk to the customers. That's Mr. Karnway's job." He twists the handles of the back open. "Are you going to sign, or what? We've got other deliveries to make today."

I accept the proffered pen, gnawed and fuzzy at the nib. The driver has emerged from the cab, and together they begin to move ramps into position and rumble a great white-swathed hump to the door.

Bag, music, chocolates are dumped on the desk as the men maneuver the piano, still a phantom presence in its shroud, through the small foyer and into the living room. I watch their progress with folded arms and wonder to myself: shouldn't I be happier about this? Donald must know something, but what's the point?

The driver, small and silent, folds the heavy material while the other man fetches the bench from outside. Rain has started to sheet down the windowpanes. I walk over to the piano to watch it from a different angle, as though the right attitude will encourage some explanation of itself.

"You must know when Mr. Deming made these arrangements? Was it today?'

The little man remains expressionless and wise, like an old monkey carved from mottled Chinese ivory. He probably goes home at night and sighs to wife, "I seen a strange girl today, didn't want the piano

He can't, or won't, tell me anything. The larger man places the bench and they leave me to decipher intentions they've never dreamed of. If this is what Michael meant by grand gestures, he knew what he was talking about, I think as I run my hands along the case. It is cold and sleek and grainy, the tiny ridges feel clean and smooth against my cheek. The keys are well weighted, the tone is clear and resonant. A beautiful thing, a thoroughbred, the winner of the Triple Crown of pianos and a puzzle guaranteed against dry rot and loneliness. I play a run of scales, testing it, then stand back to ponder the view. The glint of gold foil on the chocolates catches my eye and I pick up the box, knowing that inside are candies the colors of all the pianos I have ever seen-cherry wood, mahogany, ebony, maple-lying in crisp papers. They'll come later. I'll figure all this out and then I'll eat chocolates and play a cityshaking boogie-woogie for all my friends, whoever they are.

Infinite Vitality Inc.

Rodney Jones

When I was in the sixth grade my mother told me that my father was trying to poison me. She came up beside me on the sofa in the small living room of our apartment where I was watching an episode of McHale's Navy and said, "One day you'll see. He'll give you a Hershey Bar, then another, and then something else. The next thing you know, you're dead of hyperglycemia." She looked straight at the television as if the wide, gray face of Ernest Borgnine smiling back at us only served to prove her point. "Those blood diseases," she said. "They sneak up on you."

That morning my mother had found a half-empty box of Russell Stover's chocolates in the bottom drawer of my dresser underneath a pile of sweaters and pants I never wore, but she didn't come right out and tell me that. Whenever she found something I wasn't allowed to have, she simply removed it from its hiding place, waited until she was certain I had noticed it missing, and then approached me with a small lesson on morals or nutrition, which were both pretty much the same to her. She never actually mentioned what she had found, and that especially upset me when I hadn't noticed anything missing. This time, though, I made the connection.

The box of chocolates was shaped like a heart and had the word Boss in gold, script letters across the front. It had a kind of satiny material pasted all around the outside, and inside the empty brown wrappers of the chocolates that had been eaten rattled around like tiny paper bells. I knew it was missing right away because I checked on it often. It was a Valentine's Day present to my father and me from Mrs. Moore, a sixtynine-year-old, black gospel singer who worked as a cashier at my parents' store, and on the back of the box she had taped a card with pictures of roses and a Bible verse printed on it and above it the words: Compli� ments of Moore's Funeral Home, Cooksville, Tenn., which must have been

what tipped my mother off as to where the candy came from. On Valentine's Day I had stood with my father and Mrs. Moore in the darkness of the stockroom at closing time and unwrapped the heart while my mother was busy at the front of the store counting the money in the cash register. We each ate two chocolates, biting into them in silence, and then my father closed the box quietly like a book. He handed it to me and said, "The rest is yours, but don't let your mother find out."

I knew enough not to tell my mother, and I knew that not telling her was not a crime like a lie. It was totally unselfish.

My mother was a vegetarian years before it caught on big. Our refrigerator was covered with charts and graphs and articles clipped from Let's Live magazine, and I never got to eat the kinds of things the other kids brought in their lunchboxes to school. No bologna sandwiches. No Devil Dogs. None of those white, powdered donuts with pictures of teenagers dancing at slumber parties on the package. Occasionally my father brought me a candy bar or half an Italian sub from the deli near the docks, and my mother accused him of trying to corrupt me. Sometimes she accused him of deliberately trying to turn me against her. The only time she accused him of trying to poison me was after she found the Valentine heart from Mrs. Moore. "Your father's problem is," she said to me that evening while my father was locked up in the dining room practicing his saxophone, his problem is that he doesn't think he's going to die. He doesn't think he has to take precautions just like everybody else."

Actually, my father followed her advice most of the time, drank carrot juice by the gallon and ate brewer's yeast. I think the thing that most attracted him to my mother was her capacity for constant concern. She was probably the only woman he had ever met who paid so much attention to what he ate. When he did sin, by sneaking into the stockroom for a cigarette or staying out all night at the Sit 'n' Sip Tavern or hiding a bottle of Heaven Hill Bourbon in between the sacks of longgrain, California rice, he never tried to make excuses, never contradicted her absolute authority or denied his absolute guilt. Instead he looked at her with a dejected, please-be-patient-with-me expression and vowed to try to overcome his weaknesses. My mother's response was almost always the same. "If not for me," she said to him repeatedly, "you would have had a heart attack years ago."

My mother talked a lot about how my father was before their wedding: pale and overweight and tired all the time. He was twenty-three when he married her. She was thirty-six and had already set up the health-food store with money left to her by her father, who saved more than half of what he made as a trainman for the Long Island Railroad

for eighteen years and died of cirrhosis of the liver. She called the store Infinite Vitality Inc., a name she claimed to have thought of on the very day her father died, probably at the very same second. My father had dropped out of college with the intention of becoming either a pilot or a saxophonist, and she gave him a part-time job as a stock-boy to tide him over until his dreams were realized. Within three months, they were engaged. Two months later, at the altar of the First Presbyterian Church, my father traded in his dreams for a partnership in the store and a diet of fresh vegetables, whole grains and seven kinds of vitamin pills a day.

The store was in a long, shotgun-style building only a block from the boat ramp and the small waves of the Long Island Sound. Two rows of plastic buckets containing bulk grains and beans with colors like those in an Indian blanket ran along each wall, and one row ran down the center of the store. The shelves near the front door were devoted to vitamins-hundreds of short, brown bottles with gold labels. The front window was practically all plastered-over with cardboard signs made by my mother to advertise bargains-Organic Peanut Butter, 69�/lb.-1O% off all Solgar Vitamins-and above the smaller signs was a red, felt banner that said, "I.V.I. Lowest Prices in the Nation," each letter cut out of green felt and pasted on. The P on prices had fallen off, but you could still see its dark red outline, dotted with dried glue. At the rear of the store was the stockroom where sacks of flour and rice sat humped up on wooden stilts, everything in alphabetical order, and right beneath that was my mother's basement office-a big oak desk surrounded by piles of catalogs and brochures from distributors. Through the door at the back of the stockroom were the steps leading up to our apartment.

Most of our customers during the week were thin and serious about what they ate, teenagers in muslin shirts and old people who bought grocery sacks full of miller's bran and talked about their bodies the way people discuss furniture. But on the weekends the ferry from Bridgeport brought crowds wearing sunglasses and brightly colored pants who came to buy scrimshaw ships and eat clams and scallops at one of the restaurants overlooking the beach. Occasionally they came into our store to buy roasted nuts and talk about how it reminded them of an oldfashioned candy store. That's how we met Mrs. Moore. She came over one Saturday on the ferry with her son and daughter-in-law. Her son and daughter-in-law were looking for antiques.

"They almost paid near fifty dollars for an old washing basin and pitcher," she said to my father while her son and daughter-in-law stocked up on pistachio nuts. "Thing is, I used to have the same one in my house. I got it from the Sears and Roebuck Company for five dollars and a half, and it was the very same one."

I could tell immediately that my father loved her voice. His eyes closed a little the way they did when he played the saxophone or listened to his John Coltrane records. He loved her voice before he ever heard her sing. When she showed us a picture of her dead husband, who was a funeral director in Cooksville, Tennessee, and almost cried and then started singing "I've Got to Walk That Lonesome Highway," all twelve verses softly to herself right there in front of us, my father offered her a job.

My father was in charge of hiring employees for the store, and my mother was in charge of firing them, which she almost always did after two or three weeks. She would catch them smoking during their lunch hour or drinking a can of soda or holding personal conversations with the customers. She had a way of ferreting out even the smallest of character flaws. Mrs. Moore lasted longer than any other worker in the history of the store. Not that my mother liked her all that much. She didn't. But the fact was, Mrs. Moore had no flaws in her character at all. She was a Baptist.

She was taller than both my mother and my father, taller than anyone else I knew, and, when she stood behind the counter at the front of the store, she seemed in such total control that people mistook her for the owner. Whenever a customer asked her what kind of vitamin to take for a particular ailment, Mrs. Moore just laughed. "Now, do I look like a doctor?" she would say. "You eat what makes you happy. Who wants to live forever?" But she didn't seem to hurt sales at all. Mrs. Moore had a smile that could convince you that anything you bought from her would make you happy.

The best thing about Mrs. Moore was her voice. It was deep, almost like a man's, but soft at the same time, and she knew how to make it sound broad and sad. She sang hymns while checking out the customers, hymns like I had never heard sung at the Presbyterian Church. They had stories in them about women who had been left by their boyfriends and later found out about Jesus and how he was the one man who wouldn't ever leave them, and also stories from the Bible telling what a stout man King David was or how bad life must have been for Jonah inside that whale.

Her favorite television program was The Praise the Lord Club with Jim and Tammy Bakker, and she enjoyed telling my father and me about the episodes she liked the best. She once went on for days about one that featured circus performers who had found the Lord after horrible accidents on the trapeze or trying to train lions. "You should have seen them," she said, grinning so that her dark lips stretched tightly over her big teeth. "They all sat around and sang and laughed. Even all gimped up like that, they could still be happy. It was inspirational."

My father was never a religious man, but he respected Mrs. Moore. It

had more to do with the way she sang and how tall she was and how she liked to watch programs about crippled people on TV than it had to do with God. But it had a little bit to do with God as well.

"How's God today?" he asked her every morning, not to tease her; he really wanted to know. And she would tell him something like, "He's busy. See, he's fixing to have the biggest party in the universe, and he's spending every spare second writing out the invites to it." Sometimes she would watch my father carrying a heavy box or sack, giggle at him and yell across the store, "You think you're tired? How do you think old God feels?"

My mother tried not to discuss God or anything else with Mrs. Moore and avoided her at every opportunity. The only time she ever talked to her was to tell her about changes in prices or that the cash register came out with a few dollars over or a few dollars under the recorded total, which wasn't often, since Mrs. Moore was the most efficient cashier we ever had. My mother believed in a strict division of labor. She took care of the books and the ordering, my father and I took care of stocking and cleaning up, and Mrs. Moore took care of the customers. The store could have run perfectly even if we never said a word to one another all day long.

My father and Mrs. Moore and I said a lot to one another while my mother was downstairs making out orders or taking a nap, which she did for exactly one hour every afternoon. We talked about music and what it would be like in the future and what the largest animals in the world were. We even talked about the Theory of Evolution once, and Mrs. Moore said that although Darwin was wrong about practically everything, he must have led a pretty interesting life anyway.

The day after my mother found the box of chocolates in my dresser drawer, she said more to Mrs. Moore than I had ever heard her say to her. She handed Mrs. Moore her paycheck for the week and then started telling her about how she had worked for six years as a legal secretary before buying the store. She said she only had to work half a day because she worked twice as fast as anybody else, including all the lawyers. She ended her lesson by saying, "So I know all about the law. And the one whose signature is on that check, she's your real boss, officially at least." Mrs. Moore nodded her head slowly through the whole speech, as if trying to console her, but my mother's face remained still and humorless. I knew she was thinking about what she was going to say or do to my father. I knew she was thinking about revenge. I wasn't quite sure why this transgression was more serious than any of my father's earlier lapses, but, by the way my mother looked at Mrs. Moore, I could tell that she believed there was something truly evil going on.

The following day my mother tried to sell my father's saxophone behind his back by putting an ad in the Port Jefferson Record that read:

GROWING UP SALE!

Tom Burke turns thirty-eight and wishes to sell one well-worn E flat alto saxophone, case included. Perfect for a student or retired person. Cheap.

Inquire I.v.I. 342 Spring St. An5-3044 Nation's Lowest Prices for Natural Foods.

The saxophone was practically my father's favorite thing. He practiced it every evening, and, when we went on trips like to Rehobath Beach or down to Florida to visit my mother's sister, he brought it along with him in its battered, green-and-white case.

"At the age ofeighteen," he told me when I was still small enough to sit on his lap, "I played sax in the very best places in St. Louis. That was back when sax was still the hottest thing in that town. I had many fans." He showed me a book called St. Louis: Gateway to America with pictures of honkv-tonks and black men holding trumpets tight against their chests like weapons and steamboats going down the Mississippi River. He said that when he was my age, every kid's dream was to float on a raft down the wide stream all the way to New Orleans. My father grew up in St. Louis, but, as far as I know, he never owned a raft. He seldom went back there since all his relatives had died and most of his friends had moved away. "Everything has gone to hell," he said. "It's not the same old place."

When Richard Terriciano, who was a year older than me but only in the fifth grade since he had been left back, came into the store with the newspaper sticking out of his back pocket like a flag and inquired loudly about the saxophone for sale, my father almost clobbered him with a bag of wheat berries he was carrying. Richard Terriciano said he was joining his older brother's rock band and figured the saxophone would be the easiest instrument to learn to play.

"I could have been an absolute sensation," my father screamed down the basement steps after he had chased Richard Terriciano out the door to where his acne-spotted older brother waited by the curb. "Someday you'll be sorry. I'll go to Paris or New Orleans or Saigon with the USO. I don't have to be a soybean vendor all my life." He wasn't very good at shouting. His threats sounded high-pitched and unconvincing, so he switched to the silent treatment, didn't say a word to my mother for the

rest of the day except for "Paris or New Orleans or Saigon," like a little chant or litany whenever he passed her, and that evening he got drunk.

My father drank a lot, but he very rarely got drunk. When he did, my mother left him alone, left him to lock himself in the dining room with his saxophone while she hid out in her basement office, her eyes ringed with thin, red circles. That night my mother came and tucked me in before descending the stairs. "As soon as he gets good," she said over a chorus of "Tuxedo Junction" coming from the dining room. "As soon as he gets good, he'll leave." She put a cold palm on my forehead. "As soon as he knows one lousy song by heart."

My father was just about the worst saxophone player I have ever heard. That's why I knew my mother was wrong when she said he thought he'd never die; it was clear by the way he played that he was certain he would. He played too loudly, too quickly, and with a wide, untrained vibrato that never quite fit with his frenetic rhythm. It was as if he thought he had to get the song out fast, before it was too late. I couldn't figure out why my mother thought he could even make it through the door in New Orleans.

I really didn't mind his playing. That night after my mother went downstairs, I crawled out of bed and went to the living room to sit against the door and feel the vibrations of my father's saxophone on my back. I concentrated on feeling it and tried not to listen too much. After one song I clapped, and my father yelled through the door, "Bessie Smith sang that one the night she was run down. Woman was drunk all the time, but that didn't kill her. She got mashed to death first." Then he paused. I imagined him standing in the center of the room, his eyes closed in concentration, his saxophone hanging like a medal from his neck. "What a lady," his voice came through the door, softer this time. "You could never tell with her. One minute she'd be looking at herself in the mirror. The next minute she'd be drunk."

I felt another song and then another bounce off the door. When he was drunk, my father played louder than ever, but a little more slowly like he was swallowing each thick, hard note after he played it. Between songs he mumbled and let his feet drag heavily along the floor for a few steps, maybe adding some percussion for the benefit of my mother in the basement. As the night went on, his dance between songs became more violent and less rhythmic until, after the familiar sound of stumbling, there came the sound of glass breaking and wood slapping hard against sheet-rock walls. It was quiet inside the dining room for a long time after that. I was afraid my father had really hurt himself and wondered for a moment whether I should get my mother, who would bandage him and lecture him and listen to him weep and make resolutions, but then the dining room door swung open and my father filled the threshold with

his long body. His eyes were wide-open, startled-looking. In his hands he held a broken plate, one half in each hand. Behind him his saxophone sat in its open case, curled around the velvet inside like a woman.

The plate was blue and had a picture of the St. Louis Arch on it and the words: "Souvenir of the National Expansion Monument." It wasn't the only thing that broke when my father fell into the china hutch, but it was the most important.

He walked over to me and handed me the pieces the same way he had handed me the Valentine heart from Mrs. Moore, with that same don'ttell-your-mother look. "It could have been worth some dough someday," he said. Then he slumped deep into the sofa and stared at the blank, green square of the television screen.

I sat down next to him and tried to fit the pieces of the plate together on the coffee table in front of us. After a minute, he turned to me and whispered, "Mr. Bones," which is what he called me whenever he had a story to tell. "Did you ever hear the one about the parachute?"

I said what I was supposed to say: "No, Sir, I haven't."

My father sat straight up while he told the story. "Back when they first built the Arch," he said, "there was a man who wanted to parachute through it. He wanted to float right down through the middle of the thing, but, on his way down, his feet hit on something hard. He found himself standing on top of the Arch with Illinois stretched out in front of him. Then know what happens?"

"He crawled through a secret hatch?" I offered, gazing at my father's face and realizing by its expression that this story wasn't going to have a happy ending. I remember having the peculiar feeling that I wasn't dressed properly. I was wearing my blue pajamas with pictures of the Apollo astronauts on the front, but I should have been wearing a suit. I should have been wearing.something dark and serious.

"His parachute lost wind," he said, almost too rnatter-of-facrly. "He slid down the side to his death. He just got such a kick from being up there that he forgot he had to get down somehow."

My father was quiet after that, so still that I could almost hear my mother turning the pages of catalogs two floors below us.

The things my parents said to me about each other didn't leave upon me any of those lasting scars psychologists talk about. I never once doubted that they loved each other. I could tell my father loved my mother more than he loved even me or Mrs. Moore. I could especially tell when I watched him listen to my mother talk to us at the dinner table. The dinner table was my mother's kingdom, and her favorite topic of conversation was world hunger. My father always got very excited when she talked about feeding the world. His eyes got large and his

tongue worked nervously around his lips. Once he even suggested that we buy an old school bus and drive through the Ozark Mountains distributing bread to poor farmers.

Don't get me wrong. He never totally gave in to her. He continued to eat chocolate and play the saxophone, and even when he compromised, you always had the feeling he was winning. Standing in the living room with a shattered plate in his hands and his shirttail out on one side, he looked old and defeated, but I knew he'd get up before the count had ended. I liked to think of him then as kind of immortal, like the characters in comic books, always ready with another super-hero trick up his sleeve.

The next day my mother and I went out in the van to pick up some cases of salad oil in Hempstead. Our van was green and huge. It had Infinite Vitality Inc.: Official Use Only stenciled on the side and a Nixon/ Agnew bumper sticker pasted on the rear window. My mother bought the van to cut down on delivery fees, and my father wasn't allowed to drive it unless she gave him permission.

When we got back to the store that afternoon, there were six customers standing at the cash register holding brown paper sacks, and from the stockroom in the rear there came a racket of singing and saxophone playing that sounded a little like a church service, the kind where people cry a lot and talk in tongues. There was nobody behind the counter.

My mother didn't even acknowledge the customers. She pushed right past them and strode in long steps towards the back ofthe store with her arms wrapped tight as chains around her chest. When she got to the stockroom doorway, she stopped and stood with her mouth partially open, curled around a silent word. In the yellow light, right next to a hundred-pound bag of textured soy protein, was Mrs. Moore, posing like Bessie Smith and singing "A Good Man is Hard to Find" at the top of her lungs. My father was perched on a crate of Turkish figs above her and playing his saxophone better than I ever thought was possible. His eyes were closed, and his head was pulled back, as if he were drawing something sweet and warm from the mouthpiece, so he didn't see my mother's scowling face right away. Mrs. Moore saw her, but held on for a few more measures, belted out, "Love him in the morning, love him in the night, love him all the time, and treat your good man right," one more time before she brought her lips together and smiled at my mother. It was like she was inviting my mother to join the both of them in one rousing final chorus, but my mother greeted her with thin, gray eyes and clenched fists. "Go find yourself a good man somewhere else," she said. "Mine has got a job to do." She looked so short standing next to Mrs. Moore, like a child talking back to her mother.

Mrs. Moore didn't get mad at her. She reached down and placed both her large, brown hands on either side of my mother's face. Her eyes were still radiant with the song, and her voice was full of wonder. "Lord," she said, glancing briefly at the ceiling. "You was wrong when you said there's nothing new under the sun." Then she gathered up her coat and purse with the dignity of a prophet and walked through the store and out the door singing "Mama Won't Come Running Right Back" all the way down the block. Some of the customers stood by the door and clapped for her.

In the stockroom, my father was still holding his saxophone, and he pressed the keys where he held it rapidly up and down, maybe still playing "A Good Man is Hard to Find" with his fingers. He stepped off the crate and started moving towards my mother, who was leaning against the stockroom doorway, her hand on her cheek and her face confused, as if she were trying to figure out whether Mrs. Moore had quit or been fired. He kept his instrument out in front of him and looked at her like she had become something foreign. With each step he advanced, my mother moved a step backward, and, when they got into the main part of the store, he started chasing her around the center row of bins and buckets, still clutching his saxophone close to him to keep from dropping it. Around in a circle, faster and faster he pursued her, but not like he really wanted to catch her, more like he couldn't stop moving, had no choice but to follow the verse to the end. One time around he upset a bucket of pearl barley and sent the contents spilling and bouncing along the floor. Two of the customers who were watching rushed up to try and scoop the barley back into the bucket. A bald man wearing a kimono stood by the front counter waving his arms and shouting, "Everyone remain calm. I happen to know these two are married."

He finally cornered her next to the peanut-butter machine which was shaped like a large peanut with eyes and a grinning mouth. For a moment, everything was still-my mother crouching on the floor, my father standing above her, and the peanut staring into the space between them, happily oblivious. Then my father put the mouthpiece of his saxophone to his lips.

He blew a high, long note, more like a scream than a note, and held it, kept holding it out to her like an air-raid siren. He held the note so long without taking a breath, I thought he might never have to breathe again. And he kept it going, loud and piercing, with all the customers begging him to stop and my mother crawling away from him along the side wall, covering her ears with her palms and shaking her head. When she got to the door, she grabbed me by the arm and dragged me back to

the van parked out in front. Her teeth were pressed together, and her hair hung down her forehead in thin, wet strands.

We were already out on the Long Island Expressway going about seventy before I got up the courage to ask my mother where she was taking me. She glanced at me and sniffed in a kind of combination sob and snarl, and whispered, "Paris or New Orleans or Saigon." The salad oil was still sitting in cardboard boxes in the back of the van, and some of the bottles clinked melodically together.

We only made it as far as Queens and then turned around and headed home, but, for a while, the way we were speeding down the highway, I thought we might really make it to Saigon. I sat up very close to my mother, pressed my cheek against her shoulder and thought about Saigon. I'd seen pictures of it in Life magazine and imagined it to be a place where all the soldiers went after a hard day of war to take baths with Oriental women and drink mango wine- a place where, even all gimped up, they could still be happy.

An exile returns: a birthday speech of December 15, 1982

Rafael Alberti

Preface

On December 16, 1982, the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti celebrated his eightieth birthday. This was not, however, to be a private celebration for a few intimate friends and members of Alberti's immediate family. Madrid, and even all of Spain, took notice of this event, simply the birthday of a living poet, and converted it into a real homage to survival in a series of official and semiofficial acts lasting for several days, from December 13 to 17.

All the awards and honors given to Rafael Alberti during this week of festivities by the University of Madrid, the city of Madrid, and many national as well as international poets and critics, culminated in a popular apotheosis in the Sports Pavilion of the Real Madrid Athletic Club on Friday, December 17, where approximately 8,000 "fans" watched and listened to entertainers, poets, playwrights, singers, actors and political figures extol (until way past 2:00 A.M.) the virtues and talents of the eighty-vear-old poet who had spent almost forty years in exile, first in Argentina and then in Italy. For those to whom the name Rafael Alberti does not sound particularly familiar, it might well come as a surprise that his birthday, even at this august age, would have caused such excitement in a country where we have been led to believe by the international press that most excitement is now primarily related to political changes and the stirrings of a democratic awakening after almost four decades of Francisco Franco's crushing, totalitarian regime.

The history of Spain in the twentieth century is, in some unusual but absolute sense, a poetic history, or at least a saga in which several outstanding poets have played signal roles. As Alberti himself said in his autobiographical narrative at the dinner given in his honor on Decem,

Invitucicn

ber 15 and reproduced here in translation, the Spanish Civil War began with the death of the young Federico Garcia Lorca in 1936, and ended with the death of another Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, in 1939. The tragedy ofSpain in this century has been chronicled by many poets, by Spanish poets-in-exile as well as by several non-Spaniards including Pablo Neruda, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Roy Campbell and Herbert Read. One critic has even gone so far as to call the Civil War in Spain "A Poet's War."

In the case of Rafael Alberti, there is a special dimension to all this. Alberti is not only a prominent survivor of the Spanish tragedy, having outlived Franco and witnessed the birth of a democratic Spain-a prospect probably abandoned with reluctance by most members of his generation of poets and intellectuals prior to their deaths in exile-but he is now considered by many people as having been both the keeper of the faith and an early prophet of what has finally come to pass. It is particularly interesting that Rafael Alberti seems to have won the admiration of young Spaniards, those who did not actually live through the period of the Spanish Civil War and its immediate aftermath, but who know it as recent history and as a time of personal tragedies embodied in the lives and deaths of poets: Garda Lorca, Miguel Hernandez, Antonio Machado and all the others who never returned to Spain from their "temporary" exile, but whose poetry has come back to be seen and heard everywhere in that country.

The vatic voice of the poet seems to have found its incarnation in the figure of Alberti in the same way that the Guemica of Picasso now expresses for millions of Spaniards - from behind its bulletproof "transparent straightjacket" in the Prado-the violence, destruction, civil strife, the overwhelming sadness, and the eventual "happy ending" of Spanish history between 1936 and 1982. In the popular imagination, Picasso, Alberti and Lorca have formed a kind of triumvirate of prophecy in the arts, the oracular voices which best described the most significant events in Spain and expressed the tremendous emotional impact of those events. But now Rafael Alberti is the sole survivor of this small group, and he continues to be the most visible and most audible of the poet-prophets speaking to the new generations of Spaniards who so fervently wish to believe in the future of the New Spain.

It is a role Alberti himself obviously relishes. His poetic autobiography would seem to indicate clearly that he sees himself as history, and he apparently views his poetry of the last four decades as a type of archive containing and transmitting a record of his life while simultaneously recording historical movements and moods. The way in which the poems are interspersed in his autobiographical narrative to create a

hybrid form that borders on the epic, with Rafael Alberti as the epic hero in his eightieth year, not only offers a clear indication of how this poet of Cadiz views his life in retrospect, but it also conveys his absolutely correct notion of how he is seen by so many of his countrymen. That week in Spain was therefore more than just the celebration of Alberti's longevity; it was a celebration of history itself and of a nation's survival. This kind of retrospection, as described by Alfred Kazin in "The Self as History: Reflections on Autobiography,") can be almost biblical in its sense of commemoration of a group of people who have "come through." Alberti's personal voice describing his personal experiences ends up being not really private at all, but rather communal and popular in the broadest sense. This is most definitely a Spanish phenomenon which can be traced throughout the literary history of Spain. Alberti's birthday message and his continued prolific poetic output constitute an attempt by the poet, very successful in its way, to re-order his existence, "to give honor to a life," to quote Alfred Kazin once again. Alberti has tried to make his own experience as a poet in and of exile-a very twentieth-century experience, to be sure-add up to something, and in so doing he has given shape not only to his existence, but to the present historical moment in Spain. "Age is memory" is what Alberti said in one of the many newspaper interviews that appeared during the week of celebration, but in this instance age is also corroboration and authentication of a political and creative dream of free expression. The reaction of the public in Madrid to the festivities surrounding Alberti's eightieth birthday displayed a form of trust which belongs to the poet, to the artist, and is not so generally shown toward the political figure or leader in Spain. Part of this sense of trust arises in Spain, and perhaps in Europe generally, from the view that a poet's life is equated with sacrifice. This sacrificial aspect of a poet's existence is, to my mind, strongly reflected in the popular acclaim which Alberti has received in Spain today as he "stands in" and stands for Lorca, Hernandez, Machado, Luis Cernuda, and even for Picasso, who has often been seen, rightly or wrongly, as having sacrificed his strong cultural ties to his native country in his search for artistic freedom.

Given the mildness of Alberti's birthday statement, even its sweetness, it is perhaps appropriate to mention the possibility that adulation of him by the public might also represent a somewhat blinkered idealization of what is possible in Spain at this moment in its history. This was indeed a celebration of nostalgia by an eighty-year-old Spanish poet home for good and speaking to a sympathetic audience that was also commemorating itself for having managed to "come through." Alberti's remarks were not sparked by the same kind of fire and protest they would have 190

displayed had the poet delivered them some forty-five years earlier, nor did they address themselves to new issues of concern for the Spain of today. As for Rafael Alberti's artistic concerns, they are not so very different from what they once were-the search through poetry for light, for that special musicality, for the startlingly fresh images that capture the essence of an Andalusia he once knew so intimately.

- Gabriel Berns

El mar. La mar.

EI mar. jS610 la mar!

lPor que me trajiste, padre, a la ciudad?

lPor que me desenterraste del mar?

En suenos, la marejada me tira del coraz6n. Se 10 quisiera Ilevar.

Padre, iPor que me trajiste aca]

The sea. My sea. The sea. Only the sea!

Why did you bring me here, father, to the city?

Why did you uproot me from the sea?

In dreams, the tide tugs at my heart. It would carry it away.

Father, why did you bring me here?

I have always considered myself to be, I always have been, and I will always continue to be a child of the sea of Cadiz, of its bay, of its sea spray and its sand dunes, of the city's vibrant, whitewashed facades and musical balconies. In that month of May (the year was 1917), when I was painfully torn from the Puerto de Santa Marfa where I had been born, I took with me to Madrid that blue and white essence, the sparkling and flashing light ofCadiz which inundated not only the early rhythmic and song-like poems of Marinero en tierra, but all the poetry I wearily dragged into my long exile, an exile which was to last almost forty years. lowe to the Bay of Cadiz (and this is something I have said often) the full substance of my poetry-that is, my whole being: the part of me which reflects the most luminous of angels as well as that to which belong the most terrifying and stormy angels of darkness.

1917

Mi adolescencia, la locura por una caja de pintura, un Iienzo en blanco, un caballete.

1917

My adolescence, a deep longing For a little painting box, An empty canvas, an easel.

You see, I came to Madrid to be a painter. And as of May 1982, sixtyfive years had already passed since that event.

Y las estatuas. En mi sueno de adolescente se enarbola una Afrodita de escayola, desnuda al ala del diseno.

And the statues. In my adolescent dreams, there floated on high a plaster cast Aphrodite, Nude on the wing of my design.

In the Cas6n, that delightful little palace of Philip IV where, securely wrapped in its transparent straitjacket, the Guernica of Picasso is now to be found, I took up residence in order to learn how to draw - at least to copy the classical lines of the statues located there - alternating this kind of apprenticeship with learning about color, something I discovered with astonishment in those rooms and immense galleries of the Prado Museum, virtually my home for at least those periods I have been able to remain in Spain.

jEI Museo del Prado! [Dios rnfo! Yo tenia pinares en los ojos yalta mar rodavia, con un dolor de playas de amor en un costado, cuando entre al cielo abierto del Museo del Prado.

The Prado Museum! My God! Was it a dream? Pine forests and tall waves still filled my eyes, And I felt the ache of beloved beaches in my side, When first I entered heaven, the Prado Museum.

But in the year 1921, after a very "avant-garde" exhibit of my work in the Ateneo of Madrid, my devotion to painting began to fade, and

eventually went into hiding. With tremendous force, poetry moved in to take its place, subduing me under its imperious control. It was only a little over six years after my arrival in Madrid when I first met Federico Garcia Lorca in the gardens of the Residencia de Estudiantes, and the others with him-Salvador Dati; Luis Bunuel; the poet from Malaga, Jose Moreno Villa I had already published some short poems in the magazine Revista Honzonre, edited by Pedro Garfias, but I had not yet received the National Poetry Prize, which was to be awarded to me by a jury whose members included Ram6n Menendez Pidal, Gabriel Mir6 and Antonio Machado. To write a sonnet in those days, after the appearance on the literary scene of the "ultrafsta" movement, was almost like committing a serious crime. But I took a chance and composed three sonnets dedicated to Federico, a poet from the more dramatic, recondite, upper regions of Andalusia whom I, a poet of that other Andalusia, downstream on the Guadalquivir toward the Bay of Cadiz, had begun to admire so very much.

Sal tu, bebiendo campos y ciudades en largo ciervo de agua convertido, hacia el mar de las albas claridades del marttn-pescador mecido nido.

Que yo saldre a esperarte, amortecido, hecho junco, a las alras soledades, herido por el aire y requerido por tu voz, sola entre las ternpestades.

Deja que escriba, debil junco frio, mi nombre en esas aguas corredoras, que el viento llama, solitario, rio.

Disuelto ya en tu nieve el nombre mio, vuelvete a tus montanas trepadoras, ciervo de espuma, rey del monrerio.

Go forth, drinking in field and cities, Transformed into a watery, sinuous deer, Toward the sea of dawning clarities, To the cradled nest of the kingfisher;

I will go out to await you, hushed, Like a solitary reed in the high plains, Wounded by the wind and summoned By your voice, alone among the storms.

Cold, weak and rustling reed, let me Write my name in those rushing waters

The lonely wind calls river.

Once my name has dissolved in their melted snow, Return to your steep, climbing mountains, Deer of the foam, lord of the heights.'

And then there was Juan Ramon Jimenez, that wonderful, inspired Andalusian grouch on the terrace of his apartment in the Salamanca district of Madrid, a balcony looking out on the Guadarrama Mountains. And the sudden appearance, also in the Residencia gardens, ofthe poets Jorge Guillen and Pedro Salinas. And the beginning of my friendship-an interrupted, continuous friendship-with that devilish, enigmatic, fun-loving and rakish Jose Bergamin. And my first meeting with Gerardo Diego at a counter in the Ministry of Education, where I had gone to collect my first prize in the National Poetry Award and where he had shown up to collect the second prize. And how could I forget Damaso Alonso, the one who initiated me into the cult of Gil Vicente, challenging us a few years later to recite from memory and without a single mistake, the "Soledades" and "La fabula de Polifemo y Galatea" of Luis de Gongora?

jAy, que entonces era del ano la estaci6n florida!

Tu vida andaba y mi vida dentro en el vergel.

Y era en campo de alba pluma nuestro joven batallar por la hija de la espuma, lejos de la mar.

Nadar contra la corriente nunca fue grano de ants. lD6nde esta ya Gil Vicente, donde don Luis?

Aye, and it was at that time, The flowering season of the year. Your life, it flourished, and mine Remained in a garden-like sphere. And our youthful battle, pure and white With pens on high, our fight divine To win the daughter of the light, Far from the ocean's brine.

To swim against the current fierce, Never was simply a grain of anis. Oh, where is Gil Vicente now, and where is Don Luis?

As for Vicente Aleixandre, I did not see him frequently. The state of his health soon forced him to withdraw to his retreat in Miraflores. Shortly before 1928, the year of the Gongora centennial celebration, Jose Maria de Cossto introduced us to Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, that highly intelligent and courageous matador

Tardara mucho tiempo en nacer, si es que nace, un andaluz tan claro, tan rico de aventura.

It will be long, if ever, before there is born again an Andalusian so noble, so rich in adventure"

who carted us all off to Sevilla for that extraordinary homage to Gongora. And there, timid, secretive, "profile of the wind," appeared the poet Luis Cernuda. And in the special issue of the poetry magazine Litoral, which the poets from Malaga, Emilio Prados and Manuel Altolaguirre, dedicated to the Gongora Centennial celebration, there were the painters Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, together with younger artists who were already installed in Paris: Manuel Angeles Ortiz, Francisco Cossio, Hernando Vines, Bores. In Spain among my friends were the artists Gregorio Prieto and also Santiago Ontarian, and then Benjamin Palencia; Alberto Sanchez, that genial baker and sculptor from Toledo; Maruja Mallo; and Diaz Caneja-part of the so-called School of Vallecas, which came into being on the outskirts ofMadrid, at the edge of the surrounding plains: As for me, after finishing the rigorously formalistic poems of Cal y canto (Whitewash and Stonesong), I became possessed by all those demoniacal angels, suffering painful convulsions and dark agonies, and searching perhaps for that light which was not to appear in my life for some time to come.

Es cuando golfos y bahtas de sangre, coagulados de astros difuntos y vengativos, inundan los suenos.

Cuando golfos y bahias de sangre atropellan la navegaci6n de los hechos y a la diestra del mundo muere olvidado un angel. Cuando saben a azufre los vientos y las bocas nocturnas a hueso, vidrio y alambre. Oidrne.

Yo no sabta que las puertas cambiaban de sitio, que las almas podian ruborizarse de sus cuerpos, ni que al final de un tunel la luz traia la muerte, Otdrne aun

It is when gulfs and inlets of blood, coagulated with dead and vengeful stars, inundate my dreams. When gulfs and inlets of blood violently crush the navigation of events, and on the right-hand side of the world, a forgotten angel dies. When the winds smell of sulphur and nocturnal mouths taste of bone, glass and wire. Hear me.

I did not know doors could change places, that souls could blush for their bodies, nor that light at the tunnel's end brought death. Hear me still."

I could not sleep. I had no idea what was happening to me, where I was supposed to go, but I continued to stumble, pursuing something which was dragging me down deeper and deeper into a blind tunnel. But in the streets of Madrid, shots were heard. The University was in a state of unrest and the students were rioting, placing barricades along Atocha Street, at the Medical school and on the Paseo de la Castellana. I headed in that direction without really understanding why I went. Echoing the tone of Concerning the Angels and Sermons and Dwelling Places,? I began to compose long and violent lines of poetry filled with anger, protest and fury against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, pasting them up on walls along the city streets. That happy decade of the 1920s was coming to an end. I was twentv-eight years old. I began to dream of dying in the streets, like the hero of the Andalusian ballad:

Con los zapatos puestos tengo que morir, que si muriera como los valientes, hablarian de mi.

I will face death with boots on my feet. If I die like the brave, of me, too, they will speak.

Then came the advent of the Republic and my attempt at wntmg popular political drama-Fermin Galan, the hero of Jaca executed by General Berenguer-a play produced with the actress Margarita Xirgu and whose opening night turned into a near-riot. Soon after that I went to Paris with my companion, Maria Teresa Leon," having received a fellowship from the Council for Advanced Studies for the purpose of

studying theater. I spent time in Berlin where I met Rosa Chacel, a great friend and a great writer, with whom I was later to share several years of exile in Argentina. After a visit to Moscow, a city which took me totally by surprise and where you could still hear the reverberations from the gunshots of Mayakowsky's suicide, I returned to Madrid. But I had passed through the Berlin of Hitler on my way home, and this experience left me deeply disturbed. In Madrid, Pablo Neruda had already appeared, and people were beginning to talk about Miguel Hernandez/ "that surprising boy from Orihuela," as he was described by Juan Ramon Jimenez. Marfa Teresa and I, together with other writers whose interests were somewhat different from those of my own poetic generation, founded the literary journal Octubre, a magazine which later published works by Antonio Machado and Luis Cernuda. My feelings of sympathy for the Communist Party were now clear to me. One day, at a meeting held in the Toledo district of Madrid where I had gone to recite poetry, I met a very beautiful woman who carried herself like a worker. Later, I would sing her praises:

lQuien no la ha visto? Es de la entrana del pueblo cantabro y minera. Tan hermosa como si uniera tierra y cielo de toda Espana.

lQuien no la escucha? De los llanos sube su voz hasta las cumbres, y son los hombres mas hermanos y mas altas las muchedumbres.

Who has not seen her? She is from the soul of Cantabria, from its people and its mines. So beautiful is she, uniting the earth and sky of all Spain.

Who has not heard her? From the plains her voice reaches the mountain ranges, and men stand, brother to brother, feeling uplifted by one another.10

That beautiful woman was Dolores Ibarruri, known by all as La Pasionaria.1l

I was thirty-seven years old when the Republic was overthrown and drowned in blood. I stayed on as one of the defenders of Madrid, the city I named Capital ofGlory in a collection of poems. 12 Eventually, I had the miraculously good fortune to reach Oran and then Paris, where I subsequently earned a living as radio announcer for Paris-Mondial.

There I stayed until the Germans outflanked the Maginot Line, and then I emigrated to Argentina as an exile. In the Rio de la Plata region, between Montivideo and Buenos Aires, I lived for twenty-four years, surrounded by good friends, artists and writers, so many of whom are obliged today to live in exile among us. It is now our turn to assure that, by whatever means, we find a way for them to live here decently, openly and without unnecessary hardships, as if they were at home.

While I experienced the growing up of Aitana, our daughter, who had been born among the rivers of Argentina, above the landscape of fields and riverbanks of that enormous nation, I glimpsed, as if through a transparency, my own lost and tortured country. And there, in the wilderness bordering the Parana River, I wrote my songs and ballads.

Hoy las nubes me trajeron, volando el mapa de Espana. jQue pequeno sobre el rio, y que grande sobre el pasto la sombra que proyectaba!

Se Ie llen6 de caballos la sombra que proyectaba, Yo, a caballo, por su sombra busque mi pueblo y mi casa.

Entre en el patio que un dia fuera una fuente con agua. Aunque no estaba la fuente, la fuente siempre sonaba, Y el agua que no corrta volvi6 para darme agua. *

Today the clouds brought to me, on wings, the map of Spain. How small above the rivers and yet how wide above the fields was the shadow it projected!

The shadow it cast became filled with horses. And I, mounted, crossed the shadow, searching for my house and my village.

I entered the garden where once a fountain of water had stood. Although the fountain was gone, its sound could still be heard. And the water, no longer flowing, returned to quench my thirst."

And when, after the regime of General Per6n, I had to painfully leave my second homeland, I chose Italy as my new place of residence: Rome-where I lived happily for fifteen years.

My dear friends, many are the barriers I have had to surmount in my lifetime to be able to arrive at this moment and to be, once again, here with you after almost forty years of involuntary absence. Federico Garcia Lorca was executed when he was thirty-eight years old. I have not only lived twice that long, but have even lasted four years beyond that. I will be exactly eighty years old tomorrow and I will celebrate under the galloping sign of Sagittarius. The war that began with the death of the poet from Granada ended with the death of Antonio Machado in a village in the south of France. 14 Then came the death of Miguel Hernandez as he lay on a cot in an Alicante jail cell. And far away, in exile, many Spanish poets were dying off: Juan Ramon Jimenez, Pedro Salinas, Jose Moreno Villa, Leon Felipe, Emilio Prados, Luis Cernuda, Pedro Garfias, Juan Rejano, Arturo Serrano Plaja, Jose Her, rera Petere and, most recently, Juan Larrea. Of that splendid group or generation of 1927, some still remain: Jorge Guillen, Gerardo Diego, Damaso Alonso, Vicente Aleixandre, Jose Bergamfn and I. As for me, I have no intention of dying. To Federico, for all that was denied him of life, I dedicate this final poem:

Me vereis un cometa enloquecido, Marusalen de pelo enmarafiado con mas siglos que el mar aborrascado, sabiendo bien a donde va encendido.

iA esel iA esel iA pedradas! lQuien ha sido? lQuien es! lQue cosas dice ha predicado? Los pueblos de la cal no 10 han borrado ni sus playas del sur desconocido.

Raudo toro de fuego, no desciende, no baja el testuz nunca hacia la arena, pues en su sangre no paste buey manso.

Cuanto mas 10 fustigan, mas se enciende, y aunque tal vez arda con su melena, ardara en pie sin fin y sin descanso.

You may think me a comet gone mad, A Methuselah of entangled hair, Having lived more years than the angry sea, But following faithfully his fiery path.

After him! Get him! Stone him! Who was he? Who is her What things do you say he preaches] The whitewashed villages of the south confirm him, Nor is he forgotten by their gentle beaches.

He does not kneel, this flaming bull, raging flood, His head never lowered, humbled against the sands. No mild-mannered beast feeds on his blood.

The more he is driven, the bolder he becomes, And although the flames engulf him and smolder, Restlessly before us, he eternally stands.

Translated by Gabriel Berns

1. Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art, ed. Marc Pachter (Washington, D.C.: New Republic Books, 1979).

2. From Marinero en tierra (Sailor on Land), Rafael Alberti's first book of poetry, 1924.

3. This is the third of the three sonnets dedicated to Lorca by Alberti, and its title is "Verano" ("Summer"). No attempt has been made in the English translation to preserve the rhyme scheme of the original.

4. From Federico Garda Lorca's Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias), 1935.

5. Perfil del aire, Luis Cernuda's first book of poetry, 1927.

6. The title of this poem is "Castigos" ("Punishments") and it is from the collection Sobre los angeles (Concerning the Angels), 1927-28.

7. Sermones y moradas, 1929-30.

8. Maria Teresa Leon, a novelist, was later to become Alberti's wife. She lives in Madrid.

9. Miguel Hernandez was a self-educated shepherd and poet from the province of Alicanre and much admired by the poets of Alberti's generation. He died in prison in 1942 at the age of thirty-one.

10. The title of this poem is "Una pasionaria para Dolores" ("A Passionflower for Dolores") from the collection Signos del dia (Signs of the Day), 1945-55.

11. Dolores Ibarruri returned to Spain from her long exile in Russia after the death of Franco and now lives in Madrid. She attended the homage to Alberti at the University of Madrid during the week of celebration.

12. Capital de la gloria, 1936-38.

13. From the collection Baladas y canciones del Parana (Ballads and Songs of the Parana), 1953-54.

14. Antonio Machado died in Collioure and is buried there.

Three poems

]aime Gil de Biedma

Conversation

All you dead don't manage to get much freedom, but the night you come back is your own, entirely your own.

My love, my remorse and regret, La nuit c'est toi when I'm alone and you come back, you begin to recognize me in your pictures.

What damage does your smile remind me of? And which of my cruelties is in your eyes? Do you calm me because I was close to you at one time?

The portion of your death that I give myself, the portion of your death that I made my harvest, how can I repay you for it? Not even the portion of life we had together.

How can I know you've forgiven, alone with me at the scene of the crime? How can I sleep, while you're shivering in the saddest corner of my room?

Translated by Reginald Gibbons

A

body is man's best friend

Time still hasn't passed and tomorrow is as far away as a reef which I can hardly see.

You don't feel how the hours thicken in this room with the light on, how the cold outside is licking the windows How quickly, in my bed tonight, little animal, how quickly, with the easy nobility of necessity, while I watched you, you fell asleep.

Well then, good night.

That peaceful country whose contours are those of your body makes one want to die remembering life or stay awake - tired and excited - till dawn.

Alone with my age, while you sleep like one who's never read a book, dear little animal: human being -franker than in my armsunknown to me.

Translated by Richard Sanger

ULe Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie"

What comforts him is a clear understanding of what he's lost. He rises every morning to expire, wanders in and out of rooms where the time that has stoppedan unhealed wound - aches numbly. This other world goes on nowhere else and returns at night in the stations of weary sleep His golden kingdom, how often during the day he asks after it, afraid he may have forgotten something! the hours, long lifeless journey, His story is a favorite moment, a treasure in images, that he's keeping for his necessary consultation with death. And the end of the story is this pause.

Translated by Richard Sanger

Four poems

] M. Caballero Bonald

Inherited glories

Heroes as dull as engravings of the churchly, or as relics originating from poor emulators of nothing, erect not like phalluses on the podium which among themselves they decorate with hereditary acts of filth, boorish prenatal chattering heroes as clownish as village idols, crowned with the laurel or ovations they owe to a common idiocy, only the history to which they belong could glut itself on such flimsy history.

Translated by Reginald

Gibbons

Supplantings

Some words are useless and others will end up the same, as long as in order to love you more methodically I choose those zones of your body islanded by some stubborn reservoir of abulia, the river-bends that the trace of tedium suddenly circulating in your belly perhaps reaches first, and I put my mouth there and clouds of the future come all the way here to our unseasonable bed, get between us, leave a prediction of fever and something like a vapor of the sweat from sleep and other nighttime depths, and already in the evening ambiguity I'm listening to what memory foretells: inside you I anchor, it's like remembering you, I am like the froth at the edge of froth, while between two bodies what begins to gnaw is the voracious grief of being alone.

Translated by Reginald Gibbons

Services lent

That praying scapegrace, genuflexed as if in submission to the captain's lash, did not lift his gaze when the Second In Command passed near him and tore his cheek with the gangrenous chain of the censor. Thus punished, he trembled slightly but did not in any way modify the posture of his body or the beatific complicity of his hands. He continued to pray on his knees, now somewhere near levitation, till a faint creak of the foul wood - not from the prie-dieu but from the waxy floor-made him return quickly to the waiting room of the Subsecretary

Translated by Reginald Gibbons

The uselessness of antidotes

The exhumer of statues, with a correlative specialization in the embalming of bodies and the desiccation of polluted waters, heeded the universal signs advising him to leave the Sea ofGalilee and lend his services to the Great Ceremony of Inhumation. After a long and hazardous journey during which he decided it was wise to change his route seven consecutive times, the embalmer arrived at his destined goal so enormously delayed that he did not entirely succeed in allaying all suspicions of his loyalty. Already, however, it was the hour to put into practice the secret, propitiatory operation. The embalmer proceeded, first reckoning with the aid of a small divining rod the riprap of the heraldic gates, the carved woods of the coffered ceilings, the weave of the passementerie. He traced the scent of blood through the filthy splendor of tapestries, jewelry caskets, galleries of lamps, of statues. Then-not without doubts-he asked them to take the body out ofthe vault where it lay temporarily rotting, and shortly he returned to exploring anew, and in any case over-carefully, the steep-cragged spaces nearby, till at last he seemed to desist from the search for antidotes capable of neutralizing the corruption. The body is endemic, he declared with a rash air of success. It has ended up integrating itself with a lifelong wormbed of saints' vis, cera and trophies of the hunt.

Translated

by

Reginald Gibbons

Three poems

Rafael Guillen

Task-work

Today's light is so yours, brother, that grin carved out of wood, your silhouette against a hillside, somebody else's land, and the task-work, the heaviness over the handle of a hoe, and the bargaining, a So much for the whole job, so take it or leave it, luminous and agonizing, that haloes your old beret that's lost its tassel, your shuffle-shoes It's such a glowing coal, this day, against the whole insult of an Andalusian olive grove and a Dig here, and root out these clods, shore up the landslides, scrape the terraces clean. It's so whitewash-glare, such a whiplash across the face, the walled estate, and today they must be coming, the uproar, the nervous stamping of the owner's sorrel. It's so wellhole, the guitar, and throwing yourself into the blackness-look out below, pain's coming-of the song.

Because sooner or later the bitterness, water that soaked the spongy bottomland, you don't even know it, deep in your heart,

will end up down the ditch with the other runoff, all yours, everything that much by much you're gutted by, everything that little by little you're dying of. Curses between your teeth and As you wish, Sir: a dogged will behind the lowered eves: exhaustion propped against the terrace bank and a suffocating bondage that knots scorn around your throat.

It's so yours, brother, your careless slouch, stumbling through the nettles, hope running out with every stroke of the short-hoe; so yours, the shimmering purple heat over the far peaks, and always your love of the land tugging at you, land of your forebears, the way it's rooted in you to see nothing but misery.

A deep green hangs over the terraces and the vast countryside, none of it yours, despises-how else could it be-the servility of your worn-out corduroys and your Sorry. The light, all that's yours, piles up hills for looking at, all that's yours: the torpid countryman's stare and I'll pass this hand. Maybe we'll have some luck, and they can get into the game, not you any more, but the children of the children, who knows, maybe of your children.

The same work to finish, so get on with it, since when it comes to hanging on, there's no one can lick us men of the South, what's left of us.

Translated by Sandy McKinney

The front room

When it was gone, when a mat of rough grass filled in the space its bulk had taken up and the air returned to its region, and the plaited rush of the chairs and the clay of the firebrick and the cap and smoke of the chimneypiece over the hearth began to feel the silence slowly settling down, and the cold; when the great carved door banged to and fro and, from baseboards to high rafters and creaking boards of the ceiling, the whole brightness of the house faded as through shrinking, as if the light reflected by the whitewash had gone out, and from the railings of the lookout the grounds appeared more isolated yet, and the fear of coming back and the darkening hallways; when with half-closed eyelids, the subdued moment before tears-by now for what-and another kind of solitude for ballast, the thought that it's all right that way, the clumsy trying to let go and finding, in every corner, handholds for memories and everything beginning to come from an outer dimension of awesomeness, not profaned by absence; when bare walls and partitions, here it was to one side, and plastered porthole-windows, it persisted in its soothing

not-speaking, and shutters and latches, it watched scrutinizing gusts of wind, clouds, sitting here, and the cushion, the chest, the ironwork, it went on, moved in the shadows and maintained its being beyond these walls, beyond my arms, and kept on as if beginning never to go away; when now across the garden, the gate creaking, beyond, it paused among the first poplars on the rise almost a moment, the time it takes to grasp a strand of the past, and sank with the last useless wingflap of afternoon spilling over the roof-edge; then, and only then, something other and its own and within and above presence, everything that was its presence, unleashed from corporeal dissolution, not linked to understanding, something entire, pure immanence, returning as if from the other side of the senses, came invading that space, came taking possession, groan by groan, of the emptiness, came as though fixed in whatever was the only truth, all possibilities already disposed of, came as if giving itself to unbecoming, to never having been, and finally and forever.

Translated by Sandy McKinney

Mold

It smells in certain houses of accumulated gloom, hereditary mold. You cross the threshold, past the warped doorjamb, and it smells right away, and you move through the vestibule and it smells as if every corpse, still at home there, had in leaving, straight as he was, had departed letting drop something withered, or a livid ooze, a loathsome fluid; had, with his lips gone blue and nose stuffed with his cotton, had, it's as if he'd gone out breathing into the walls, impregnating floor tiles and steps and baseboards with his bodily death, and it's that odor like a stain that leaps at you right out of the clear air outside.

Walk up the stairs in certain houses and as you reach the landing out comes the dense odor of everything that once was alive there-you've been alive in some time or other-and it hangs there now, fustiness and fading memories, from garlanded portraits of girls who've lost their bloom, from chipped crockery, fringed shawls draped on the walls, in the little parlor, the marble of the console; it hangs there unraveling in crocheted bedspreads, bursting feather-ticks,

bedroom dampness, a cracked pitcher on the corner washstand.

It doesn't smell of damp earth or wholesome, honest manure-melting down for new life to come backno, there's no cycle that justifies this fulsomeness. It smells of there's no room to breathe here, like the rotting stubble of mud flats; and you look at the hall's faded light and half-closed doors and it smells used up, for now and for all time used up, and the deathblow is from inside.

No more. The life here, in certain houses, has gone stagnant, pigeonholes crammed with things left undone, and now it smellsit's yourself you're smelling-like it's rancid and as you move on it pleads for its cut-off freedom, smelling of what it's become, of emptiness fermented, of depreciation, of the lack here now of even the price of going out dead.

Translated by Sandy McKinney

Two poems

Ldzaro Santana

Family chronicle

There's always a hot season in the South. Mornings we went to the ocean; we were there till dusk; lying in the sun, playing ball, plunging into the water from time to time. Then the slow return home. It's night now. We've eaten dinner. My wife is reading near me; in the next room, the little ones are sitting in front of the television; I write these graceless - but faithful-lines.

On the island, another Sunday has gone by. This is its light, this simple fatigue, familiar, domestic, boring and happylike that of a god with no imagination.

Translated by Reginald Gibbons

P.s.

Sometimes I want to write - nothing important, really, but something about myself, the life I'm leading now, this mediocre life, deprived of stimulation.

I make some effort, but reluctanceit's just a part of my bones like another dried-up skin - keeps me from the futility of the task: so much has been said and written about empty existences: what could I say that would be different?

With a melancholy resignation I admit being merely a reflection: on any page that expresses the inexorable degradation of a soul there I am

Translated by Reginald Gibbons

Industrial Venus

Fernando Quinones

Up from the huge furnace-mouths, from the boiling emanations down there on both sides of the estuary giving birth to red-hot steel, devouring men, alongside the clang of the pile, driver, the raging tortured vapors, the acrid smokestacks, the street rose, climbing, and on the street there was the house and in the house, the bedroom and in the bedroom, the bed where, like the most perfect work of the High Blast Furnaces, lay that body waiting to take all the blackness out of everyone who washed himself in her beauty.

Compact body, swelling and resisting, finished and technically flawless, body or a generous blaze that lit up the factory night like a body poured from the desires of thousands of workers who at the same instant might think of it in the anguish 'Of fire and sweat

and at last create it, produce it, all of them together, install it there, knowing it was for all of them, too, dense soft freshness sprung from heat and soot, a love in common, a carnal talisman, the ivory Venus of heavy industry.

Translated by Reginald Gibbons

Frolll uFive fragments for Antoni Tapies'

]ose Angel Valente

The prime requisite or, perhaps, the only requisite for art is that it be an exercise of withdrawal. The act of creating is not one of force (force and creativity are mutually exclusive); rather, it is one of acceptance and recognition. The creative act is essentially feminine in character; the artist's passion is not to penetrate matter but be penetrated by it. Creating depends on providing a state of availability, on the creation first of emptiness, empty space. The artist may, in fact, only be creating space, room for creation.

God said, "Let us Nothingness see." He placed His hand before His sight Until for all It dimmed the light And Nothingness came to be.

The creative state is similar to that of yin-yang in the practice of Taoism: a state of nonaction, noninterference, and of rapt attention to movements in the universe and the pulsation of matter. Only in such a state of withdrawal can form emerge, not as something imposed upon matter, but as a natural epiphany of it.

For the artist, matter is never encountered at surface level. It occupies the empty inner space, space generated through withdrawal, through noninterference, wherein two minus one is usually greater than two plus one, as in Kandinsky's recently formulated law of negative addition.

A creative state and creative space. "Once I attempted to go directly to silence," wrote Antoni Tapies, Silence or nothingness. The place of internalized matter. The place of illumination?

CINCO FRAGMENTOS PARA ANTONI TApIES

Poetry has often been drawn toward silence. A poem is by nature inclined to silence; it contains silence as its raw material. Poetry: the art of composing silence. A poem only exists when its silence is heard above its word.

3

Tapies has clearly perceived a work of art to be "simply an aid to meditation." His art, in fact, has the texture of meditation. But the lengthy, pure meditation that characterizes Tapies' work emerges through a process natural to him in forms increasingly devoid of contemplation if we understand the latter to be an experience of unification. To be sure, the art of Tapies offers a sovereign vision of matter, of the essential presence within it that becomes form, but which is, more specifically, formation: forms dissolve themselves in their nostalgia for formlessness, for what is essentially impervious to change and yet may be transformed into anything and remains the root for infinite possibilities in form.

In considering the art of Tapies it is meaningless to speak of abstraction or configuration. Form does not shape: it is. Form is matter. Matter-the matter in the painting or in the composition-does not serve as a basis for something superimposed. It is not matter in anyone form but pure form in itself. Perhaps in modern art no artist has carried the process to greater extremes: unifying matter and at the same time unifying matter with itself; Etre La matiere! wrote Flaubert.

The "inferior" forms-sashes, a walking cane, or the traces of forms taken on by matter, footprints or stains left by bloody fingers-signal a complete eruption of matter which forces the forms to become new beings, into an existence impossible for a single form to attain. Thus, Tapies has brought the movement inherent to creation back to matter itself. His meditation has been a long, extended, subtle effort to perceive creative movement within matter which has become fixed into a form whether for utilitarian or artistic reasons. This, his radical adventure, produces the strong, stirring tension and the undoubted, disquieting power of so many of his compositions.

4

An entrance into matter and a contemplation of matter, the work of Tapies by its very nature denies any possible division between spirit and

matter. Matter which is internalized, is drawn into union, and is caught in its spontaneous movement before coming into form would be very close to what Novalis in "Hymn I" calls "life's innermost soul." (Lebens innerste Seele.) This art searches anew for matter in its absolute being and as radix ipsius. The work's fulfillment is as much an inner process as it is the visible exercise of a craft (as was true in the ancient wisdom of alchemy). At the point of arrival (or at the point of departure in ancient wisdom) matter is matter-spirit, the philosopher's stone of the alchemist or the stone "with a dormant image," a reference from lung based on an oft-cited text by Nietzsche. Truly sensing the breath or pulsation: that is, perhaps, exactly what Picasso meant when he stated, "If a mirror is drawn close to a genuine painting the mirror should form a film as from the breath of a living being because the painting is alive."

The unified and unifying matter that Tapies works with is imbued with symbols. He has considered himself as the source for some of the major ones. The wall in "Communication with the wall" is a case in point because the word "wall" suggests his name (through association with "tapestry"). This text is one of his best and one of our generation's most beautiful theoretical texts written in Spanish. But there is another symbol related to his name that, to my knowledge, Tapies has not mentioned. It is a major symbol that appears repeatedly in his work and which tends to be fused with the T of his surname: the symbol of the cross. An axial tree, the axis of breadth and height, the cross is the symbol of the union of all living matter. It is Christian only in the sense of also being pre-Christian or supra-Christian. Such is the cross that Tapies places in his material, the cross that also composes a particular material that he has favored - woven material in which the warp and woof, visible in the coarse garment or loosely woven material of heavy cloth, are bearers of the timeless symbol of the cross, as Rene Guenon has pointed out in a major book on this theme.

The absolute presence of matter with all its breath, the work ofTapies denies any possible division between spirit and matter. A symbol of that negation or of the denial of negation is the cross, the point of convergence for the complementary, where opposites are reconciled, where the equinoctial and solticial axes cross, where active and passive are mutually productive and where yin and yang are encountered.

Translated

by Elizabeth Gamble Miller

Out of the world

]orge Guillen

Todos quedamos tuibados; suspensos e imaginativos. La Senora Cornelia

jOh instante del ser al no ser! Manara, Discurso de la verdad, XIV

1

Quevedo says, with others: Life is death, Death is the beginning of our life. There are some simple contraries. Life, then? It's life. And death? Is death.

Faith will vouch for each person's answer. It's faith, not reason, that decides.

2

I'm here, then, without rest, With scarcely any rest in the measured span Of this continuous self-urging Toward what might be the goal of courage.

On the far side of the chattering beast Will I attain my fully human being Bound to love and creation Among the errors and the sorrows Of man-who is no god-at last made human?

3

And with angelic voice the tempter says, Ye shall be as gods, immortal.

From tumbler's mat to that far bridge Where No Place finally begins Must I make the incomprehensible leap?

4

In the beginning was the conjecture. It will live by hope. And it makes a great leap: faith.

Do not unsettle that sublime ambition. Leave a proper sphere to everyone.

5

"What have I, that you sue me for my friendship?" Could that First Mover Take notice of me, Of me-so tiny Among infinite beings Of time and space?

I humbly feel myself unworthy Of attracting such attention. Could what's of need be me?

This question, once it's spoken, crushes me to nothing. I won't presume to interpose vain hopes. "What have I, that you sue me for my friendship?" Would the Prime Mover need Thanks-giving songs, praises, prayers, Precisely my own eulogies,

Resounding through a space that vast? Is there a way of making the Prime Mover listen? And I, weak-voiced .1 don't know anything. Happy is he who succeeds in this, or hopes to.

Creation - could it be a preliminary Transition, an insufficient servant? What is man without his hours and places? Can the splendid universe of matter Again and again transform Its energy into a spirit-vertex Only to finish in a choir of phantoms, With superfluities of useless stars? And I, at the end, joining a horde of ghosts?

6

Everything that we are and have Lays a path that must run to a finish: Total loss. It's not a failure. It's the right and proper end of History, A History that's wisely organized. If you're born, you'll die. What is there to complain of? Let it be the gods who are immortal: them.

7

It's right that I annul myself as well, Although the loss of those I love will grieve me, And of so many many others: my birth-planet, Nature surrounds me, holds me in, sustains me. And I grow, ripen, decline, consume myself.

Let death among my people be serene. Let love be with love.

One day, perhaps laborious with pain, I'll go to sleep, serene, calmed down. I won't wake up, come morning, Nor in the afternoon. Not ever?

I, a bodyless monster? Let the order be fulfilled. Don't let a solitary dead man sadden you, His solitude is not a place: he doesn't exist.

No one in the cemeteries. How all alone the tombs are! 9

- The most important one is God. - And what if he did not exist? - Standing up in the question mark, That One must always head the list.

Translated by Reginald

Gibbons

An afterword on the poets

This small selection of recent work by Spanish poets offers a kind of cross section of poems published between 1975-when Franco died-and 1982. The range is from the extremely private and meditative, if not mystical, prose composition of Jose Angel Valente, to Rafael Alberti's birthday speech of 1982, in which he recalled for thousands of listeners the poetic trajectory that kept him in exile from Spain while Franco lived.

Rafael Alberti, winner of the 1983 Cervantes Prize and one of the greatest Spanish poets of the century, has been writing stinging, scatological verse satires against such figures as Pinochet and Nixon (in the recent volume, Fustigada Luz, 1980). These are as untranslatable as anything written, with their dense wordplay and topicality. Gabriel Berns' preface to Alberti's speech provides a sense of who Alberti is and why the speech was momentous.

Jaime Gil de Biedma (born 1929 in Barcelona) has, since 1975, published almost no poems at all, after his early works received great admiration. His complete poems, Las personas del verbo (Seix Barral, 1982), includes a few poems first published in 1975, and even fewer thereafter. He appears to have nearly stopped writing, and has written "I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but in fact I wanted to be a poem. And in some measure, bad measure, I have succeeded in this; like any more or less well made poem, I now lack interior freedom, I am all necessity and internal submission to that tormented tyrant, that insornniac Big Brother, omniscient and ubiquitous-myself." Gil de Biedma's work exemplifies a poetic of private life, colored by the disappointments and frustrations that characterized Spanish society in general, especially after the passage of time, for while some immediate material ills were cured, many social psychological ones were exacerbated.

Especially powerful in Gil de Biedma's late poems is the feeling of not

having a future, and of having been deprived of a past as well, or of having lived it mistakenly. This is powerfully expressed also in the poems of J. M. Caballero Bonald {born 1926}, whose first book in fourteen years, Descredito del heroe {EI Bardo, 1977}, displays a bitter conviction of waste and habitual dishonesty in both private and public life. The age-old dominion of Andalusian poets seems as vital as ever in Caballero Bonald's work, which employs a very rich vocabulary to convey a conflict between abstraction, commonly colonized by those who claim they speak the truth, especially in political life, and the world of sensory experience and the specificities of daily life.

Similarly Andalusian richness of vocabulary and a greater syntactical virtuosity appear in the work of Rafael Guillen {born 1933 in Granada}. Author of many books, Rafael Guillen, although known as a superb poet of Andalusia, is also a poet whose concerns have national resonance. The poems translated here are from the collection Moheda {published as an issue of the famous Malaga literary magazine, Litoral, in 1979}. The peculiarly rustic {at the same time resoundingly dignified and ceremonial} vocabulary of Andalusia has rarely been employed so convincingly as in these poems, which aim not at the kind of mythic universality of Lorca's Andalusian episodes, but at a very detailed texture of a living tangible reality. And Guillen so intensely concentrates the rhythms of speech that the convoluted anacoluthons convey not tentativeness but great intensity of feeling and considerable precision of expression. When the translator of these poems, Sandy McKinney, was working with Guillen on the English versions, he wondered if first they didn't need to be translated into Spanish. The only comparable effectboth technically and in terms of emotional power-in contemporary American poetry seems to be in the poems of C. K. Williams' last two books, With Ignorance and Tar.

Lazaro Santana {born 1940} is a native of the Canary Islands, and his work repeatedly makes use of the irony of an isolated provincial who looks at the life around him with a kind of stubborn pride in its removal from the accomplishments and putative superiorities of life at the center. In some sense, most Spanish writers of recent years have felt removed from the center, no matter who they were and where they were writing, because all cultural expression under Franco was subject to the subtlest and most damaging, as well as the coarsest and most easily dismissed, forms of censorship. Since 1975, one sign of the removal of this blight has been the presence of the erotic in recent fiction and poetry. Readers of Prose from Spain (TQ #57, Vol. 2) will recall the novel excerpt by Fernando Quinones (born 1930 in Cadiz), in which the pretext of a sociologist's taped interviews with prostitutes provides some frank, sustained meditations on love and sex. One poem from Quinones' collec-

tion of poems, Muro de las Hetairas (Ediciones Hiperion, 1981), is included here.

Jose Angel Valente (born 1929) has moved toward greater and greater compression and an almost gnomic reticence in his work, through a succession of books. Material memoria (La Gaya Ciencia, 1979) contains mostly poems, but more powerful than they are his prose paragraphs, written to celebrate the graphic work of Antoni Tapies, whose works have a kind of Zen combination of apparently casual technique and powerful spiritual or emotional resonance. The problem of silence, as most poets of the twentieth century would recognize it, may come to Valente not only out of his own personal imperatives as a poet, but as well out of the situation of poetry in a culturally repressed Spain over the years of his career-something that cannot be proven, but which is far from unlikely.

Jorge Guillen (born 1893) is perhaps the best known of Spanish poets, and despite his great age and recent chronic illness, has continued to write poems since the publication some years ago of the final, comprehensive version of his life's work, the poetic trilogy Aire Nuestro. That book was followed by Y otros poemas (And other poems), and then, to conclude yet another volume, Guillen wrote the philosophical testament of his poetic faith, the "finale" translated here. Because of its very removal from either passionate lyric or detailed meditation, it is representative of another strain of Spanish poetry that is far from uncommon. Poetry has remained a tool of serious intellectual effort in Spanish culture, as well as the vehicle for the same sorts of poems of love and loss that fill lyric anthologies of many poetic traditions. What is more common in Spanish than in English, and consequently as difficult to translate into English as, say, short poems by Goethe, is the poem of ornamented philosophical statement, in which the form of the poem-both at the level of traditional meters, line-lengths, and stanza forms, and its shape as a whole, the drama of its progress of image, thought, and feeling - makes a kind of meaning that prose statement cannot make.

Perhaps no other Spanish poet of this century has succeeded in this endeavor as well as Guillen, as readers of the many translations of his poems will already know. Guillen's last collection, Final, is not the end of this tradition in Spanish, though it may represent the end of his own work, and with him, the end of another kind of old regime.

- Reginald Gibbons

About the translators

Rafael Alberti's translator, Gabriel Berns, teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has translated Alberti's autobiography,

The Lost Grove, and is presently translating Alberti's collection of poems, The Eight Names of Picasso. Richard Sanger teaches English at the University of Seville, Spain. Sandy McKinney has recently returned to the United States from Granada, Spain, where she was working with Rafael Guillen on her translation of a selection of his poems published between 1956 and 1979. Elizabeth Gamble Miller is a professor of Twentieth Century Hispanic Literature at Southern Methodist University. She is also the American translator of the Salvadoran poet Hugo Lindo.

Reviews

William Goven, Arcadio. Clarkson N. Potter. 1983. 147 pp. Hb, $12.95.

George Garrett, The Succession: A Novel of Elitabeth and James. Doubleday, 1983. 538 pp. Hb, $17.95.

A visionary work, with the authority and density of meaning that only a life's labor around the same themes and preoccupations can produce, Arcadio is the last novel finished by William Goyen before he died in August 1983. It is a kind of utterance rather than a narrative, a tale rather than a story. The bulk of the novel is Arcadio's spoken word, framed by introductory and concluding passages in which a watching, listening narrator describes how he came to see and hear Arcadio, and then finally bids him farewell, having in some sense adopted Areadio's voice as his own.

Arcadio is a creature of halves at war with each other. He speaks a peculiar and vivid language of Texas slang and "Mescan espressions." He is a hermaphrodite, filled with knowledge and experience of sex as both sexes feel it. He is a scarologically inclined figure of saintly forgiveness, and a faithful believer whose life has been wanton and debased. He is a fearful renegade and runaway, at moments perhaps armed and dangerous, and he is a comforter of the forsaken and the imperiled, who soothes wounds and delivers babies. He is a creature, and the novel's first accomplishment is the utterly convincing orchestration of his voice, his integrity as a fictional creation.

Much criticism of contemporary American fiction is at this point crippled by a blindness to work that does not fit the preconceptions of a narrowly enthusiastic school of thinking interested mostly in formal experiment that is defined in advance as an experiment in thinking

about the nature of the novel. This definition would, however, rule out some of the formal experiments considered in Auerbach's Mimesis, for the writer's deepest thinking has usually begun with the difficulty of a subject, as much as with the accomplishments of predecessors. A new book, American Fictions 1940-1980, by Frederick Karl (Harper & Row) does not list Goyen in the index, despite the author's ostensible interest in fictional innovation. Goyen's first novel, The House of Breath (1950), was and remains a unique experiment and accomplishment, neither Faulknerian (though it has been called that) nor Southern Gothic (though it has been called that, too) nor surrealist (though it has even been called that). But it is not an experiment of the preferred sort. This novel set a pattern for Goyen's later works that is repeated in the novels In a Farther Country: A Romance (1955), Come the Restorer (1974), and now in Arcadio, which also repeats some of the narrative technique of the idiosyncratically related, vivaciously voiced The Fair Sister (1963).

From the novels on the pattern of House of Breath Goyen took the method of stitching together first-person sectionshe called them the medallions later sewn into the quilt of the whole-that proceed "lyrically" rather than expositorily. From The Fair Sister he took and refined a use of language so intense and idiosyncratic that it replaces conventional narrative, and offers a kind of sustained vision. The dynamic and diction of language are pervaded, almost in every sentence, by the implicit themes of the tale. In the case of Arcadio, these are the revelation of identity in actions, the loss of family and home-place, the conflict between sexual nature and spiritual being. Goyen wrote of the wonders and horrors of the human tale-the way the story of a life seems often to reveal a meaning we can't grasp in

any other way except in the very act of telling the story, or hearing it told. Telling, in Goyen's work, was itself a supreme human act, for the drama it implied in the situation of the teller and the listener; and it was rarely a straightforward recitation of events, but instead a kind of performance, a singing speech.

Goyen's Collected Stories and the uncollected ones he left at his death are a monument of American fiction, but remain unknown to many readers. His novels are intense and sustained revelations, while the stories show a range of abilities. The quality uniting all his work, however, is readily apparent in Arcadio: an uncanny intimacy. The words draw the reader in as an accomplice-not to an intellectual construct or exercise whose preoccupation is pnmarily epistemological, but to a struggle for the soul, between the courage to pursue understanding and experience, and the fatigue that leads to weakness and despair-to having no angel, good or bad, as Goyen put it in one late story.

Goyen's work has been regarded as "experimental" ftom the moment he published his first novel. House of Breath was championed and translated into German by Ernst Robert Curtius, translator of The Waste Land, and likewise enthusiastically rendered into French by Maurice Coindreau, translator of Faulkner. But the experiment it essayed did not kindle a continuing admiration, or rather a continuing acknowledgement, in this country. Although the twenty-fifth anniversary edition was published by Random House in 1975, under a special imprint called Bookworks, along with The Selected Writings of William Goyen, both books are now out of print. The Collected Stories, published in 1975 by Doubleday, went out of print quickly because of administrative vagaries in that publishing house, and a paperback edition was never issued. (Arcadia is the first work of Goyen's to see print since that time.)

The "experimental" quality of nearly all Goyen's books does not in itself account for their inaccessibility in the U.S. (and their availability in many languages in

Europe). For the experimentalism of others has stood them in good stead, especially writers of the "postmodern" group, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pvnchon, John Hawkes, Robert Coover, among them. The reason for this discrepancy of literary fate is not far to seek, however. The postmodern writers have mainly accomplished experiments in the meaning and control of narrative and characterthat is, they have raised these aspects of fiction into epistemological questions and artistically self-conscious questions of technique; in so doing, they have gratified an academic appetite for intellectual conundra and a cloistered conviction that dramas of mind are superior to any other sort. These writers have made the technique of fiction the subject of fiction; they have made the writer's mental exertions in thinking about his own art the principal material for that art. Authorial comment, an accepted convention in the eighteenthcentury novel and beginning to become an intrusion in the nineteenth-century novel (to be rejected almost entirely by many whom we now most revere), has become in the work of the "postrnodern" writers a preferred mode. In such novels, it is the author who is the central character, while in work like Goyen's, the voice we continue to hear as a fabulous concoction is never arch or manipulative but intimate, impassioned, unselfconscious artistically, and often in extreme circumstances. The early masterpiece, "Ghost and Flesh, Water and Dirt," is the most intense of the stories to make use of this method. It is a performance piece hinting at the later powers that will sustain a much longer aria in Arcadio:

Come back to this house, opened it up and aired it all out, and when I got back you know who was there in that house? That ole faithful ghost of Raymon Emmons. He'd been there, waitin, while I went aroun, in my goin roun time, and was there to have me back. While I uz gone he'd covered everrhin in our house with the breath a ghosts, fine ghost dust over the tables and chairs and a curtain of ghost lace over my bed on the sleepinporch.

But to explain why Goyen's experiments have not met with American critical acclaim it is not enough to point to what appear to be regionalisms in his style. He was more sophisticated than his critics in this, and repeatedly insisted that his fietionallanguage was created, not recorded, and was faithful not to a region at all, but in itself composed a place where his characters could live. The answer lies elsewhere: Goyen's experiment was one of feeling rather than technique-which is to say that the technical originality of his work arose first not from wrestling with the inadequacies of the fiction written before him, but from the need to find a technique that could convey the great store of feeling that was Goyen's material, a store offeeling built on the experience of hearing stories told, and of observing inexplicable mysteries in the lives of those around him. Goyen did want to break away from the conventions by which feeling was being depicted in the novel, from the all-inclusive sweep of Faulkner's endless, psychologically imitative phrases, to the conventions of Hemingway's reticence and bravado (very off the mark for Goyen, whose material was lush and expansive), to those of Joyce's neat, beautiful dramas of the sentence. Goyen mentioned James, Proust, and later in life, Beckett, as his masters. The first two are among Cyril Connolly's Mandarins, but Goyen turned their elaborate prose into the work ofConnolly's other category, the Vernaculars.

Frederick Karl writes in American Fictions 1940-1980 that "increasing forms of abstraction" dominate the novel, and all the arts, in America, after World War II. If invited to dominate, one wants to reply, they certainly will. But everything depends on where the reader, or the critic, looks. In asking fiction primarily to provide statements or fables about the nature of mind, and to confirm implicitly the fundamental disconnectedness between mind-which many critics implicitly take to be all of life-and world, criticism like Karl's accepts without reservation only one possible philosophical stance, and

sidesteps a question so obvious that it rarely appears. When it does appear, it embarrasses some people: What is the nature of feeling? Suzanne Langer remains one of the few critical thinkers to have dealt with this seriously and at length, and in ways useful to both critics and artists, but you will not find her name in the index of American Fictions 1940-1980 either.

It is feeling, intuition, and instinct that take us through our most vivid experience: love, the birth and growth of children, the creation of artistic works, the satisfaction of intellectual endeavors, grief at loss, and preparations for our own deaths. In this world, of which Goyen writes, the most vital forms are those of action and the resolution of powerful feeling. Arcadio is, on one level, a tale of escape and rebirth. Repeated escapes: first from his orgiastic childhood as a kind of brothel slave, then from his silent presiding on a mock throne as a sideshow freak, and even from a place called "the Missoura jail," which seems to be every bondage to self-delusion and unconsciousness with which we do damage to others. Areadio's very language, even when it is simply descriptive, suggests the compelling power, in this world, not of qualification and doubt but of awe and curiosity, wonder and yearning. There is little place here for caution regarding the ability of language to convey the truth (although Areadio does touch on that, too, as he leaves very few stones unturned in his meditations). Here he describes seeing his runaway mother (for the first time since he was an infant) when she comes to the sideshow to see him:

A woman of worn beauty had kept comin to the Show. Her beauty was wearing out on her-and so was the dress she wore, a green dress of thinning fringe, diamond-tipped, a tiny shining drip hung from the strings of fringe. I first noticed her on a Saturday night, a crowded night and a rainy night. My God the rain comin down on the Show. Mud on the shoes of my gazers and the smell of wet sawdust, the smell of the wet tent. There she was. Winkin green fringe. bruised

green shoes with spangled buckles, tinsel combs in black long hair. Twas in Memphis, Tennessee. Come away, she whispered We left town together, a Charro and a Puta, my God, and went out a ways on the road toward the moon that seemed like was a white flake something was eating out a piece of, something was eating the moon. I wanted to choke my mother and wanted to lie on her breast.

Recurring themes-the wearing down of beauty and the world (the eating away of the moon), the struggle between rage and a need for solace and comfort - inform the details of the description, even though they have not yet surfaced in Arcadio's meditations as his explicit preoccupations while telling his story, now that he is almost ready to leave this world. This escape from the Show does not give him back his mother, for she runs out on him again. His experience continues to be unbearable, even apocalyptic, yet his remembering of it remains sweetly considerate of every shade of color, every little sparkle of detail. He recovers the life of experience, now he is in his last stage of remembering, by virtue of his open and innocent wonder at the spectacle he has witnessed and lived.

I do not think a more surprising or profound meditation on experience and the soul has been written by an American writer of our day, and I hope Arcadio will become for many readers as memorable a literary creation, with resonance as wide in American life, as Ahab, Huck, Babbitt, Gatsby, and the Invisible Man, and others such. Arcadio's shrewdness and simplicity, his experience of extraordinary debasement and spiritual awakening, his sly humor that wears a mask of innocence, and his innocent yearning that seems both incongruous and authentic in a creature of such ready perversity-there is no one else like Arcadio in all our books. Superlatives, and many of them, will merely gall the reader ofthis review, but it is difficult to convey to one who has not read this tale the surprise and gratitude with which one begins to realize, in reading it, that it is the sort of visionary crea-

tion that beggars both the conventional pursuits of selfhood and the super-octane explorations of the cerebrum that fill the bookracks and cannot satisfy our desire, our need, for works of deep feeling that can speak to us in our world of living and dying, together, as well as in our insulated privacies of doubt and fear. To summarize or characterize the book beyond what little has been written above, will not convey its powers or importance. It is the simple story of a hermaphrodite who, after a life of wandering in search of lost family and companions, and in search of love and dignity, is telling his whole story one afternoon while sitting under an abandoned railroad trestle that spans a dry riverbed. He is playing his harmonica from time to time, the one tune he knows, and he is full of memories of the dead. Areadio, like the book that holds him, exhibits the necessities and responsibilities of age and thoughts on last things; he has no desire to impress anybody, or to prove anything, but is willing to tell his tale, if his listener is willing to listen.

The novel is a valedictory performance. Arcadio, for all the ferocity of his anger sometimes, and the bitterness and mordancy of his humor, is melancholy and weary. Reconciliation and forgiveness are among his thoughts now, and the release in death from the bondage of the flesh. His personal end makes it seem the whole world is, as he says, wearing away. "It's time to say farewell and so goodbye adios old world, old world is passing away." This book is one of the grand experiments and accomplishments ofcontemporary fiction.

Near the end of George Garrett's great novel, someone thinks, "world is upside down and inside out these days. All things changing for the worse and no help for it." It's curious that an apocalyptic sentiment should appear in this novel too, but perhaps it is only a measure of the sweep of any large novel, that must come inevitably to such considerations. What is certain is that Garrett's long-awaited sequel to his novel of Sir Walter Ralegh, The Death of the Fox, has a whole world in it,

begins with a birth and ends with a death. and compasses an astonishing range of experience between them. all of it convincing and masterfully orchestrated to touch on many serious and weighty subjects.

Garrett experimented with novelistic form in The Death of the Fox, which proceeds in no straightforward way, but by moving back and forth in time and place. draws all of Ralegh's experience, and the mood and complexities of England and the Elizabethan court, toward the hours before Ralegh's execution. His imprisonment in the Tower has turned, under King James, from a political expediency into an appointment with the headsman. His recollections of youth, of the death of his young son, of every precious memory he retains whether of happiness or pain, adventure or court intrigue, gradually build such a convincing intimacy that his death horrifies the reader as much as any fictional death can. The triumph of Garrett's formal experiment was a triumph of feeling, and it is very powerful.

In The Succession, the experiment continues, and has taken a further step. This novel also weaves back and forth in time and place, but with a principal difference: there is no single central character through whose life this world may be gauged; there is no single narrator; there is no plot, but only plots, in both senses of the word. The element common in all of Garrett's medallions-to use Goyen's word-is the language. While this is not truly Elizabethan (it would be a great obstacle if it were), it is nonetheless greatly enriched by echoes of an earlier usage, full of the lively freshness of diction and syntax that have not yet yielded to the written word, but still have the unraveling delights of spoken cadences full of qualifications, reminders, place-names of great individuality and historical weight, and curious, vivid vocabulary. The novel is a kind of stage-no surprise-on which actors in related, but separate, dramas appear, briefly or at length, and from which they then exit, some to return for another scene, others not, even though

their stories have not been played out to the end, and we must guess what those ends might be.

Two minor characters appear repeatedly, linking top and bottom of the social order, a courtier whose fortunes have undergone typically Elizabethan and Jacobean reversals, and a messenger, who picks his way by horse through the length of England southward in 1566 to take word to Sir Robert Cecil, Elizabeth's closest advisor, of the birth in Scotland of James, a male cousin to the unmarried Queen, and the likeliest candidate for the crown, if at her death he is still alive and no one has interceded. Elizabeth did not indicate her successor until she lay on her deathbed many years later, and even that equivocal nod of the head was open to varying interpretations. Claimants to the throne were various and contentious; the long stewing war with Spain would be affected by the identity of her successor; bitter cruel suppression of the Catholics in England had taken many lives and was not yet over. Elizabeth's strategy was to refuse to name her successor. She made everyone play a game of loyalties that were nothing more than guesses and bets-on which life and property were ultimately staked. Out of this period of great political anxiety for the future, and of widespread suffering among the poor, Garrett has made the unlikeliest sort of historical novel, in which the very situation of the nation is the subject, and no one life rehearses its history fully to provide the reader with the customary satisfactions of plot.

The novel does not even proceed far enough in time to settle the effect of the succession; after Elizabeth has nodded her head to James's name, the book returns to Christmas, 1603, favoring the keen uncertainty still in the air then, to a dead resolution of tensions. Thus Garrett has chosen a fictional method that is the very embodiment of his subject: an artful refusal to settle the narrative on a single course. His three main themes are large. One of them is change: our perception of the Elizabethan and Jacobean world as

being much of a piece is false, for the actors on this stage see such a great decline from earlier times that one of them can say in 1626 that in 1603, just before Elizabeth's death, "the world was powerfully simple then." Garrett portrays an age of shifting ground, and this too matches his own shifts from scene to scene, and from one year to another one far off, as his method gradually offers the perspective of many figures in a series of tableaux.

Another manifestation of this is the way in which Garrett's purely technical resources often convey one man's thinking or talking dissolving into another's, at another moment, as if to suggest a crowded simultaneity of diverse historical moments and experiences, especially in the brilliant section, "Player." A second theme is all manner of duplicity, deceit, dissembling, disguise, treason, treachery, tricks, spying, acting, and so on. The instances of this are so numerous they seem finally to be the fabric of life, from the intricate ploys of Elizabeth's letters to James, to the ruse by which a wounded small Scot beats a great emboldened English lord and steals his horse. A third theme is the richness of intense consciousness: of the moment, of place, of pleasure, of conviction and cause, of peril and fear. These three themes are braided in a single cord, which is the struggle for knowledge that will give one man, or woman, dominion over another, or, in a few cases, over himself and his soul.

Perhaps "braid" is the wrong figure. The novel is more like an enormous web or network, each knot of which will tremble when any other is touched. Crossreferences, echoes, abrupt truncations and later continuations, a marvelously complicated interplay between past and future, known and unknown, one moment's certainty versus the next instant's doubtsuch virtuoso manipulation of the stuff of the novel makes it seem even larger than it is, for its capaciousness stands in great contrast to the mere encyclopedic variety of the usual sort of historical novel, or the voluminous exhaustive campaigns of writers like Gaddis or Barth, or for that matter

the catchalls of popular writers like Michener. The Succession is actually a work of great compressed intensity, cleverly disguised by the complicated leisure that must be taken by the characters in it in order for them to recover as fully as they can their memories of what has happened to them. (In the case of the messenger, it is time taken to look ahead and foretell what the journey will be like-yet another surprising twist.) There are so many tricks of fiction in the novel that it can be read as a kind of demonstration of the powers of language to erect the most splendid mansion of possibilities and actions. And no element of this world, or of the possibilities of the novel, has so fascinated Garrett as contradiction. To take a simple instance: the novella-length section, "Reivers," presents the crippled, blind and late-comers who have been left behind a thieving raid across the Scottish border into England. Awaiting the triumphant return of their abler companions in arms, they sit around a fire and tell stories of heroes and escapes. But the raid they regret having missed is turning into a disastrous failure as they sit talking, and men are dying for less than nothing, up the road.

Garrett never plays such ironies as heavily as they must seem in summary, and he makes use of the greatest delicacy in proposing much of the action as something that mayor will happen, or might have happened, when in fact it is already accomplished. This further confounds and enriches the novel's perspective, till another theme emerges, I suppose inevitably, the one that lies behind many of the most substantial novels of the tradition: the nature of reality. Garrett has the good taste and respect not to embark with drawn sword on that expedition, but in section after section the quest for the truth of a matter raises this question. The dazzling section in which Sir Robert Cecil analyzes the whole history of the correspondence between Elizabeth and James comes to mind in this regard. Again the peculiarly convincing verisimilitude of a manifestly artificial manipulation of nar-

rative time reproves all conventional dependence on plot and unfolding action in fiction.

But to enumerate themes will not serve to suggest what a pleasure the novel is. Nor will themes manage to suggest how effectively the novel, which seems to have turned its back on our own world, very much restores our own daily actions and troubles to us, in illustrating the powers of consciousness, the pleasures of keen perception, and the persistence of our desires for contradicting human realities: both peace and dominion, both love and power. Hidden in these many narratives, Garrett is offering comment, as well, on the vanity of some desires. But that is for the experience of reading the book, not for any reviewer's comments.

The critical opinion that the American novel since World War II has been understandably dominated by abstraction and an abandonment of subjects that do not bring with them ruminations on the creative act, rests on the vaunted impossibility of saying anything meaningful after the Holocaust, the atom bomb, all the facets of an increasingly absurd and inhuman world. But the bloodshed, deprivations and injustices of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England are as cruel as any; the Middle Passage killed millions of men and women and children, as cold-bloodedlv as the Holocaust, if not with mechanical efficiency; and the sexual debasement of men and women is not trivial; to take only a few countervailing instances. The responsibilities of the novelist have never excluded consciousness of such horrors as these. If the pursuit of abstraction seems to some to have set the course, out of the sixties, for all the rest of this century, then I think that's a mistaken perception of contemporary writing, emboldened and self-authorized by the hegemony of academic criticism over the reactions of readers outside the academy (and I do not mean the contrast between highbrow novels and mass culture confections-which is interesting for other reasons).

Experiments with the novel have not

been confined to the postmodern writers, and in many cases have opened new ground for the novel that postmodern fiction has entirely abandoned. Some names not present in the index of Frederick Karl's book (which otherwise might be admired for its comprehensiveness as well as for some of its judgments) are Grace Paley, Harold Brodkey, Reynolds Price, Larry Woiwode, Leslie Epstein, Leonard Michaels, Marguerite Young and Mary Lee Settle. But each of these has accomplished his or her own experiments, and they are of lasting value to the course of fiction. Neither Goyen nor Garrett has written a novel that can be dismissed as conventional; how can one proceed by convention when the purpose is ultimately to address the nature and consequences of human action, the responsibilities of consciousness, conscience, and spirit, and the identity of man? There should be more novels like Arcadia and The Succession, but it will take great honest artists, unswayed by fashion, and always hungry for this world's horrors and splendors, to write them. - Reginald Gibbons

c. K. Williams, Tar. Random House, 1983.65 pp. Hb, $10.00; pb, $5.95.

It's rare to encounter poetic formal innovation of substance, when much of it seems to be an attempt at mere originality. Most such attempts are doomed to unaware repetitions of experiments already perfected in the early decades of the century by European poets who are now neglected by contemporary American poets. Tzara, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Breton, Claudel, Marinetti, Vicente Aleixandre and others mined nearly every vein that can be found in poetic technique, and with more historical urgency than we can claim now, while the real question remains in need of answering for each generation: with what words can I find expression for what is, now?

The more powerful expressive needs arise from the complexity and power of

the subject, as much as from the eccentricity or extreme sensitivity of the poet. A kind of negative proofof this can be found in the way the academic canon, for a variety of reasons, gives special place to the works of twentieth-century poets whose special gift was ingenuity and technical or philosophical sophistication, rather than the power to move the reader: Eliot, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery enjoy an often uncritical embrace that has yet to be widely offered to Pound (whose passion makes him too difficult to hold close, despite the rich cerebral delights provided by his poetics), Williams, or even Frost. Perhaps this merely reflects the emotional fatigue of teachers, who would rather carry something manageable into the classroom, than something powerful and exhausting. Even the taste once set by an adversarial counterculture was prey to this weakness, because honest emotion-leaving out sentimentality and cant-remains subversive of all system, and it may be the comfort of merely conventional attitudes that has animated enthusiasm for ersatz surrealism, say, attitudes no less conventional for having opposed another, dominant group of attitudes.

The genuine innovators, whose discoveries arise from the power of feeling, may not find themselves welcomed in every quarter, despite the authority of their work. I hope this is not the fate of C. K. Williams, for his last two books of poems, With Ignorance (1977) and the new Tar (1983), are among the most original, substantial, and moving books of poems by any contemporary American poet. Williams uses a long line. Perhaps it descends, as such long lines are thought to do, from the Bible and Whitman. But perhaps out of another source, as well, for what comes to mind is the fictional, digressive meander of a sentence exploring character and circumstance, the complex refractions and the time-bound unfoldings of a sentence of Henry James, and the digression shooting off from what seemed a main plot, in Chekhov. Williams' syntax is thoroughly American, however, and

exposes to ridicule the attitude that the speech of everyday life cannot be rich supple, and adequate to very complex feel: ings.

The first three poems in Tar establish the authority of Williams' technique by offering connections between things so apparently far from each other, and apparently linked so casually, that one's first impression is an excited hunt for the hidden links. "From My Window," the first poem in the volume, is one of the weightiest and most moving poems I have seen made out of a subject that has now finally arrived among us, the waste of life (and not just in death) of the war in Vietnam. But the surface of the poem is not "about" that. An ambling opening, a very traditional sort of praise of spring air and flowers, has an odd, underlying note that suggests the real subject of the poem has yet to be announced, but is already shaping the speaker's perceptions of the pretty resurrection of life from the ruins of winter. The words I have italicized point up this note:

Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar, complex scent arrives from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in the end of the wretched winter. The scabby-barked sycamores nnging the empty lot across the way are budded-I hadn't noticedand the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have already broken the grirtv soil.

Up the street, some surveyors with tripods are waving each other left and right the way they do.

A girl in a gym suit jogged by a while ago, some kids passed, playing hooky, I imagine, and now the paraplegic Vietnam vet who lives in a half-converted warehouse down the block and the friend who stays with him and seems to help him out come weaving towards me, their battered wheelchair lurching uncertainly from one edge of the sidewalk to the other.

A subtle preparation for an encounter, at the very least, between the watcher and the watched, for the importance of everything noticed lies in this watcher's sense of an impending meaning, not yet quite accessible, but coming, in what is unfolding below him on the street. The true subject of the poem is a moment of acknowledgement of despair and hopelessness, and of an unbridgeable gap between victims and those who, for the moment, are sound and free.

From this point, the poem proceeds in a way Williams has made characteristic: memories of earlier moments cut into the present moment, and the poem moves backward rather than forward in time, not hunting for a source of feeling, or an earlier version of the present moment, a kind of idea-rhyme, but for a moment in which, it might be said, the present drama first began to unfold. In other words, the interweaving of past and present is not of separate moments echoing each other, but a kind of poetic investigation into the question of where inevitability starts, where things took the turn which then led them to this moment of realization, of sudden new understanding of what happened then and what is happening now. It is a subtle thing Williams is after, and the miracle is that he succeeds so often. Many of the poems appear to begin as casual meditations on what has just this moment happened to cross an intelligent, reflective mind; but what is being thought through, and felt through, is not really what happened but Iww what I am doing now or thinking now is part of a process that had already begun. This is poetry of a profound sense of personal history, of the realization that "history is your own heartbeat," as Michael S. Harper writes in another context, and not to reduce or trivialize "history," but to gauge adequately the cataclysms of a singe life.

So the history of the war in Vietnam includes this moment in which the paraplegic vet and his friend, with "their" wheelchair, move along the icy pavement one morning, unaware that they are observed.

Yet how cleverly Williams stages his drama for the reader: it depends on this feeling of watching others who do not know they are observed. Of thinking privately about them, wondering "how they stay alive," and having ordinary, mundane thoughts about this ("on benefits most likely"), only to be drawn into a hot, embarrassed realization that they are all too aware of being watched, and of being quite literally looked down on. But it's even more complicated than that: the poem begins now, in the spring, but also backs up once, quickly, to remember another moment, to establish a depth of field for the watcher's pondering:

I know where they're going-to the "Legion": once, when I was putting something out, they stopped, both drunk that time, too, both reeking-it wasn't ten o'clock-and we chatted for a bit.

I don't know how they stay alive-on benefits most likely. I wonder if they're lovers?

They don't look it. Right now, in fact, they look a wreck, careening haphazardly along, contriving, as they reach beneath me, to dip a wheel from the curb so that the chair skewers, teeters, tips, and they both tumble, the one slowly, almost gracefully sliding in stages from his seat, his expression hardly marking it, the other staggering over him, spinning heavily down, to lie on the asphalt, his mouth working, his feet shoving weakly and fruitlessly against the curb.

In the storefront office on the corner, Reed and Son, Real Estate, have come to see the show.

Gazing through the golden letters of their name, they're not, at least, thank god, laughing.

Now the buddy, grabbing at a hydrant, gets himself erect and stands there for a moment, panting.

Now he has to lift the other one, who lies utterly still, a forearm shielding his eyes from the sun.

Williams' accomplishment-and it is a

great and rare one-is the shape of his sentences, as well as that of his lines: the gorgeous, complicated, unwinding account of a sequence of action and perception. It calls to mind Antonio Machado's definition of poetry, the word in time. And the genuinely colloquial cadences offer a "nonstandard" syntax as rich and energetic as if it were Elizabethan, or, more to the point, rescued from centuries of written poetic usage and our perceptually impoverished experience of mechanized and featureless work and artifacts. Sentences like these:

He hauls him partly upright, then hefts him almost all the way into the chair but a dangling foot catches a support-plate, jerking everything around so that he has to put him down, set the chair to rights and hoist him again and as he does he jerks the grimy jeans right off him.

No drawers, shrunken, blotchy thighs: under the thick, white coils of belly blubber, the poor, blunt pud, tiny, terrified, retracted, is almost invisible in the sparse genital hair, then his friend pulls his pants up, he slumps wholly back as though he were, at last, to be let be, and the friend leans against the cyclone fence, suddenly staring up at me as though he'd known, all along, that I was watching

And here Williams backs up once more, this time for the climax of this drama, which is one not of action, but of understanding. The poem plunges backward in the middle of this long sentence: and I can't help wondering if he knows that in the winter, too,

I watched, the night he went out to the lot and walked, paced rather, almost ran, for how many hours.

It was snowing, the city in that holy silence, the last we have, when the storm takes hold, and he was making patterns that I thought at first were circles then realized made a figure eight, what must have been to him a perfect symmetry but which, from where I was, shivered, bent,

and lay on its side: a warped, unclear infinity, slowly, as the snow came faster, going out.

Over and over again, his head lowered to the task, he slogged the path he'd blazed, but the race was lost, his prints were filling faster than he made them now and I looked away, up across the skeletal trees to the tall center city buildings, some, though it was midnight,

with all their offices still gleaming, their scarlet warning-beacons signalling erratically against the thickening flakes, their smoldering auras softening portions of the dim, milky sky.

In the morning, nothing: every trace of him effaced, all the field pure white, its surface glittering, the dawn, glancing from its glaze, oblique, relentless, unadorned.

The image of the companion's obsessive pacing, his escape to nowhere outdoors in the cold, away from the crippled vet for whom he seems to be responsible, provides only now the starting point for the poem. This image is what lies behind the watcher's keen appreciation of the spring and "the end of the wretched winter." Not that spring has brought any hope: for on this spring day the two men are struggling to keep their wheelchair on the pavement and go on to wherever it is they are going. Can it be anywhere, given the figure-eight path trodden in the snow by the one with good legs, against the indifferent, lit-up beauty of the city night?

The next two poems, "My Mother's Lips" and "The Dog," offer equal surprises and accomplishments, and a drama and sense of comradeship with the lost, the tormented, the helpless, that are fully as powerful as those of "From My Window." The most surprising thing about Williams' language, even when it is turned to less striking, and more intimate, purposes, is that, given its vital relationship to the way we really do talk, no one else has done what Williams has done. The one thing most missing from contemporary poetry may be a sense of the spoken, the intensely uttered, that is based on real

speech rather than inherited poencism. (Thomas McGrath can convey this, as can Dennis Schmitz and Stephen Dobyns, to name a few.) "My Mother's Lips" opens with these lines:

Until I asked her to please stop doing it and was astonished to find that she not only could but from the moment I asked her in fact would stop doing it, my mother, all through my childhood, when I was saying something to her, something important, would move her lips as I was speaking so that she seemed to be saying under her breath the very words I was saying as I was saying them.

Or, even more disconcertingly-wildly so now that my puberty had eruptedbe/ore I said them.

These opening three poems, as well as "Combat," "Waking Jed," "Neglect," "Soon," and "Tar," are brilliant. Others, formed from the same poetic impulse, are good, and help to give the book a substantiality it's tempting to call fictional, if only to make it clear that it offers the reader a world rather than a small corner of one room.

The most overtly ambitious poem in the book, "One of the Muses," seems another matter, however, and I do not think it is as successful; it takes on a more purely philosophical challenge, and speaks at a remove from reality, compared to the other poems. It is self-absorbed and is clearly intended to address an ostensibly more difficult or elusive subject, but it is not easy to say precisely what that subject is. It has self-consciousness of a different sort: qualified, sometimes a little arch, a guardedness masquerading as sophisticated openness. But the other poems restore to the reader a sense of life, rather than a sense ofthe poet. They vindicate the truth of the romantic insistence on the poet's special awareness and expressive powers, while pushing emphatically to one side, by example, the sham romantic snifflings and mutterings we're more used to. That kind

of stuff gives poetry a widespread bad name. The poems in Tar are an antidote, a corrective, that could reach a new audience for poetry if three things were not in the way: false classroom preconceptions, academic overvaluation of what most invites the analysis of language rather than the experience of it, and poetic faking. Shallow preoccupation with self rather than with Keats' soul-making plagues the age, and probably accounts for these problems.

The miracle of the shorter poems in Tar is that while self (the poet's self, let's go ahead and say) is always the focus, or a necessary filter through which everything comes to the reader so each item perceived will have weight, nowhere does one feel that there is too much self and not enough world. Quite the opposite: world impinges everywhere, and the authority of the perceiving mind gives significance to everything observed and named, without having to explain much of anything. "One of the Muses" may be a kind of reverse image of the shorter poems, offering an entirely interior version in which reflection is the subject of the poem; but I prefer the others, for their extraordinary technique built out of living speech, for their humane sympathy, for their wonder at both emotional violence and the merely ironic clashes of desire and need, and for their straightforward, unabashed conviction that the poet's task is still, as Edwin Muir put it, to present a true image of life. - Reginald Gibbons

Gina Berriault, The Infinite Passion of Expectation, North Point Press, 1982. 252 pp. Pb, $12.50.

Gina Berriault is the kind of author of whom we should regularly be reminded. Many of the stories in this book were first published twenty to thirty years ago, and over half of them appeared in a previous collection of her work. Fortunately, they have been issued again, together with some recent stories, so that we can redis-

cover the strength and beauty of her approach to short fiction. Berriault's narrative style is marked at every turn by discipline and tact and shrewd selectivity, qualities that arise from her very real involvement with her material. Berriault steadily pursues the truth about certain patterns in human behavior, and the extent of her commitment is suggested by the epigraph that she has placed on this book, a statement by Neruda, "-and that's how we are, forever falling into the deep well of other beings."

Berriault's characters are people who have placed their faith in relationships, only to find themselves alone, and vulnerable. Her stories cover all kinds of separations: parents and children become estranged; husbands and wives break apart; one person loses interest in another; someone is unfaithful to someone else; a person tries to make contact with another, but fails; somebody dies, leaving others behind; the fear of death comes between people. Berriault seems to offer little hope for the continuance of relationships, but she is not a cynic. She remains sympathetic at all times to her characters as they try to make sense of their lives. She does not hesitate to show their confusion and despair, but she is also quick to acknowledge the least sign of courage and decency, not only in the few who overcome loneliness, but in the several who lose themselves in it.

The relationships that endure in these stories tend to be those between mothers and daughters. Berriaulr seems to feel that a mother and daughter can enlarge their love for each other by the awareness and knowledge that each brings from her separate experiences. The equally mature women become able to give each other support and to say and do things that might not have been possible in their early years together. So it is that one mother, learning that her daughter has been dropped by a man, embraces the young woman and urges her not to worry: "So much love went out to her daughter that her old body seemed depleted suddenly." Berriault believes that the love between a

mother and daughter can withstand threats from outside, and continue to grow throughout their lives. It is appropriate that the final story in the book, "The Light at Birth," presents the relationship between a woman in her sixties and her ninety-six-year old mother, who is ill and nearing death. They tell each other stories and talk about their dreams, holding on to the remaining minutes together. No other relationship in the book has lasted as long as theirs.

The other characters do the best they can to continue living by themselves. Some are in too much agony to survive; an elderly woman dies in a lonely apartment after spending weeks obsessed with the young man living upstairs. She wants to talk with him and learn about his interests; she wonders about his girlfriend. Her final journal entry reads: "All I feel is the fall of the ceiling about to fall." In the title story, a psychologist in his eighties, who has lived most of his years youthfully, "always looking forward," resigns himself to solitude and eventual death after being rejected by a young woman. When they meet a year later, the woman realizes that he has "drawn back unto himself his life's expectations." His is one of the most dignified decisions in the book, but no less lonely than others. Some characters try to bull their way through loneliness, concealing their fears in strange ways. A merchant sailor carries a small enameled box painted with blue roses and bearing some of his wife's ashes. He shows it to no one but her brother, and tells no one that his wife hated him, or that she died after having his unborn infant aborted. When the main character in "The Stone Boy," accidentally shoots and kills his older brother, his neighbors and family do not understand why he fails to show emotion immediately. He experiences a rush of feeling the next day, but then even his parents rebuff him. As a result, he becomes hardened and impassive, the stone boy that they took him to be. Many other characters allow their fears to show. It is hard to forget the look on the face of a man whose son has just visited him in a mental insti-

tution, and the muddled thoughts of a woman who, while returning home to her children, suddenly realizes that they grew up and moved away years ago: "They were lost to her, her children, everyone of them, and she was as timorous, in this moment on the road in the night, as a motherless child." Even at times like this, Berriault's characters keep a grip on themselves, and do not cry out or complain.

We trust Berriault because of the integrity of her approach. She seems always to be asking questions of her material, and looking farther to verify an impression. Her sentences are beautifully formed and rich in detail, not from an interest in fine surfaces, but because she is committed to getting at the truth ofher subject. Some of the strongest moments in this book occur when a single detail reaches the truth about a character-the careful walk of the psychologist after he has given up his expectations, the red crease across the forehead of the sailor who denies mourning his wife, and the "shadowy scoop" in the dress of the woman whose children have departed, "a cradling bare of comfort." Berriault leads us from detail to detail as her narratives progress, but we are by no means the prisoners of her text. We go with her willingly, convinced that we are with a sensitive, intelligent writer, and that the knowledge toward which she is directing us will open into even larger understandings. - Fred Shafer

David Schubert, Works and Days. Edited by Theodore and Renee Karol Weiss. Quarterly Review of Literature, 1983.340 pp. Hb, $20.00; pb, $10.00.

The most intriguing biographical aspect of David Schubert's life is the fact that the fiscally and emotionally frugal Robert Frost once saw his way clear to pay a three-dollar-a-week stipend in order to keep the younger poet from destitution in New York. Frost's rare generosity can best be interpreted as real faith in the future of Schubert's writing, a slim body of work

once lost to the common reader of modern poetry, but now recovered and reframed in Works and Days.

Appropriately comprising the fortieth anniversary issue of Quarterly Review of Literature, long a champion of the overlooked and underestimated, Schubert's Works and Days is only partly the making of this nearly forgotten poetic spirit. This absorbing volume is as much a loving and living tribute to Schubert as it is a gathering of disparate writings, opinions and memories intended to heighten, if not initiate, appreciation of his poetry.

For the record, Schubert was a minor figure whose work was seen in many of the major verse magazines in the thirties, and early forties. During his life, his only book-length publication came in the form of inclusion in the 1941 New Directions issue of Five Young American Poets, along with such eventual notables as Karl Shapiro and Paul Goodman and such forgettables as Clark Mills and Jeanne McGahey. In either camp, Schubert was to be odd-man-out, the familiar story of his brief, anguished career.

It is precisely the nature of this life, combined with the unusual life left in his poetry, that makes Works and Days so worthwhile, valuable and, often, unbearable a history.

The first part ofthis volume is dedicated to the forty or so poems Schubert managed to preserve during an existence marked by self-doubt, constant revision and considerable internal rage and discontent. These are flanked by three able translations of Baudelaire. The third and concluding section bundles the few available critical evaluations of Schubert's work. Most useful are considerations from James Wright, John Ashbery, and Irvin Ehrenpreis.

But it is clearly the midsection of this gathering of Schubert that matters most. Here co-editor Renee Karol Weiss has devised "a Multi-Auto-Biography" in an attempt to recreate the process of Schubert's inner life, as well as the socioeconomic waves, his poverty and The War, that surely battered the young poet. The

'Multi-Auto-Biography" profiles Schubert through an array of letters from, to and about the poet (notably correspondence with Ben Belitt, M.D. Zabel, Horace Gregory and co-editor Theodore Weiss), interspersed with contemporary recollections from family and friends. These sequences are edged with quotations from the poems. And all this is finally riddled with notable news headlines and snippets from literary and psychological articles. So the "biography" section becomes a history of multiple and moving parts, a screen of remembrance, event, living language. It is within this process of recreation we encounter Schubert's courtship with his wife-to-be, now Judith Schubert Kranes, his freshmen failure at Amherst College, and, above all, his monumental passion for poetry. Although Schubert was a gifted student, a professor recalls that he "had only one language, the one he was exploring with such inward delight, and he used it on all occasions, whether writing a poem, or a history paper or a botany quiz. The results were astonishing and the teachers were perplexed."

Such puzzlement soon led to academic dismissal for Schubert, but not before he established a fleeting but memorable relationship with Robert Frost. Subsequently, Schubert labored unwillingly as a lowlevel librarian at CCNY and, later, the assistant editor of a journal sponsored by the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. All the while, however, his only real work was the verse he painfully extracted from the emphemeral and largely closeted life he conducted in New York City.

But the poetry alone was insufficient, as was the love of wife, the admiration of poetic peers and the support of friends. Soon he sank into his "desert years," with the ever-present self-doubt, the rejection slips, ensuing analysis, a breakdown, institutionalization, shock treatments, and, finally, death from tuberculosis on April 1, 1946, at the age of thirty-two. But even after life, Schubert's bad luck persisted. It was not until 1961, after numerous false starts and hopes, that his friends could

convince a publisher to issue Schubert's one major collection, Initial A. Needless to say, the book received polite but limited attention.

One can speculate that a psyche as fragile as David Schubert's would have eventually shattered whether he chose to be poet, postman or proctologist. Still, it appears his art did set-and pull-him apart more quickly and decisively than other roles. Within his only frame of reference - that of eternal pursuit of poem-Schubert became both moth and flame. As a friend notes: "With almost harsh flame he burns away the minutes of each day - a crackling brush fire." The fire was destined to consume itself. As if hoping against hope, in the introduction to his 1941 New Directions selection, Schubert wrote: "What I see as poetry is a sample of the human scene, its incurably acute melancholia redeemed only by affection." Schubert never found quite enough affection or redemption, in or out of poetry.

It should be noted that Schubert's extant poetry is remarkably uneven because of the inclusion of numerous early works, poetic calisthenics in sentimentality and rhetoric ("my heart was turned into a Lachrymose commentator"). More to the point, however, as he continued to enhance craft and heighten perception, the work in many instances becomes decidedly interesting, compressed yet rarefied, at once capable of desperation, gaiety and self-mocking wit. And for all his troubles, real or otherwise, he occasionally was able to strike a meaningful balance between personal desire and attainment:

When you cannot go further It is time to go back and wrest Out of failure some Thing shining.

To suggest that Schubert's poetry is a great find or rediscovery would be misleading. It has moments, but it remains undeveloped and unrefined, more promise than practice. Similarly, speculation that Schubert might only have needed

more time to join the preeminent voices of his generation-Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell and Shapiro-is simply that, speculation. What can be determined is that Schubert is well worth knowing, albeit his final powers were less than fully mature. It's also fair to conclude that Schubert wrote a handful of poemsnamely, "The Simple Scale," "The Picnic," "The Snow in the Mouse Wind:' "Kind Valentine," and "Midston House" - that ought to be read today and last for some time.

What also should endure is recognition of Schubert's personal and artistic torment. While it is likely his poetry will never rise much above the stature of a literary footnote, the story of Schubert's creative battles should continue to instruct, inform and forewarn, insistently asking the question, as it does, What price a life with poetry?

No doubt Schubert was an extreme case, uncompromisingly committed to his "inward delight" with language, without regard for any other situation of wellbeing. "So fiercely self-absorbed was he that nothing of him was left for the outside," recalls Theodore Weiss.

Schubert proved to be a lightning rod, attracting the most violent and fearsome of emotional and physical conditions, as well as plain terrible luck. Given entirely

to his art, his collapse was equally fierce, pure, complete. Above all, his self-induced trials remain now to serve as witness to the terrors that can be evoked in the name of art's trusted beauty. David Schubert's demons are at last revealed, and with good cause, in Works and Days. It is a lesson not to be missed by anyone serious about the high stakes of creating art.

-G. E. Murray

Publishers of books reviewed:

Clarkson N. Potter One Park Ave. New York, NY 10016

Doubleday Publishing 245 Park Ave. New York, NY 10167

Random House 201 E. 50th St. New York, NY 10022

North Point Press 850 Talbot Ave. Berkeley, CA 94760

Quarterly Review of Literature 26 Haslet Ave. Princeton, NJ 08540

Contributors

Ward Just is the author of six novels and two collections of short stories. Currently, he is writer-in-residence at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. His new novel, The Amerian Blues, will be published this spring by Viking Press. Joyce Carol Oates teaches at Princeton and helps edit The Ontario Review. Her most recent novel is Mysteries of Winterthurn (Dutton), the third in a quartet of American "genre" novels. A recipient this year of an Ingram Merrill Fellowship, Howard Norman is currently on the Expeditions Staff of the Arctic Research Center, Churchill, Manitoba, Canada. His most recent book is Where the Chill Came From (North Point Press). Jane Aumerle has had fiction published in Manifest, and poetry in Mendocino Review and Descant. "The seventh circle" is part of Graven Images, a work in progress.

Professor of English at SUNY College at Brockport, New York, William Heyen is the author of many books, the most recent of which are Lord Dragonfly: Five Sequences (Vanguard Press, 1981) and The Trains (Metacom Press, 1981). Mark Godfrey is associated with the Archive Picture Group and works on assignment for such publications as Discover magazine and the Special Publications Division of the National Geographic Society. His most recent book is Frontiers of Science. Ray A. Young Bear is a member and resident of the Mesquakie (Red Earth) Tribal Settlement located near Tama, Iowa. His first book, Winter of the Salamander, was published by Harper & Row in 1980. He has work forthcoming in Manhattan Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, and Greenfield Review. Bruce Weigl is the coeditor of The Imagination as Glory: Essays on the Poetry ofJames Dickey, to be published by the University of Illinois Press in June. He has poems forthcoming in Tendril and Quarry West.

C. D. Wright's latest collection of poems is Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues (SUNY Press, 1982). She teaches at Brown University and coedits Lost Road Publishers. Dennis Trudell has had poems in recent issues of Iowa Review, Ironwood, and Georgia Review. Last summer he visited in Nicaragua briefly. Ray Murphy has published poetry in Northwest Magazine. At present, he is writing poems and working on a novel. Gerald McCarthy's first book of poems, War Story, was published in 1977 by Crossing Press. He has recently published prose and poetry in The Ohio Review, New Letters, Ploughshares and other periodicals. Now director of creative writing at Texas Tech, Walter D. McDonald has had poems accepted recently by Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, and The North American Review. His three books of poetry include Anything, Anything (L'Epervier Press,1980).

Maxine Kumin's most recent publications are a book of poems, Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief(Viking/Penguin, 1982), and a collection of short stories, Why Can't We Live Together Like Civilized Human Beings? (Viking Press, 1982). Elder Olson's new book, Last Poems, will be published this spring by the University of Chicago Press. R. L. Barth has published a chapbook of poems, Forced-Marching to the Styx: Vietnam Poems (Perivale Press, 1983). A second chapbook of poems, Anniversaries, Hours, and Occasions, is being published this year by Goshen Press. John Ciardi, the distinguished American poet, is often heard on National Public Radio. Miller Williams' most recent volume of poems is The Boys on their Bony Mules (LSU Press). He is Director of the University of Arkansas Press. John Frederick Nims' most recent books are Selected Poems (University of Chicago, 1982) and The Kiss: a Jambalaya (Houghton Mifflin, 1982). The two epigrams by William Harrell are his first published poems.

Mary Kinzie's first volume of poems, the Threshold of the Year, won the 1982 Devins Award from the University of Missouri Press. Timothy Steele is the author of Uncertainties and Rest (LSU Press) and The Prudent Heart (Symposium Press). X. J. Kennedy has recently published an anthology, Tygers of Wrath: Poems of Hate, Anger and Invective (University of Georgia). Raymond Oliver teaches English at Berkeley and has published a collection of poems, Entries (David R. Godine, 1982).

A teacher in the Creative Writing Program at SUNY Binghamton, Gayle Whittier has published work in Ploughshares and Pushcart Prize VI. "Turning out" was written at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts during a Dean's Research Semester awarded her by the Dean of Arts and Sciences at SUNY. Frances Kuffel's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cutbank, Prairie Schooner, Wind, and Quarterly West. "In praise of chocolate" is her first published story. Rodney Jones is a graduate of the University of Virginia and a student at the University of

Arkansas Writers Workshop. "Infinite Vitality Inc." is his first published story. G. E. Murray is poetry critic for the Chicago Sun-TImes and has published criticism in The Nation, The Saturday Review, and The Hudson Review. William Wilborn has published poems in Poetry, Inquiry, and The Yale Review.

Notes on contributors to "Alberti and others" can be found at the end of that section.

TriQuarterly wishes to thank Giulio Einaudi Editore ofTorino, Italy, and the publisher's representative, Mrs. Bobbe Siegel of New York, for permission to print two essays by Natalia Ginzburg in our Fall 1983 issue (TQ #58). The essays, "Winter in Abruzzi" ("Inverno in Abruzzi") and "Portrait of a Friend" ("Ritratto di un Amico"), are from Ginzburg's book The Little Virtues (Le Piccole Virtu), Copyright © 1962 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino. The essays were translated by Michele Stepto.

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#22 Leszek Kolakowski special issue: co-edited by George Gomori. The first translations into English of this important Polish philosopher. 256 pp. $2.50

#2S Prose for Borges: a special issue with an anthology of writings by Borges and essays and appreciations by Anthony Kerrigan, Norman Thomas di Giovanni and others. 468 pp. $6.00

m Ongoing American Fiction I: features Stanley Elkin, Robert Coover, Thomas McGuane, Russell Edson, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Joyce Carol Oates, and Philip Stevick. 420 pp. $5.00

#29 Ongoing American Fiction U: stories by John Gardner, Joseph McElroy, Joy Williams, Gilbert Sorrentino, William Kittredge and others. 216 pp. $4.00

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#31 Contemporary Asian literature: co-edited by Lucien Stryk. With Lu Hsun, Chairil Anwar, Ho Chi Minh, Shinkichi Takahashi, Yasunari Kawabata and others. 244 pp. $3.50

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New Work and Work in Progress by William Coyen, published by TriQuarterly and Palaemon Press. Works that first appeared in TQ #56, reprinted in a fine hardcover edition, hand-bound with red endpapers, and signed by the author. Edition limited to 200 copies. Contains two stories, excerpts from the novella Arcadia and from Coven's autobiography, and a lengthy interview conducted by Reginald Cibbons. 80 pp. $15.00.

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