Orestes in Progress

by Roberta Kalechofsky, micah@micahbooks.com, www.micahbooks.com

This is the full text of the novel, in one file. The print version available from Micah Publications, 255 Humphrey St., Marblehead, MA 01945, www.micahbooks.com . Roberta's other fiction includes: The Martyrdom of Stephen Werner, Justice My Brother, A View of Toledo, Solomon's Wisdom, Autobiography of a Revolutionary: Essays on Animal and Human Rights, and Bodmin 1349.

All of the above books are now available on CD, in a "context" of 270 related classic books,  for just $29:
Works of Roberta Kalechofsky in Context contains five novels, a book of short stories, and a book of essays by Roberta, together with 270 related classic books that provide a context for better appreciating and enjoying her work. The "context" books deal with Jewish Religion, Christian Religion, Medieval Europe (including works of Dante, Boccacio, and Chaucer), Greek classics (including Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles), Latin American History, Animals, Women's Rights, Anti-Slavery, along with works of novelists Conrad, Melville, and Hawthorne. Table of Contents

Micah Publications also publishes Jewish vegetarian and animal rights books, such as: The Jewish Vegetarian Year Cookbook, Vegetarian Judaism -- A Guide for Everyone, and Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb. For a full list with descriptions, see www.micahbooks.com

Chapter One -- Flight Pattern

John walked across the George Washington Bridge, carrying a single piece of luggage. His hair was unkempt, his shoes were wet from rain. There was disorder and haste in his appearance. But he was handsome and three girls who had never heard of Orpheus or Raphael's honeyed dreamings, set their teeth on the breeze and giggled with young sexuality. John did not notice and was not flattered. His sight was sucked inward upon his history, and he would never again experience benign pleasures.

After wandering two days in turmoil, he had come in this twilight gloom of an August evening, to the city seeking succor, seeking the wisdom of Morris Bloom, noctambule and Israelite, who had arrived at these shores in 1946 with his wife Annie and their son Leonard. John bore his tale of personal horror to one whose wit had been winnowed or, put the way of simple judgment, was plain crazy. But where else? Who else could take from John's shoulders his struggle with justice?

First there was the need for lodgings. John took a downtown train and with his new instincts of the dispossessed, found his way to the edge of the city along the lower East River. He opened the door to a small hotel on the river's edge and rang the bell for whoever's business it was to answer it.

Mr. Kunz came out, six feet tall and three hundred and fifty pounds. Nevertheless, or perhaps due to a sense of expansiveness and avoirdupois, he was a man with kind, blue eyes and, irrelevantly, a handsome blonde mustache. Mr. Kunz was a sober proprietor and ran his hotel with an instinct for serving others, with respect for their privacy and discrimination in gossip. He was where he wanted to be in life: running a hotel at the edge of the city. There was intelligence in his face, without vanity or judgment, and an unaggressive kindness. But Mr. Kunz was not where Mrs. Kunz wished him to be. Consequently, there was a shot of sadness in the blue eyes which otherwise would have been only kind, blue eyes, but were condemned to be kind, blue, sad eyes. He offered John the registration book which John accepted with lackluster carelessness. He wrote his name and residence in it, wishing he had arrived at Mr. Kunz' hotel without the vagaries of history.

Mr. Kunz was an intuitive man. He grasped John's mood and turned the book around to note: John Orestes from Middletown, Maine. He took in John's rumpled clothes, the classical face, the golden hair, the wet shoes, and said, by way of trying to bring the elements together, "Tired?"

John nodded grimly.

"You didn't walk from Maine, " Mr. Kunz laughed to make him feel at ease. The effort failed. "Partly," John said stolidly, who had walked, hitchhiked, and taken a bus to arrive.

Mr. Kunz picked up his suitcase and started up the narrow staircase to the third floor. His bulk took up the stairway as he wheezed his way to the top, opened a door at the end of a hallway and set down John's suitcase. "This do?"

John nodded assent, but looked without appetite at the room. The furnishings were a survival of lower hotel life, circa 1910: an old metal frame bed, a night table with brass imitation oil lamp on it, a well oiled mahogany dresser, a brocaded Morris chair with an embroidered footstool, a braided rug on the floor, and a picture of Jesus in blue beckoning to Lazarus on a wall. One window faced the river, the other faced the street.

Mr. Kunz risked another question. "Ever been in New York before?"

John resented questions and answered aggressively, "Yes. You ever been anywhere else?"

Mr. Kunz' answer was a clue to his destiny. "Nowhere else for me to go. My room is on the main floor. I got a special bed, a special chair, a special tub, even a special toilet bowl. I don't know if I'd fit anywhere else."

John's eyes softened by way of responding to human confession.

Mr. Kunz noticed they were friendly eyes after all, and felt relieved. He liked to have a little security about his clientele and drew the limit at dope addicts and murderers. He couldn't place John, but it was the quality of Mr. Kunz's generosity to conclude that most men were more innocent than not, and let it go at that.

"I run the kitchen," he said. "I do the cooking, my wife helps.

Breakfast is from seven to nine, and dinner from five to seven. I have a girl to help with the serving and the cleaning. Her name is Lilly. She'll be by here in a while to bring you towels and soap. If you mean to eat with us I need a half day's notice."

"You got it."

Mr. Kunz was pleased. It pleased him to have his hotel guests eat in his dining room. A man of large feelings in a corner of the world, a proprietor, a burgher, life's meaning was in provisions, stock, tastes, smell. The thorn in his life was his wife. He was fat and she was lean.

"He is an elephant," she shrieked, "my God, an elephant! Other women are married to men. I am married to an elephant, a hippopotamus, a rhinoceros, a dinosaur, an animal, an elephant. He is not a human being.

A human being has ambitions. A hippopotamus wallows in the mud."

He blocked her way. It was her ambition to move their business "uptown!" The word released atoms of energy in her. It stroked her ambitions and stoked her dreams. It was a driving force. Her soul was a propeller. It whirled her into motion. She bumped through the hotel in a spic and span dress with no spare parts, lean as a broomstick, cleaning corners and painting bannisters, a cigarette on her lips. He was an immovable rock. She was a torrent sweeping over him and their children, sweeping along Peter and Anne, the first born and the good stock, sweeping over Georgie, who couldn't swim. Not in a river that was flowing upwards.

He couldn't even talk. He scorned sister Anne and ducked brother Peter's suspicions that he was a half-wit. "Look out, Peter yelled at him, "your sock'll get wet." Georgie cried: "M-m-m-ind your own b-b-b-usiness. Lilly wiped his tears. Peter sneered. "Look out there, girl, you're gonna get left behind. No one's gonna throw you a life preserver." They were swimming upstream, lock, stock, barrel and business uptown, and Maria had this tremendous barge behind her that could barely toot a whistle or wheeze a breath.

She measured and weighed, boiled, steamed and skimmed, poached and sliced thin, shopped lowfat, no sugar and meatless. It did not help.

Behold! He was a conscientious dieter by day and a glutton by night. By day he ate poached eggs and grapefruit, at night whipped cream and dobretortes, German or Danish, Jewish or Italian salami, port du salut cheese, corn, rye, pumpernickel or cheese bread, French, Italian, Syrian or Jewish bread. He was non-partisan, international, a continental man, a continent, an adventurer, a man of many tastes, a casanova of the taste buds, a prowler, a smuggler, hiding olives, ham, halvah, rolls, pastrami and uncooked sausages in a toolbox in the garden, in a waterproof bag in a toilet tank, in a customer's knitting bag. She reconstituted, he reinstituted. He prowled, she searched. He kept three steps ahead of her as she prowled the prowler. "Not for you, fat boy," she said if she caught him. She was a garden rake in a white uniform, raking his food out of corners and from under the bed.

To his hotel guests he was the expansive hotel keeper, the more-than-generous host, a barn which housed all their wants, a well from which they drew endless soap, towels, hot water, hot chocolate, hot milk, butter sauce and information. His girl Lilly, general woman of all chores, was his right arm, his loyal friend and Georgie's sustenance. 

2
Alone, John's mind went mercifully blank. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked out the window. Twilight deepened and moist lights sputtered along the river, lights on the boats, the automobiles, the highway, the streets and the houses. The scene was irrelevant. John had no plans except to sit still and protect himself by sitting still and being dull, by being nothing, by being not John Orestes, boy of his father's dreams, man of outspanning ambitions, with his hand on the pulse of the sun. He was small town, well read, educated to the limits of his parents' ambitions and beyond, emptied with a single stroke of everything they had taught him, dulled back into being mere mortal, feeling how deadly quick one becomes old. The room he sat in darkened, the outside lightened. A line on the horizon remained to the sun while the boats lit their way down the river. On the opposite shore smoke rose from factory stacks, in the distance lights moved up the slope of a highway. The river swayed with the city lights.

There are rivers and there are rivers.

There was a river that went past the bottom of their farm, a pretty good river for a local and unhistorical affair, about thirty feet wide and various in temperament, home to tadpoles, minnows, and an occasional bullfrog. About a half mile down it gathered speed, became shallow, showed rocks and moss and more fish, and further down became a rapids. For a boy growing up on a farm with few friends it was an indispensable toy, a diary of the seasons. And John knew all its moods: its steely summertime heat when his father used to pull up his trousers above his knees and wade out to watch John and Leonard dunk each other under the water. John used to jackknife down and nip his father's toes. Basil played the farce to the hilt, howling that a fish had bitten him and worrying Leonard to tears because he hated water with ghostly things in it. Basil had bought the farm for John, believing that a child needed acres to wash himself in. He had married in his late thirties and they had waited ten years for a child.

It thrilled him that John ran with the cows and the pigs, cramped city boy that he had been. The farm represented a way of life, belief in freedom, harmony with nature, leisure, the expression of ordered seasonal existence, the plantational attitude. Chlore admired these sentiments, but hated the life. Moreover, to her surprise, she found being a parent difficult, fractious, as if each move had to be thought out. She plodded her way through motherhood, and doing it on a farm made the going worse.

Basil thrived on activity and privacy, and on John's youth. He could write an article as easily as swing in a hammock. Chlore liked her time organized, the hairdresser on Tuesday, a concert on Sunday, the theater Wednesday evening. She liked her time to be bolstered by metropolitan resources: to walk in museums, to window shop, to take lunch in a tearoom.

She liked the architecture of cities, brick and stone, the upward flight of tall buildings, wet pavements and snow on tiny plots of garden. Disorder, especially the kind that came from inactivity, made her feel like Humpty Dumpty: smashed.

Basil lived his ideal. He had a professorship at the college, a place on the town council, his research in archeology received critical attention, he had his travels and his country life. "Everything," he had said to Chlore when they first married, "I want everything, town and country, the active life and the contemplative life, books and music and nature, travel, and then home. Why not?" he said, the human kind in him ravishing realms, kingdoms of intellectual conquest. They lived a lifestyle that did not suit Chlore, alternating between the farm and expeditions to bereft islands and muddied valleys.

John followed in his father's footsteps. He had the same gargantuan appetite. He was interested in everything, with barely time for it all. Three days ago he had come home from graduate school, wondering which road to take: philosophy, law, physics, history, archeology? He was booked for an expedition to a Greek island that fall and had come home to pack.

Tears ran in his head to remember the time he and Basil had gone fishing half a mile below the rapids. They had walked along the riverbank and had come to a spot where the river was shallow and fast, slipped around large stones and tumbled over fallen logs. A boy, about nine, sat on a rock in the middle of the river, with his hands plunged into the running water. Basil and John set about their business and cast their lines, hoping the boy wasn't one of those with two dozen questions. He wasn't.

He sat in glum silence, with his hands plunged into the cold water.

Basil said, "I'd think his hands should be damned uncomfortable by now. His perplexity didn't stop his enthusiasm to fish. The air sang with sunlight and his line sang in the sun. Nature gloried in her light. Then a tomcat twirled by and the boy took his hands out of the river. The river's foam glinted on the cat's fur with dead communication. Basil and John looked across the running river at the boy. The tomcat caught on a log by the bank, its broken head twisted towards the sun.

"Hey, son," Basil called out.

The boy dried his hands on his shirt, and looked at them with a vacant face.

"Was that your cat?" Basil's voice quivered. The boy stared deadpan. The sun bounced off his eyes. Basil was visibly upset. Something from his youth came up like a regurgitated mess. He called across the river again. "Why'd you do it?"

The boy stared at them with dead blue eyes.

"Why'd you do it?" Basil called again, his voice thinning with ineffectuality.

The boy blinked his eyes with a fleeting concession to adult pressure. Some indecision fluttered in them for a moment. Then he crossed his arms on his knees and stared down the river with iron stoicism. No adult would break his will.

The day was ruined. John and Basil collected their fishing gear and left. The river had become tainted.

Now in his hotel room, John closed his eyes. It was only ten o'clock and he could not sleep. Hours and hours to go, plotting survival, exhausted and sleepless, in the worst of states, between opposing tendencies in his nerves and opposing needs. He went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face and his hair, rubbed his skin with a towel hard enough to feel some sting. He opened his suitcase and unpacked it. The items were ordinary: socks, underwear, a shirt thrown in unfolded and carelessly because order was beside the point. He grabbed his jacket from the bed and fled to the city streets.

Stores, lights, music from stores, CD's, tapes. The humid night provided an atmosphere for walkers. John joined them, deliquescent, as if he might gather from them a humanity that was fading from himself. He concentrated on looking normal. He glanced at shop windows and magazine stalls. He stopped at a candy store and bought a newspaper. His behavior was the model of an indistinguishable man. He walked with hands behind his back and scuffled scraps of paper with his toes.

Eventually the stores closed and the traffic thinned. The city closed down by cinema, by pedestrian, by motorist. It was inevitable and John panicked. He did not want to be by himself, with John Orestes, inheritor of memories. Nor did he wish for company. The heart of the matter was that he did not wish to be alive and did not know how to divest himself of living.

He came back to his room and tried to read the paper, but meaning broke down everywhere, even on the elementary level of words. He could put nothing together. His room had been straightened out in his absence. He had been supplied with soap and tissues, towels, flowers in a vase.

Objects listed themselves on his brain, discontinuously, without meaning.

He spent the night struggling against wakefulness, praying for sleep, for calm, for help, for Lethe, for death.

3

A rooster woke John. It crowed all around him with self-righteous possession of the air. Incomprehensibly the sound swept down from the farm in Maine and brought autumn skies chilled with bird song. John stiffened with unreality. Location was difficult in the earsplitting din and dazzling light in a dingy hotel. This is where he was, here in a room, in a hotel in New York. Hang on to it, John, he said to himself, better not forget where you are. He went down for breakfast and came into the dining room on the cross currents of bacon, coffee and fresh muffins. In spite of everything, John had a fund of good nature to draw on and acknowledged benign possibilities. The hum of morning sounds hung over the room, the clink of juice glasses and coffee spoons, the whisper of a dozen men of assorted sizes in inexpensive suits of gray and blue. John took a table near the window. Sunshine warmed the back of his neck. He felt incredibly good-humored. The people in the room looked innocent, and he felt it was possible to love them if one could sustain the mood of well being for more than twenty minutes.

Mr. Kunz opened the door from the kitchen and surveyed the scene.

His wife, Maria, surveyed the scene too from over his shoulder as if his report would be untrustworthy. They stepped aside to let Lilly out with a metal tray stacked with crockery, baskets of rolls, platters of bacon and eggs, bars of butters and pitchers of juice.

Poor Lilly! Her presence offended John. He was young and sensitive to the female presence, and there had not been anything in his life like Lilly. There had been a Ruth with bowed legs and a Marsha with a breast a size different from its mate, but not a Lilly. Deformity there was of a kind, but not of an analyzable kind. It seemed to be a matter of too much of this and too little of that, a voluptuous bosom and a gnomish height. John felt an instant antipathy to her, and his good mood vanished.

"Mind?" a man said and sat down at his table and snapped open his morning paper with a mission. John was jealous of such focus. "Nice morning," John said, the bon mot of good weather and strangers.

The man closed his paper and surveyed the scene on the table: toast, eggs, coffee and waffles. That was pleasant enough, but he said, "I don't care for summer weather. I don't care for it at all. It's not healthy weather. Larry Barnes the name." He inched his neck above the collar of his white shirt. "I'm in the baked goods business. What's your line?"

John went limp with memory. "I don't have one."

"Tut, you're young," the man said. He had a square shaped head and tight collar, but brimmed with adult compassion. "You're young. You'll find something and straighten out. Took me a while. Rome wasn't conquered in a day. First I sold jewelry, then I sold linen. Took me a while to find something I really wanted to sell. Everyone eats bread. You're not from New York, are you? I can tell by your accent. You haven't got one."

"Maine," John said, "small town in Maine."

"Ever been to New York before?"

"No," John lied, draining anonymity.

"Well, New York's not a bad place. Don't let them scare you with all them stories."

"What stories?"

"Stories about thieves and dope addicts. I've lived here all my life and never met a dope addict, never had anything stolen from me except once in Tarawana, Florida, when I was in the army. I had a cigarette case stolen."

John snickered to show he wasn't the type to fall for such tales.

"What's it like in Maine? Some thing, I bet." Barnes laughed.

"Yeah, I've often thought of going somewhere else, but I have an eighty-two year old mother. Know what I mean? She don't want to go nowhere and I'd hate to leave the old lady and find out it wasn't worth it. It would kill her if I left here. Know what I mean? and it would have to be worth it."

He jerked his chin out from the pinch of his shirt and folded his paper away. "Better leave. They don't like you sitting past nine:thirty. Mrs. Kunz is very particular." He winked confidentially. "Washes the floor after every meal. You can't get service like that anywhere else in this priced hotel."

John felt a mixture of awe and cheap respect for Mrs. Kunz's strictures and fled, unsettling a chair in his hurry. He started for his room, then remembered there was nothing he needed there. There was nothing he needed anywhere. John was suspended between nullities. What he needed was a future, but the past was upon him like a hound, like a tiger's claw, and he left the hotel and fled down streets and alleyways. Run, John, run. His father handed him a glass of wine, his mother with red hair and a brown skirt, bundled him into a parka.

Run, John, run. If hate won't get you, love will. Baaa, baaaa, black sheep, and eat your cereal to make you strong. What a riot! Memories seized him with the clutch of a grizzly bear. Too bad, John, Better forget it, forget the golden prince and the golden pear, the golden princess and the golden hair, golden John under his mother's golden arm. All good things wind down. Even John. Sssshhhh, they wind down under the pillow, under the sheet, under the blanket, under the golden bed. Was the dragon.

Always was, John. Breathing fire. Better run. Bolt! Here come love chuckling bravadoes: Goodnight, dear son, goodnight, dear son, dear son, goodnight. Paterfamilias floating with a little pomp. Remember your boots in the morning, John. Because we love you, remember your boots. Because we love you remember your scarf, remember your mittens, take good care of yourself, remember us and turn out the light. Better run, John. Stir!

Get moving! The past is a god with demonic powers. His hand is upon you.

Hop, skip, scat. Here comes the nightmare mother. Scoot! The past is a devil with a thousand shapes. Don't turn that corner, John, Watch out. The past is a chariot, a whip, a wolf, a wild dog. It will run you down and eat you up. Move, John, move. The past is a bag of tricks with a million shapes, days of family warmth, papa wobbling on ice skates, mama in fur to her ears, jingling Dobbin steaming in the snow. Oh, the good times, John!

The past is a magician. Into his hat go two loving parents and out comes!

Oh, hush, John! Don't say it.

4

It was evening when John returned for supper. His room had been put to rights, the bed had been made, the towels had been changed, there was fresh soap in the soap dish and flowers in a vase. The orderliness outraged him, the hiatus between appearance and reality. All that John's mourning could amount to was a ritual of remembering what life had once been like. His parents were people who had lived no ordinary life. The summum bonum had sat upon their heads. Even now, contriving a piety for ancient days, John felt it had been so.

Mr. Kunz served wiener schnitzel, with potatoes au gratin, rolls and butter, and a whipped orange parfait, but his generous portions and gourmet cooking didn't help. The dining room was bleak on a dampish evening. John sat at his table as long as he could. He clung to chair and cloth, fork and spoon until he was the last person to leave. He sipped wine and crumpled the rolls until they were a mass of grain. Lilly came in to clean, sleeves rolled up, broom and dustpan in her hand. A clock ticked. Its sound exploded. It was John's wristwatch. He looked at it manfully as if checking the time for an appointment, and left as if honor bound to keep it.

He walked along the river. Foghorns bled eerily. Demon sounds.

Jumble of childhood pieces that would not fit the puzzle of what his destiny had become. He bought a ticket at a movie house to stall for time.

Dull movie bit him with desperate fatigue, and he left, stood in the street and watched the pedestrians. Paralyzed, went back to the hotel.

Lilly sat on the stoop.

John felt pity for himself that she was not more than she was.

She sat with her feet tucked in under her dress, her neck and arms bare in the print house dress trimmed with rickrack. Sitting on the stoop was obviously her summer entertainment. Loneliness thins a little in the air; in a closed room it thickens like sawdust. Could John have guessed otherwise but that she was lonely.

"Good evening," she said with a gravity that irritated him, the total lack of female vivacity. He meant to ignore her, but fatigue and terror overcame him.

"I suppose it's pleasant to sit here," he said without conviction.

The rain had stopped, the dampness was lifting.

In Lilly's life John was an event. Such men as he never came into Mr. Kunz's hotel. "It must be hard to be a stranger in a city like New York," she said.

Her opening was not wise. He despised her solicitousness. "That's not my problem," he said sharply.

To his surprise, Lilly could have told him that that was not his problem, for who knew more about strangers than she did, making their beds every morning and cleaning their rooms. When she had seen John at the breakfast table she had thought he was surely somebody's darling, he looked so much the golden boy. But he made her feel ill at ease, although it took little to make Lilly feel ill at ease.

"Do you sit here often?" he asked aimlessly.

"About every night."

He grunted to himself that he would have thought as much, and it irritated him that she was so apparent. "Aren't you ever curious to do other things?"

A dozen answers rose to Lilly's mind, but she suppressed them as she always did. She knew what she was taken for, and felt she deserved it because she could not free herself of being afraid. It seemed to her that there was not a thing she was not afraid of. She was afraid of the night and afraid of going to sleep, and when she woke she was afraid of the daytime and afraid of being alone. She was afraid of harsh words and afraid of rebuke, afraid of crowds and fast cars, and afraid of October when the sun fell in the sky. She was glad to have a job that kept her away from people. She could have been a receptionist or a secretary, but she was glad to be a chambermaid and have her own room on the ground floor, and glad to be able to live where she worked and not have to fight her way on to subways and down streets. People took her for a shadow, and she was glad to be one.

All right, all right, John said to himself, I can't muster enough good manners to keep this girl from self pity. "Look," he said apologetically, "I was lost in my own thoughts." He laughed. "I have amusing thoughts sometimes."

"Good for you. Amusing thoughts are rare."

Surprised, John recognized an intellect and felt suddenly expansive. He grinned at her. He thought of telling her, maliciously, to check her self indulgent frailty, that his mother had murdered his father and run off with her lover. Look here, he would say, free of melodrama, my fate is that I'm the child of a murderer and my fate is that wisdom. So the fact is that we mustn't, you and I, compete for pity. He laughed at the thought of this conversation, and rubbed his ankle. Then quietly, caught in the spasm of fate and thinking about it, not quite fainting, he fell on the sidewalk.

Lilly jumped to her feet. John put his hand across his eyes and squeezed them. "I'm all right," he said. "I just seem to have fallen off my perch." He laughed uproariously and got to his feet, perched drunkenly.

She took his arm. "Let me get you something," she said.

He looked at her quizzically. "What is there to get me?"

"Come in and let me make you some coffee. The heat must have gotten to you."

John could only think how gastronomically strange the whole thing was becoming. No sooner had she said that than he wanted coffee desperately. As a matter of fact, he was famished. Moreover, clean kitchens refreshed him, and Maria Kunz's kitchen, he would bet, was among the cleanest. He had expected in his own life to be a family man, and appreciated domestic virtues. It might be a hopeful sign to be surrounded by tile walls and copper pots hanging from hooks. The sight was momentarily uplifting.

Lilly brought some mugs to the table. John wished she'd offer cake. "Been here long?" he asked.

"Ten years. I used to sleep down here in the back of the kitchen, but the dogs and cats prowling at night bothered me. Mr. Kunz put the bars on the windows to make me feel better, but it didn't help because one night I saw a man watching me through the bars and it made me sick." John spotted an apple on the counter and wondered if he could take it. "Mr. Kunz gave me a room on the main floor after that, next to his daughter,

Anne. They have three rooms down at the end of the hall for themselves, and I have the fourth room there. Peter stays upstairs when he comes home which, thank God, is not too often. It makes him feel like one of the guests to be on an upper floor. I share the bathroom with Anne when she's home, which is usually only on weekends.

John snickered privately. Out loud, he said courteously, "You sound as if you have all your requirements for life." She nodded gravely.

"I do. I shall be lucky if I do no worse."

"Worse!" Her gravity jangled on his nerves. He had contempt for tidy tragedies. He craved a bacchanalia of death or sex. "What's worse?" he said.

But sober Lilly had the potential calamities of her life organized as if fate were a budget. "The usual. Old age, ill health, an unkind employer. The Kunzes quarrel often about selling this hotel. If they do, who knows what would become of me. I've worked as a chambermaid since I'm fifteen. There are all kinds of chambermaid work. Mr. Kunz employs help for the hard work, scrubbing the floors and washing the windows. We have a dishwasher, an electric ironing board, a drier and a washing machine.

That's Maria Kunz's doing. I have had jobs where I did that kind of work fifteen hours a day and went to sleep on a cot in the hall."

John despised her. He could have guessed that whatever she had to say would convey quietus. He squeezed his hands together under the table.

"What do you do with your day off?"

"I don't have days off."

He grunted.

"I like being where I am," she said, vexed that John looked unconvinced and she had to propitiate his consuming denunciation, yet she wanted to explain herself to him. "People like me are cursed with the frugality that belongs to our station."

He waved his hand cavalierly. "I intended to pay." She sucked in her breath at his obtuseness. He put his elbows on the table and rested his head in his palms. It was as difficult to attend to her as to anything else, but she was all he had for the moment. "It's called a date," he laughed.

Terror struck Lilly, then pride. She refused. John felt giddy.

He wished she would offer him the apple. It was monstrous to refuse him anything. "I need company," he cried, thumping the table with his fist. Lilly's nerves flew apart. It was not her fault. It was hard to know how to take John.

Lilly was spared the effort. Luckily, Maria Kunz came into the kitchen. The lights were on, but she swung her flashlight around the room. She didn't bother with greetings. She scanned the kitchen, she scanned the refrigerator, then she scanned them.

Ambition, efficiency and energy are suspicious virtues. She became John's instant enemy and he decided on aggressive measures. "Are you looking for the thin man who slips between the bars?"

She responded with warning precision. "I see that only the two of you are here."

He decided to punish her for bad thoughts. "I've asked Lilly to spend tomorrow with me." Lilly developed an instant headache and closed her eyes.

Maria did not like sudden changes in her routine. It was sloppy, like having to remake the world. But Lilly's ways were depressing, her nerves were going in shreds like a piece of wet tissue. Maria was a woman of practical remedies and knew that a little sex straightened out a few problems. "O.K. by me. You can take off from twelve to four, but better not come back late. That's all I can spare."

It was a tough warning but if anyone would obey it, Lilly would.

She froze, erect, prepared to obey it. Maria had a sense of social grading and thought as she left the room, what the hell does a guy like him want with her. That was her first clue that something was wrong with him. She had a temptation to swing back, pour light into his eyes and see what gives with his funny request. But if she had, she would have found a hole. They were gone. Lilly was groping her way to her room, like a mole down a tunnel, to safety and darkness, frantic for comfort. John was stumbling up the steps to his room, trying to feel some charm in Lilly's manner. A depression was quickly overtaking him, quickly, quickly, while he mounted the steps to his room unprotected by nothing but the feeling that he ought to be sympathetic to Lilly until, without turning a hair in his thoughts, he felt too exhausted to make the effort . He turned the key in his door and heard his mother's breath behind the sound of gunshot and felt her kiss on his cheek as he started for school by himself for the first time.

5

Lilly wore a seersucker suit, double-breasted and belted in the back. She wore white plastic pumps which made her thin legs look thinner, and carried a white plastic pocketbook. They went to a nearby restaurant and sat in a booth near a window.

John gazed out the window at the sidewalk. Her thrift shop suit from another era pained him. It was an attack on his masculinity. He regretted the afternoon with her and she too looked out the window at the sidewalk. Barely had she set teeth in the love apple, barely set eyes upon John and she was in hell. Eros, at this late stage of her life, found her unwitting, without contrivance for self protection: a marked victim.

It was all she could do to look at John and keep her voice from cracking when she spoke. Her soul embarrassed her. Humankind, in general, made her nervous. John brought her to the verge of neural collapse. He was just about to tell her that they looked like the owl and the pussycat when fortunately the waitress came to take their order and his cleverness deserted him. He said, instead, "How does one stop thinking?"

She sensed trouble and sat up even more erect. "I suppose you think and you think until you've thought it all out." But being Lilly, she added charitably in spite of her premonition that she would not like the answer, "What do you think about?"

John smacked his forehead explosively. "God, if I could tell you that then we'd have something to talk about."

She ground her teeth and endured their silence.

They finished eating and left the restaurant. He made a gallant effort at good humor and suggested they walk to Greenwich Village. She bravely agreed. He found it difficult to walk next to her. She hardly came to his shoulder, he felt he might stumble over her. She was stunted. Her job was to inspire him with erotic feelings, distract him with a universal formula, but nothing she did worked. He felt nauseous and wondered if his stomach would ever feel right again. Perhaps this was the beginning of enfeeblement: disenchantment and the bodily accommodation to it. Lilly wondered what savage form of good manners kept her from going home.

They wandered into Washington Square Park and sat down on a bench. Blossoms of girls dressed in summer skirts and dungarees, their warm hair piled brownly on top of their heads, fluttered by amid the pigeons. They looked supreme, but John knew that it was not true that anyone of them could be consolation. They were ordinary girls who would run off at the first exposure to his thoughts. His pain was his own, already his vision of life that was molding him into the shape of calamitous man. He wondered if there would ever be time when life would be gratuitous again, when to eat was merely to eat, and when one took a walk because the weather was fair and not because one tried to out walk the tread of insanity.

"If I told you I was in agony, what could you do for me?"

Her eyes fluttered. Conversation was not an improvement over silence. "I suppose I would sympathize," she said.

"Would that help me?" he whispered.

"I don't know," she faltered. "I think it always helps a bit."

Birds darted among the trees. They cut across the sun and the sky with swiftness, disappearing anywhere. "To a nightingale or a sparrow or a blue jay," he smirked. "Why do you suppose Keats did that, made of death

and terror a longing for birds. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Escape, escape, escape."

"I know the poem," she said in a stiff voice.

"I'm sorry. I don't know you, and I have an image of myself that I know everything. I'm well educated and the well educated are always falling on top of their ignorance." He looked at the sun without seeing

it. "My parents were ambitious for me. My father believed that knowledge was life. The more one knew the deeper one lived and my father believed that one should pursue the fullest life. I don't think my father understood what he meant by that." John put his hands over his eyes and shielded them from the sun. "My father is not alive anymore. I believe I am in mourning for him." He took his hands away from his eyes. "You haven't said one sympathetic word."

She pushed her tongue around the dry ball of anxiety in her mouth.

"I don't have to. You seem dazzled by your pain."

"That's not a very sympathetic thing to say."

"You're not used to pain," she said gloomily.

"No, I'm a newcomer to it. Tell me, does it wear differently with the years." He looked at her maliciously.

His sarcasm were like grains of sand and released her from her stifling passion. "Yes," she said meanly, "it becomes less glamorous, merely a condition, not a battle. It gets old alongside of you. It becomes an embarrassing infirmity, not a noble calling. Perhaps you never cease to resent it, but you stop fighting it. You build your life around it and make room for it. Now and then someone asks you to go for a walk, do the shopping, or mind the desk. Your stomach flutters. Here comes people. Here comes pain, you say and your mind begins to built compensations for your cowardliness. You live an inner, meaningless drama that takes up all your time and becomes simply life.

John looked at the girls strolling by, at their naked calves, their painted toes. Women pushed baby carriages, and small children toddled after them, their legs full of perplexity. The park was magnificent with the ordinary. It was all that life should be, green grass, sun, trees, water fountain, birds, old man with cane and dark glasses, young girl with her hand on the shoulder of a dreaming man. How did one become an ordinary father with an ordinary child stumbling after you? John's heart jerked with sentimentality and loathing. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. Lilly worried that he might fall again. "What is the matter?" she whispered.

He smiled coarsely. He could not tell her without feeling fantastic. He swallowed his saliva and put his handkerchief away. "I am in mourning for my father."

Unprepared for anything in life, she asked with foreboding "How did he die?"

John felt whipped across his shoulders. His head fell forward. He buried his face in her knees. She gasped. His spirit snapped. He fell apart in her lap.

A balloon man went by. A dozen balloons floated out from under his shoulder. They sailed through the trees in blues and reds and greens. The children shrieked after them. The women, in slacks and skirts, barefooted or sandalled, ran after their children. Life went by in blue and yellow and red, and a balloon floated into the sky. A distressed child ran forward to catch it and missed and sat down on the ground and cried. A hopeful child ran forward to catch it and tripped over Lilly's ankles.

John barely said, "My mother murdered him." She bent forward and rubbed her bruised ankle. The daylight sifted through the green trees. The world thundered by in bicycles, skates, voices, crying. He picked his head up.

His face was wet. The park faded into gray water. "Can you help me?" A child's ball rolled under their bench and he plunged between Lilly's legs to get it back.

Routine is the gift of the fortunate, a girdle against wasting emotions. "Please can we go?" she said. "I must get back. It's getting on to four." They took a bus back across town and walked along the river.

John's stomach flew apart. He stopped to watch a seagull fly. Like a bird his psyche dipped, delirious for control. "My father groaned and I thought he was rehearsing a play. He was reading a letter from my mother's lover.

It sounded like a script. A script!" He smacked himself on the side of his head and roared with laughter. "Stop it," Lilly said. He tried to control himself. He bit the inside of his cheeks with the effort. Her earnestness drove him crazy, it made him helpless with laughter. Better not look at her, he said to himself. He kept his eyes on the seagull, off Lilly's pruned up intensity. "I ran down the steps and saw her running out the door. Her bathrobe caught on the door hinge and she screamed. Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard for a spade and a shovel to bury the dear dead dog." Lilly winced. "Oh, my God," John laughed, "don't take it so seriously. I buried him in the river to save her." The seagull screamed.

"Ssssh, do you hear the river running?" he said. A church bell gonged four times. Lilly stiffened with disaster. "I have to go," she said. John bawled with laughter. The river rose. John was drowning in tears. Lilly tried to move. He caught her arm. His angle of consciousness spun through revolutions. "Don't," he said. Lilly felt shrunken and helpless, familiar feelings. She was sorry she knew what she did about him. "I have to go," she repeated. "Help me," he hissed. "You said you would." She shrank from him and started across the street. He caught her arm again. "Who cares about your ratty little job. I need help. God in heaven, there must be help for me." Sickness poured from his eyes. He sagged in her arms.

She led him to a garden in the back of the hotel and told him to sit there until calm or sobriety or whatever it is that comes to people in crisis came to him.

The garden was hers, an anomaly of pansies and a rose bush in a corner, a miniature rock garden in the center with phlox and daisies, a tulip bed, crocus bulbs and hyacinths against the house. Next door was Mrs. Arcano who farmed on four square yards of land lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans and eggplant and kept, to the surprise of her neighbors, two chickens and a dawn crowing rooster, a retreat on a street of cars, taxis, dogs and baby carriages. "Stay until supper time," she said. I'll come back for you." He looked at her incredulously. Unprecedented shadows were falling. He stood, blinded with the shock of his confession, crumpling in a bed of violets.

6

Georgie sat at the table peeling onions. He looked at the clock when Lilly came in, he looked at Lilly, he looked back at the clock and his head swung low like he'd been socked. Maria kept the lid down on her explosion. Maybe Lilly's being late was a good sign, but Lilly didn't look as if it were a good sign. The skin on her neck was goose bumpy. Was that sexy? Not unless you were a chicken. Lilly was an insect. She had no spine. Maria felt confounded with sympathy and revulsion for her.

Sometimes one feeling got the upper hand, sometimes the other. She moved the onions to the sink and a pot of water to the stove, carrots to the pot and sugar to the carrots. "Your afternoon was pleasant?" she tried, but it was as hard as biting a bullet to keep back the charge that Lilly was late. Georgie's head swayed like a reed under water. No point his trying for conversation, trying to say something clever that would make them laugh and think of something else beside the clock.

Lilly wiped the perspiration from her forehead. "Fair," she said.

"Fair!" Maria snapped. "Fair" wasn't good enough for being late.

If you sacrifice a lamb, the wind better blow in the right direction. "Is he likable?"

"I don't know."

Even Georgie knew that was a bad answer.

"You don't know!" Ha! Some time they must have had. Why the hell should someone like him take out someone like her? With all due respect to Lilly, but the world is what the world is and men are what they are. "Let the potatoes go and prepare the meat." Maria threw her towel on a rack and snapped her fingers at Georgie to come with her. He swung his eyes at Lilly to let her know she had his sympathy. Lilly buried her head in the chuck as if it were a mess of flowers. As soon as they were gone, she went to the window to see if John was all right. He had fallen asleep. Desire came to her, as it always did, with denial and resistance.

Lilly, Lilly of the valley, a garden snail who keeps close to the wall, she thought, how did this inept existence which she led become unsettled? She must right it immediately. Lilly was nothing if she did not know her place, and she knew that her place was the place of a chambermaid, a cinderella among the ashes, a witch on a weathervane.

That's me, a scrawl on the wall, that's me, that's me, a bug in the bark, a ball of dust in the wind. Ladybug, ladybug, fly away, your soul is on fire, you can smell the decay. That's me, that's me, sunup and sunset, and in between the hollow day to think about how she had evolved into herself, going over the step-by-step process again and again, the internal dialogue tracing the evolution of herself:

That's him, my stepfather, coming home from work. He prowls the outside of my garden, the outside of me. I spy on him, watching for clues to what it's all about.

What is it all about?

Not much, I can tell you. He's Mr. Ordinary.

There must be something more. Look harder.

There isn't. He's not much, really. Hardly enough for philosophy.

Not a man, only a step, a sound in the hallway.

What kind of a sound?

Lilly wobbled away from the window. The sound of ordinary. He works six days a week delivering furniture. He sleeps all day on Sunday. A prizefighter once, he was defeated by illusions. He wanted to win, with all his guts he wanted to win, but he fought too dirty even for the dirty and one night they upstaged him on morality and crushed his shoulders. Now he has gloomy and unintelligent eyes and a shuffling footstep acquired in the ring. He works six days a week and brags on the seventh how he could have been heavyweight champion. Sometimes the rooster crows over him and I watch him for clues. From a corner of my window, from an angle of vision, I can see the balding spot on the top of his head, the crush of his shoulders. I spy him out, catching at threads that might untangle him. He thought I had disappeared and good riddance to bad rubbish and maybe his bad conscience that couldn't stand the sight of me lying on a bed for two years as if I was a cripple. His kids said I was a liar. They were right.

I was not a cripple, and I felt as cheap about myself as they did and joined in the game. Lilly the liar. That's me, a liar and a cripple.

What about your mother, Lilly? Couldn't she save you?

Her? She bore me. Her parents kicked her out at fifteen for bringing me home but she rode on a tide of courage and kept me and saved me. Courageous at fifteen, collapsed at twenty-two when she married him, then gave him the only prize he'd ever get for fighting dirty. Me at twelve. Oh, despicable Adam and a terror-stricken Eve.

Why didn't you call for help?

Yes. I have never stopped calling. The door opened and the door shut. My only experience of love. Now I suffer it in unregenerating darkness. That's it. That's my life. Lilly, carved upon a window sill, doomed to spy out a universe of thought upon the problem of evil condensed into only him, a man with crushed shoulders and gloomy eyes, who works six days a week and brags on the seventh how he could have been a champion; who has the peculiarity of a footstep that could be heard by me in the snow or upon sand or upon a carpet as it was heard in the hall way outside my room twenty-one years ago. The sound was never to depart from my head, it contained so much of the sound of ignorance about the way of the world, of confusion as to survival, suspension of thought, unavailable help. It became the sound an animal makes as it watches danger come close, the sound of scuttle in a trap. Not ever to go away that sound, it was originally only a footfall, a step upon a step at night, an alerted pause, it has become for me an inexhaustible symbol, a scratch upon my brain, an element in the universe, the sound of evil absorbing them one by one, the actors in my drama, him, her, them, me, absorbed their wrongs, absorbed pains they denied, virtues they forgot, her courage, his disappointment, that one's silence, this one's dullness, until I became what she was: the task of years to mold rage into quietus, to carve perspective like a monument of myself that I was only one more sufferer among sufferers without particularity, disciplining the voice inside me which had nothing to do with philosophy but was the voice of my merely single and outraged soul crying for a retribution I could not have.

That's me, I know nothing of life but resistance and endurance.

Chapter Two -- In The Belly of The Whale

1

The voice warned John that reality hadn't changed. Thus spoke Rabbi Bloom the night he had come to their home and brought them his total fate: disshevelment. Coat flying, eyes twitching, pants slipping. Basil put his pipe on the mantel, stoked up the fire and tried to presume order. Chlore sat on the couch and knit, affecting domesticity, and Annie ran after her husband, squawking that the universe was going mad. Morris Bloom waved an old husband's hand at her to quiet down. "It's only an academic question," he said to Basil, "How is it? Look!" he held up his arm, "that when I hold up my arm my arm knows that it wishes to be held up? Since my brain is gone who tells my arm to go up or down?"

The door opened a sliver and Annie's blue eyes peeped through.

Then she threw open the door. "John," she gushed pleasure, as always Annie, making much of the little she had, a domestic scene played over and over.

"Come in, come in, whoever you are," Morris called out from the living room.

"Just see," Annie took John fondly by the hand, "see what the tide has brought in. A stranger, John, you hold yourself to be a stranger. We haven't heard from your father in months." She tucked his hand under her arm like a cat that might spring from her clasp. "What are you doing in New York? How's your mother? You look hungry. Let me get you something to eat."

John was cautious. Their dog, three-legged Aleph, scraped at his trousers. Aleph was known for accidents. Annie bent down and picked him up. She gave him a light rap on his head. "Naughty Aleph. You remember Aleph?" she said to John. That was only a manner of speaking, because why should he forget? John, in a twilight of unredeemable memories, patted Aleph's head cradled in Annie's arms. "How could I forget him?"

"He's unforgettable," Rabbi Bloom said. John, on the brink of greeting him, stepped back. "I see you have company."

"You call him company?" Rabbi Bloom boomed. "He's only a doctor. A doctor is never company. He comes to take my pulse to see if my brain is working. He should take my brain to see if my pulse is working."

Annie's skill was in evasion. She swept John into the living room furnished in photographs of three generations: the wedding pictures of Leonard and Dorothy, the baby pictures of David and Mark; a family picture: Leonard's hand on Morris' shoulder, Morris' daughter sitting on his lap, a graduation picture of Leonard from Harvard holding a diploma, tassel in his eye; an old picture of his sister on a street in Vienna with braids holding the handlebars of her bicycle. Annie said with aplomb, surrounded by the photographed summas of her life, "This is Dr. Mandeville. Doctor, this is the son our very good friends from Maine that I was telling you about," and she tucked John's hand under her arm again so that he knew he was as welcome as the messiah, a boon to conversation, the incarnation of a bundle of ideas they had just been discussing, in the flesh himself, who would have thought it, the very John I was telling you about. "And what a son John is. He's like our second son. You can't blame parents for doting on their children when they have a son like John. He and Leonard were the best of friends. Maybe they fought when they were children. All children fight, that's to be expected, but who would want a better friend for Leonard than John or a better friend for anyone than John's father. Such a scholar! Such a brilliant man! Would you believe it," she beamed at John with the blue eyes that was all that was left of a china doll beauty, "we were just talking about you?"

"You would believe that," Rabbi Bloom said, "because given topics A to Z in the encyclopedia what else is there to talk about? What else, what else but my good friend, John?" His eye twitched, his nose snorted, his warts danced.

John felt a titillating disgust. Not much has changed, he thought again, but was that good or bad? It all depended upon where you located the center and along what radius you traveled. Actually, he thought to himself about Morris Bloom, he's looking quite well, and said so.

"You think so?" Rabbi Bloom asked archly and put his bullish head on a side. He looked coquettish like a cow about to urinate. Then he covered his head with a newspaper. "How do I look now?"

John read: BORDER DISPUTE BREAKS OUT ANEW. "Actually," he said, "like that, not well. It's yesterday's news."

"Quite right," Rabbi Bloom said. He blew the paper off his head.

"Even insanity should be up to the minute."

Dr. Mandeville said, "Come now, Rabbi." Annie, with only ninety-eight pounds and four feet ten of body space built all the way through like Meisen china, placed her fragile shoulder beneath the weight of both her husband's orthodoxy and his apostasy, never to have let him guess her atheism when he believed or her pain when he no longer believed, condemned to be brainless beside his burly intellect who had rescued her from the Viennese upper classes where she had been condemned to sit and sew and play the piano, happy if life would only be that once again, to sit and sew and play the piano and wipe the milk from babies' mouths, to let the world go by and for her part as far away as possible.

Somebody once asked, surmising incompatibility, "Why did he marry you?" Annie was not offended. She materialized a picture of herself at twenty, black hair up in a Gibson sweep, blue danube eyes waltzing on the photograph. "He didn't marry me for my orthodoxy," She laughed. Tidy down to her pearl buttons, an inheritance of values from the upper bourgeosie, she took John's hand again like an anchor in that aquarium drenched room and sat him down on the couch and plundered her store of interests. "How long have you been in New York? Why didn't you let us know? Stay for supper." John said no. What was no? "You must. Leonard will not forgive." She looked down at the watch on her bosom. "A few minutes they will be here. Dorothy works now too. The children, David and Mark, you remember David and Mark, will be home from school soon. Stay.

Be. Let me get you something. How long? How far? Till when?"

"Chatterbox," Morris crackled.

"I must be going myself," Dr. Mandeville said.

Annie gathered the doctor up and saw him to the door. John went too to say goodbye. Good manners kept him moving. "Still overreacts," Dr. Manville whispered in her ear. Her eyes tossed for reasons. "I get on his nerves. We're alone so much."

"You overindulge him. Overindulgence is bad for the constitution.

Moderation." He looked at John. "The Greeks had a word for it."

"They failed too," John said.

"C'est la vie," Dr. Mandeville said, "nothing goes on forever.

Well, goodbye and remember," he called into the living room to Rabbi Bloom, "be good."

"How's that?" Rabbi Bloom called back. His fingers diddled on the air. His nose twitched like a dog's on the scent. Nervous tics chased each other across his face. He rapped the television set for attention.

"A gift from Dorothy and Leonard, with good wishes for my recovery. Look around, look around. Everything in the room is a gift with good wishes.

The frog in the bowl, the bird in the cage, the fish in the tank." He flattened his nose against its glass. A wagtail platy flirted by. Heckel and black angels, swordtails, hybrids, killifishes and catfishes, badis badis, carps and chromides, mormyrids his favorite, breeding habits unknown. Plants swayed in the tank, hygrophilia, polysperm, cabomba, anarchis, sagitarria, corkscrew vallismeria. "Some fish tank. Insured for five hundred dollars, a present from your parents with good wishes for my recovery."

John's nerves jumped. Hazardous identity stirred in him. His tongue almost rattled loose. Inside he growled and whined for help. He thought with agitation: why doesn't he stop with his nonsense and look me in the eye, dear friend that he is, and see what has become of John. 

2

"Slivovitz, shnaps, wine or sherry. Who wants which and which wants who?" John took slivovitz. Rabbi Bloom poured. "Be careful," he warned, "it will swallow your tongue."

John felt sardonic.

"How long has it been?" Leonard asked.

"Four or five months."

Leonard's lashes fell, a veil, a shutout. He never gives himself away, John thought. "What's new?" he asked, an indifferent opening.

"Developing an interesting new line in textbooks, a whole new concept in how to teach mathematics at different stages of the child's development." He circled son David's wrist and stopped his reach for bread. Making the best of it all, John thought, the best of a Dachau childhood and entering Harvard at sixteen. They were a unit. Everyone did his bit, like soldiers in a war, to pay the medical bills. Leonard left graduate school, Dorothy worked as a bookkeeper, Annie raised the grandchildren. John wondered if the apartment was stuffy in the summer, if Leonard disliked New York winters and small offices whose windows faced a brick wall, if he took his two weeks' vacation alone with Dorothy or with the children, or with the children and Annie and Morris. He envied Leonard and felt unsalvageable.

Dorothy said to Rabbi Bloom, "Mark has to learn to sit at the table and eat by himself. He's old enough." Annie brought in stroganoff, noodles with poppy seeds, carrot relish, grated apples and nuts, and warm bread.

"We're never old enough," Rabbi Bloom said and circled Mark with his arms. Mark appreciated the move, hopped on to his lap and poked a finger in his eye. "What makes it go so fast?"

"It's in a hurry."

"Where's it going?"

"It has a date with fate."

"What's fate?"

"A balloon that blows away."

"Don't feed the dog under the table," Dorothy said.

"Eat, eat," Annie said," there's enough for all."

"That's why Aleph is a bad tempered dog," Dorothy said, "because you have never trained him properly."

Rabbi Bloom shot her a look from his rabbinical days. "You'd be bad tempered too if you were missing a leg and were blind in one eye."

Mark was in rapture. "How do you make it go so fast?" He practised himself. "Stop that," Dorothy said. She looked at Leonard for reinforcement. He said, comforter to a nervous wife, "Mark, it is very bad to make your eyes do that."

"Zeyde's eye does it."

"No, no, Zeyde's eye does nothing," Rabbi Bloom laughed and put a spoonful of noodles in Mark's mouth. "This eye belongs to God. The other belongs to me, the one that is peaceful and quiet. The unruly eye I gave to God. You know God once spoke to me and said, Nu, Moishe, something you must give in honor of life. I will not ask for an Isaac like I did from Abraham, but something you must give me. So I gave this eye to God.

Handsome it did not make me, and I thought God would like to see the world through this eye."

"What can I give?"

"You? You don't have to give anything. You can keep everything for yourself."

Leonard said to John, "How's your work going? Weren't you scheduled for an expedition this fall?"

John fell off his perch. Straining for balance, he reached under the table and patted Aleph who, expecting food, licked his hand. Finding nothing, he sulked away, leaving John to reach elsewhere for the normal.

"I decided not to go."

"Was that wise?" Annie asked. "You shouldn't throw your chances away."

"It was wise," Rabbi Bloom said. "What's in Crete or in Rome or Jerusalem. Grownup men playing with pails and shovels. Is that wise? A shtickel here, a shtickel there they find. A bone in Rome, a pot in Crete, and from mosaics they think they build a past. Every year comes a new discovery. Crooked vase lying by side of King Aknehotepa. The world is shaken. It cocks an ear, it wags a tongue. Professor Minatoni rebuts, Dr. Rubenstein refutes. Comes a new era, a sign in the sky, a new constellation, walk dog, go to work, feed baby." He put another spoonful of noodles in Mark's mouth. "Eat, yingale. Megst bahalten alles far zih alein. The rest play with the past as if it's a toy with movable parts."

Annie brought in a tray with cake and coffee and said, "Frederick of Prussia seduced a mistress with a cake like this," and sank the cake knife ceremoniously down the layers of cream and chocolate.

Rabbi Bloom looked at it with relish and scorn. He was trapped.

Come here, Adam liebe, have an apple. "Eat, eat," he mocked her to John, "Annie works very hard at making life pleasant. Enjoy her efforts."

"Never mind," Annie said, lifting out a wedge of cake as clean as a new ploughed furrow, "his mistress knew from such a cake that she would have the best of chefs and kitchens to command."

"She is a museum piece, a collection of old habits," Rabbi Bloom said. He raised his glass to Annie. She ignored him. She threw apples at him and knocked him out. What did she care for his irritability as long as her grandchildren licked cream from their bowls, and would she care if the sky fell down, as long as she had a washcloth in her hand to wipe food stains from their mouths. A dozen children she should have had, one for each month, three for each season, half for the cold weather and half for the warm weather, three who needed pity and three who needed punishing, two to grow up and two to stay down, one to live and one to die. Her defenses he knew were much for his rusty weapons, old housekeeping skills, coffee ground fresh daily, an excellent dobretorte, none better in all of Europe, cheeses cut by the pound fresh, tub butter as yellow as sunflower.

Annie, put the kettle on, the wind is at the door. His leg jumped with a nervous twitch. Mark broncoed his knee and shouted, "Do it again, Zeyde."

His rusty weapons: total recall from the beginning. He felt an old depression and thumped his chest to clear it away, but it would not clear.

He drained half a glass of slivovitz and said, weeping, "It clears my sinuses." Dorothy's slim hips in a herringbone skirt, moved like a shiver in her seat. Morris Bloom's eye snapped meanly at her. John was delighted, always resenting Dorothy's sociological intensity. He could not forgive her for looking breezy in a sailboat and sounding pinched in conversation as if her father had been a textbook and her mother a teenage magazine. Leonard's marriage, not made in heaven, was made on a sloop off Nantucket Bay and now there were boring years ahead of him. Morris Bloom plunged and snorted and bellowed, but depression poured in. He was a leaky raft, untrustworthy. A hop and he stood at the edge of a hole. An old snake beckoned him, tempting him to jump. Life was split second timing. A jump from a roof could end it. He clutched Mark and wept inside himself.

Control yourself, he said to himself, sanity is required of you. Here is company, here is Basil's son, John, his only son who is like my second son, who was born with a halo on his head, a silver spoon in his mouth, Icarus for whom his father had fashioned wings of accomplishment, the silver spooned, the golden haloed, the child who wears the robe of many colors, Joseph in Egypt, Isaac on Mount Moriah, Augustine beloved of Monica. "Vest hoben grois nahes fun dain zun," a hawknosed neighbor in his shtetl had said to his father. His father had received the revelation with dry eyes, measuring the possibility to a centimeter. In reality, he courted and calculated, skimped and saved. From a piece of string, a shoelace, a button, a pin, he fed, he clothed, he tutored God's gift and sent him to the university in Vienna indistinguishable from other penniless geniuses. "For you I will beg," he had said and carried coins home in a hat for him. His son threw them away. "Ya, ya," his father cried back and gathered them up again. "Your hurt is worth your staying ignorant, but what is my hurt worth?" He went. A village followed him to the train platform to wish him, God's gift, a Solomon, a Moses, a Maimonides, what? health, wealth, success, love, joy, long life, many children, a big house, a handsome wife, escape, escape. He took the train and never saw his father again. There was a parade passing by. Oif rechts, oif links. Oif rechts, oif links. Don't push. Everyone keep in line. Dorothy's athletic calf, not forgotten by John on the tennis courts of the university, wrapped tensely around her left ankle. No cue to the uninitiated, Rabbi Bloom's soul shook. "Child, do not quiver," he said. "You think my ideas are an entertainment like the fish tank. My idiocy is harmless. There are worse idiocies in the world. An army of men have pondered my guilt or innocence for millennia. Here am I, Morris Bloom, tottering in premature senility, living in an apartment house six flights into the air. I spend my summers in a bungalow in the mountains and the rest of my time surrounded by frogs and fish to keep a smile on my face while all the time I keep a smile on their faces. My frog is entertained, my fish are ecstatic. Such an important man, I tell myself, Morris Bloom, what are you doing here dozing while the theological heads of Europe decide what is just for you. Get out of your chair. You are the defendant. Turn off your television set. Give your fish and your frog to the superintendent to care for them and go make yourself heard. Mary had a little lamb and alle yid brenen."

Annie, with her cake knife in midair, prepared to split an argument or an apple, said, "Who stops you?"

Rabbi Bloom drew bitter comfort from her. "There's a woman who knows how to live with confusion."

David kneaded a ball of bread into a bullet.

John felt the need for a change in conversation and said to Annie:

"How do you like living in New York?"

"How do I like living in New York? Ask me, I'm an authority on cities. I've lived in eighteen. The other night I counted them and was surprised myself. Eat your cake. What a question! I don't like living in New York. It's too intense for me. At my age I need quiet, birds, grace.

New York is too compressed, no grace except for a street here or there."

This was a good topic to keep one out of trouble, and John continued it. "What city has grace? What about you?" he asked Leonard.

"He loves it," Annie answered as it it were a warning.

"Do you?" John persevered.

"Yes, of course," Leonard said "I thought you preferred a small town."

"That was way back when." Leonard smiled Kafka-esque, thin-lipped, brooding brown eyes, and shrugged a hapless shoulder. "An exciting city makes up for a lot." He put a restraining hand on David's wrist.

"Adults and children don't mix," Dorothy said.

"What should we do, bury them?" Rabbi Bloom asked.

Annie uncurled David's fingers and the doughy bullet fell out, but David shot a look of lethal warning to Mark. Voodooed, Mark began to cry.

"Don't make an issue," Dorothy said. "Must be cramps," Annie said. "It is not cramps," Dorothy said, "he's over tired." She rose to take him. Mark clung to his Zeyde's neck, but Dorothy uncurled his fingers. Rabbi Bloom wept at the scars he left. Aleph, half terrier, half beagle, his fate wagging in his tail, paddled after them.

"He does very well," John said.

"Better than you would do on one leg," Rabbi Bloom said.

"It's remarkable how he manages," John said.

"Not at all," Rabbi Bloom said. "He has the bitch drive of his mother, a high bred aristocrat, what did she care for papers when the right smell came. Trained properly in the best of kennels, she couldn't resist the smell of the forbidden and like Pyramus to Thisbe, kept her nose to the fence where her beagle mate waited for her. Came a bright day with a stiff wind she took a running leap, cleared the fence by an inch and landed on top of him with all fours. The kennel keepers ran, the owners raged, but by that time the beagle had figured out the nature of the thing and it was too late. Fate shivered between his legs. Together they sailed to glory and brought in Aleph, the mistake, sold in shame for half his worth, a loss to the kennel. His mother lived to win a blue ribbon and his father retired to the fireside licking his memories. Aleph, the mistake, was sold to us."

"And believe me, he is a mistake," Annie said, "a mongrel, a mutt, a hound under the feet all the time," but John knew that Annie was fond of Aleph. It was her nature to attack those whom others spoke well of and to defend those whom others attacked. She met life with contrariness, because to complain made Annie feel vivid. "More?" she asked John, cake knife up like Excalibur. To his surprise, whose soul felt as apprehensive as a fish out of water, John ate enormously. He drank enormously. Bloom wagged a finger at him. John hiccoughed back. To his surprise, he even forgot who he was, John spinning on a needle of grief when the conversation became dangerous. "How's your father?" Annie asked. John stuttered. "Still busy?" Morris asked. "Amazing how he carries on. A mountain of valorous work that man does nightly to dig up Agamemnon. And what does Agamemnon say when he's uncovered?" John was at sea and pecked at a thumbnail. Inept, Rabbi Bloom said to himself about John, educated beyond an answer. He wants to defend history, theology, archeology, anthropology, physiology, zoology, geology, biology, psychology, sociology, faith in learning, redemption through scholarship. Children, his soul cried, an army of ideas is marching. Fall in line. Oif rechts, oif links, zum rechts, zum links. To the left, to the right. Thank God, he said to himself, I have given up the profession of being an intellectual. It is no longer incumbent upon me to find answers, and he determined for the hundredth time not to utter, ever, in this universe, another word. But the habit of the sermon was too strong in him and he spoke again: "Words are a curse, a flood. Before we finish talking, calculating, educating, we are drowning in the future. Behold, everyone cries, the future is talking. Do you hear it?" He cupped his hand around his ear. "Talk! With an open mouth you drown. The more we open our mouths to plan salvation the more water falls in. Swim. The flood is rising."

John was lightheaded. Annie said, "So life is tragic," and swung her cake knife. "Life is tragic. How many times can we say it? Knock your head against a wall you get a headache."

Bloom took a drink and triumphed over Annie, over John, and over his depression. Oif rechts, oif links, zum rechts, zum links. He took another drink and triumphed over the echo. Eyes glinting, warts dancing, chest barreling, he speared John down. "Does it matter if Agamemnon lived? Some truths matter and others do not. Some truths are only curiosities, not worth the labor to confront. Agamemnon is legend now, whether he once lived or not. Homer triumphed over Agamemnon. Jesus is real, whether he once lived or not. History and fiction wear a horse's costume. Does humankind know which end it is wearing?"

John felt more entitled to Rabbi Bloom's state of mind than Rabbi Bloom. Come on, read me, he thought, and to hell with this other nonsense.

"Shoin genug, Rebbe, enough," Annie said.

Dorothy came out of the bedroom and closed the door. "I wish you would speak to them, Leonard. I don't have any authority with them."

Bloom said, "Yes, yes, talk me down. Bury me with apples. If I mention the Laws of Moses to Leonard he turns yellow and my daughter-in-law turns green, because from the Laws of Moses we go to Paul, from Paul we go to anti-Semitism, and from anti-Semitism we go to the unraveling of Bloom.

They think a thought is a fish, it comes to the surface with wishes for your good recovery and goes down again.

Annie said, "Someone must walk Aleph."

Bloom said, "That woman is an immortal scandal. We are drowning.

The air is filled with electricity. Ideas are falling like hailstones.

They are falling from the trees, from the skies, from the rooftops. Hurry, henny penny, cover yourselves. Zum rechts, zum links."

David called from the bedroom. "I want Aleph to stay with me."

"Run, run, Rabbi Bloom said. "Ideas are falling like buckshot. They are rolling in the streets like dice. The people scramble after them like money. Who's got religion, who's got socialism, who's got the welfare state, who's got free speech."

David called out from the bedroom, "I want him now."

Mark said, "It's not your turn."

Annie said, "Soon, soon."

Leonard laughed and said to John, "You're not used to such hectic meals."

John grabbed at the role of bachelor friend and laughed too.

Aleph, who knew the routine as well as anyone, went to the door and stood there with mute eyes. His tail thumped against the wall. Come on, his eyes said, somebody notice.

Rabbi Bloom crooked a finger at Leonard and John. "I have a message," he said, "found in the tomb of King Aknehetopa. The people have become gamblers. They are rolling ideas in the street like dice and everything hangs on a throw. The proletariat are threatening the middle classes and the middle classes are threatening themselves, aristocracies are dying everywhere, and men tremble as if they care. They cast dice to read the future. One and five. The third world and its threat to the first world. Three and three. Communism and its threat to the democracies. Four and two. People's democracies and their threat to people. The experts are playing their game. Ideas are rolling like autumn leaves, likes waves in a storm, like stones in an avalanche. We are being buried in a mudslide, choking on mud. We shall have to go to the bathhouses to be cleansed." He cupped his hand over his mouth and laughed behind it. "King Aknehetopa left a message. The examined life is worth as much as the unexamined life." Aleph thumped his tail against the wall.

Windbag, he said, it's now or never.

3

His leash caught around John's leg.

"Careful," Leonard said, and unwrapped it. The elevator door opened and they walked out. Aleph's beagle blood surged into his nose. The smell of the air transformed him into a dachshund, he spread low and slithered forth. His bladder control was at its tether end, he hit the outside with the confusion of his mother and dad, show dog, mutt and weak bladder driving him to the nearest tree.

When you have a dog, John thought, relishing dreams of placidity, that's how the day ends, and felt again balanced on the foreboding of suffering. Leonard was letting him go, fatally. Rabbi Bloom had failed to read him. A friend in need! John said to Leonard in retaliation for this failure, "How does your mother live with him?" Leonard stiffened. John immediately acquired a stately attitude towards his cruelty. After all, he thought, Horatio could have said the same thing to Hamlet, or Ismene to Antigone.

"You know my mother," Leonard said, and buried his melancholy in a quip. "She flips her fingers in the air and says, so who makes sense all the time." He searched John's eyes for a grain of accommodation to life on the lower scale. "You should try to see him again. You know how fond he is of you. He regards you like a second----

"Don't say it," John said, and hailed a taxi. 

Chapter Three -- Scoring

1

John, what have you lost?

I called it life, he said, grabbing the bannister and pulling himself up. John was the son of Basil is the son of a murderer. The event was public. Girlfriends he had warmed himself to would wonder at what they had escaped and feel fonder of their husbands. That was John, his forehead as high as the brim of a hill, only son of the best house in town, fallen down the slope of fate, while they, relishing the merely mortal of fixed mealtimes and school hour years, knew enough to keep to the grind and their noses out of trouble.

Peter gave him something else to think about after breakfast. He stood behind the desk in his father's place, in a short-sleeved shirt, arms taut and akimbo, and leaned his weight on them as he read the morning newspaper, tabloid open, his eyes snapping it up. John, forewarned by instinct and the gossip of history, braced himself as he put his key on the desk. Peter said, without looking up from his newspaper, "If you're coming for meals, you're expected to make reservations in advance. This is not a restaurant and we're not short-order cooks."

John knew from a thousand years of education and the morning news that Peter hated him. As he stood there, clothes in disorder and soul soggy all the way through with headache and hangover, fumbling for the meaning of the breach he had committed, he envied Peter his hatred. It was the best way to have one's hatred if one had to have it. It consolidated his position as a man. Having arrived at so much analysis, John flipped and said, "I'm sorry, sir, it won't happen again."

That snapped the snake. Peter looked at him with with an expression that trailed film footage of Al Capone and Humphrey Bogart honed to political usage as a social weapon. Still, John was struck all the same, be the glance genuine or artificial, by the intensity of the passion it carried. He looked at Peter from the distance of Hamlet looking at Fortinbras, wondering whether it was worth the fight. There was no doubt that as Peter looked back at him from his proprietorial position that Peter hated him. No doubt about it. It was the instant fraught with accumulated culture. Peter felt for him what John felt for his mother: damn you, damn you and damn you for betraying me. But Peter was accustomed to his hurt and had learned how to use it; John was frightened by his and didn't know what to do about it. Betrayal had destroyed John's universe; it created Peter's.

John made no reservation for meals and left the hotel, as indeterminate about fate as a random feather. He wandered, fighting thoughts. He did not notice that the afternoon was light and warm, blue from the sky down to the river and that women sat on benches minding babies who lay in their carriages sleeping and soaking in the sunlight down to their marrows; that the men were at work, the women were at peace; the children slept. A seagull cried. John's nerves jumped. The sidewalk swayed; the air splintered; the blue shattered. He thought deliriously, the delirium is in the world, not in himself. But the women knitted, the babies slept, the men worked. He wandered by river and by park and tried to locate the delirium. How many days and how many hours can John wander mulling the codes of Alfred and Ine, Hammurabi and Moses, battering the graves of old lawgivers for an answer to the problem of what to do about John, wandering, sitting on park benches, haunting museums, waiting for a resolution as if out the gift of an ordinary and endowed summer afternoon where mothers sit on benches and knit and their children lie in carriages and sleep, an answer will seize John by the shirt collar and propel him in a direction.

Morris Bloom, rabbinic by trade, having acquired roughly five thousand and seven hundred years in a diverse manner of living, having met with no new thought under a difficult sun from exodus to hexodus, John decided the compass pointed towards him. Or, put another way, having exhausted philosophy, theology and psychology, having fended off nightmares, having thought every thought, having hacked at every idea, having clutched at every straw, having nowhere else to go, having nothing any longer in common with women who sit and knit and men who commute and work, forsaking the golden ordinary, John spun on his heels and fled uptown again, determined this time to be heard, the statement of his disease clenched in his brain.

2

"Come in, come in, whoever you are."

John closed the door behind him and leaned against it. "I have a story to tell you." Rabbi Bloom pushed the hassock away with his feet. His toes curled upwards. "A story to tell me?" He rubbed his hands together and turned off the television set. "These days are positively fraught with entertainment. Come in, come in. I can't listen to you from across two rooms."

Jon moved away from the door. "Where's Annie?"

"Out shopping. Poor woman, she has to take advantage of my sane moments to do her errands."

"Can you come for a walk?"

"Can I come for a walk?" He twirled his fingers in the air. "Why not? Do I look as if I don't have feet?" He got up and tucked in his shirt. "I shall make myself presentable, the very image of a pleasant walking companion." He went to the foyer closet and took out his winter coat and hat and put them on. John felt a rude pain, and said sharply.

"The month is August."

"Ah, such precision. About some things we are very accurate. I suffer from chills and freezing. I never go out unless I am well wrapped against the elements. Come, come." He took John under his elbow and opened the door. "What is most on your mind, your story or my dress?" They came into the street. He blinked his eyes. "Extraordinary how the sun goes on and on." Some boys lounged against a car. "Ignore them," he whispered.

"They are anti-Semites and surprised to see me in the daylight. Which way shall we go?"

"I don't care. Anywhere you want to."

"No, no, you must choose. Never ask a Jew where he is going, for he does not know. If he knew where he was going, he would not go there. The same for you."

"Watch the street in front of you," John said, "that's all that should concern you."

"I've jangled your nerves. You do not have the right mood. You are far too elementary and very precise. That is what the Cossacks said to Shmuel." They fled across Park Avenue, dodging cars. "Or was it the other way? Shmuel was not precise at all and they threw him in a dungeon."

Flood tide on the East River Drive, a river of cars. Rabbi Bloom raised his arms to heaven, an historical quirk. The traffic stopped. He poked John's ribs. "Always works."

John grabbed his arm. "Stop your insane idiocy. Live your individual life and forget your history. Who will believe your stories a hundred years from now. Haven't you heard? Already they are accusing you of Nazi brutalities, of inheriting your oppressor's role."

"Yes, yes, I heard. My fish heard. The catfish heard. The goldfish heard. The frog heard. The bird heard. We all heard."

"Some are already saying that you can't tell the victims from the torturers."

"Can't tell. Can't tell." He ducked his head under a tree. "It's easy to tell. Just look down at your organ." He sniffed a blossom. "Who's got the foreskin?" He turned his twitching eye on John. "I can tell. Ask me." He looked up the avenue and sniffed in deeply. "I smell soap. Someone is about to wash something out and wash something in."

"To hell with you," John said. "I don't want to hear your babble."

"Not my babble. What do you want then? A verisimilitude? A parable? A paraphrase? A paradigm? A parallel?"

"Clarity," John said, "I know you've got it."

"Liar, not I. I have only entertainment. Amusing tales. What kind would you like?"

John gripped his hand. "Not any."

"Don't refuse. It'll put a laugh in your belly." He whispered in John's ear, "I have one for the educated, the man of belles lettres." He put his finger against his nose and intoned, "Eftsoon."

"Stop it," John said.

"Too late. The bird is on the wind. The brain is in the fire.

There was in England, in a quaint time, in a section of London town given over to the Jews. Here they prayed, here they lived, here they died, here they usured, and here some Christian boys threw Yitzhak in a manure pit and he drowned in shit. The setting sun burned his eyes and a frog croaked on the edge of the pit. Yitzhak's mother ran through the villages looking for her one and only. Prompted by faith in justice, she searched everywhere, for as they say, murder will out, you know that John, murder will out, if there is a God the blood of a cursed deed will cry out throughout the countryside. The townspeople dragged the cesspool and found Yitzhak. His muddied head came to the surface, from his mouth ran the slime of the cesspool and the miracle of his faith. Out poured shit as he sang with closed eyes, 'Sh'mah Yisraw-ayl.' Someone ran for the priest, someone ran for the bishop. The people picked up Yitzhak's body and carried it to a nearby house, and the inconsolable mother followed. It was Yitzhak's fault. Do you know why? He had strayed a meter from his village. He had forgotten where he belonged."

3

John brought his forehead against Bloom's. "You know my mother," he said. Rabbi Bloom chuckled. "Are you testing my memory? I tell you it's better than ever. I remember a thousand years of stories. John brought his face eye level with his. "That's not far back enough. I have a story to tell you." "What kind of a story?" "A story about justice." "About justice." Rabbi Bloom whistled. "I know justice very well. An overpriced whore. A woman of fabulous reputation, with nothing to show for it. Her smile makes you sweat but her bed is cold. Still, everyone runs when she beckons." John's brain whirled. He felt like Samson, Medea, Hamlet. Where should he go for wisdom if not to literary ancestors and what, he argued for himself as well as for all predecessors, real and unreal, should Oedipus have done? John shared the fate of Hamlet and Antigone: maladjustment. Voulez vous? Who can deny that when a man comes upon the detection of the devil and life will not sustain him through the smell, he will tear down the temple of his own being. Self destruction is sometimes destiny. John shook like a leaf with premonitions. "There was once a man, " Rabbi Bloom said, "who had a daughter named Susanna. You must know my daughter, Susanna. She lives wherever Christians congratulate themselves on their Christianity." John's head flipped back. He opened his mouth like a horse in terror. "My flesh is in agony, " he cried. Rabbi Bloom back away. "Hey, hey, you do have a story to tell!" John grabbed Rabbi Bloom's coat lapels and sank to his knees and wept and bled his tale out on the ground.

Rabbi Bloom covered his ears with his hands. He slapped his cheek, he tore at his warts. He wailed. John stumbled and his forehead smacked the sidewalk in a trance. "Gavolt, " Rabbi Bloom cried out. John woke from his faint and gazed at the sky.

"Say nothing to Leonard or Annie, " he said. Rabbi Bloom knelt beside him and tried to raise his head. He wiped his mouth and wrapped him in his coat. "What will become of you? Come with me. Let me hide you." John looked at the fragile sky. "Under your coat?" he laughed. "Gavolt, " Rabbi Bloom cried again, "the world is coming to an end. Run, Henny Penny and Chicken Lickin." "Ssshhh, " John snapped. "What kind of protection is that? You're attracting attention." "I can help you,

" Bloom said. "I have a room somewhere, a room in a basement. I can hide you there." John felt farcical and repellent. He wagged his finger sheepishly. "You've been leading a double life." "Of a kind. The room is a present for Leonard and Annie." "What kind of a present?" John asked suspiciously.

"I can't tell you. I have a purpose." He winked histrionically.

John dismissed the subject. He felt, suddenly, remarkably bored. "I must go somewhere, " he said, and got to his feet. He looked about him like a badger climbing out of his hole. "Will you come with me?" "Where to?"

John brought his eyeballs against Bloom's. "Home." "I smell soap, " Bloom said., He held his hand out and tested for rain. He looked down the street cluttered with late petals. "Soap bubbles are rising everywhere." "I smell justice," John said. "Phew, " Bloom said and held his nose. "A dog can't smell his own shit."

John roared at him. "Don't try to stop me." "I must. Ask the law for justice. It's their job." "What could the law do for me?"

"It could arrest your mother and hang her for murder." "I could hang her myself." "Yes, but the law will spare you. Remember Moby Dick and stick to the deck.

Don't fish for justice." "The law is not my flesh, " John cried. "My flesh has an agony in it the law can't quiet. My flesh cries for a justice it can hold in its hands. I want to see it, I want to feel it, I want to taste it, I want to know it in my soul." Rabbi Bloom moaned. "The law was made for escape from fate. Use it, John, I beg you. Find protection in it, if not justice. Do that, John, I beg you. Be John, dear John, nothing else. Be a father, a husband, a student, a teacher, not a seeker for justice. Be only John, plain John. Forget what's happened. Be my dear friend John and come to dinner with me. Annie will bake, the children will quarrel, Aleph will lick your shoe. Let the day be, the night will pass. Choose life, I beg you, John, not justice. Don't break my heart. Come away with me, come away from your thoughts, come with me and be only John." John skipped out of his reach.

"Will you come with me?" Bloom's head flipped back. His mouth opened for air. "I?" he moaned. "Don't ask me, John, do you think I am mad?" He reared his head and sniffed at the air. "No, no, I am not mad. I smell soap." He peered at John. "The gutters are choked with soap bubbles. Don't go." John felt fantastic, lightheaded, hot, disastrous, preposterous. He stood ankle deep in petals. "I am beyond choice, " he said. 

4

"Will you come with me?" he asked Lilly.

Her mouth dried. She tucked her skirt in under her legs tucked in under the stoop. What would it have been like to have been born with a little more fortune and to have had the confidence of beauty to be able to meet John's inquiry. He wanted to make use of her and in his presence her thighs became boneless. Her weakness maddened him. He looked at her ironically. His expression threw her into self hatred.

John disregarded this aspect of himself. That was not him. He was sorry for his rudeness: that was him. He was desperate that he could not control his moodiness. He wanted to ask her to forgive him and he wanted to wound her for being so much less than he needed. "I can't seem to mount it, " he said foolishly. "What shall I do?" he whispered. "Go home," she said. "Nothing can happen to you that has not already happened."

"Will you come with me?"

She felt his remorseless need and knew herself to be wasted by it. "No, I must spare myself something."

"Spare yourself what?" he thundered. "I need help." He felt dizzy and wondered if he was going to faint again. He registered this weakness that was becoming habitual with him, at least in her presence. She drained him of spirit. She became as stiff as human nature could make her, stood up abruptly and fled to her room. She braced herself against her washstand and registered the dry triumph of willpower. That's me, she thought, the loathsome are loathsome and must make their quietus with self denial. I know nothing of life but resistance.

Man has an impulse to contradict reality. John went after her to apologize, not sure for what. She looked at him with wrathful eyes, at his blonde hair, his light eyes, his lips. "I don't want your apologies, " she said. He grasped the doorknob and muttered something. Poor Lilly, wishing him gone or dead, could not blind herself to his pain, but when in his life had he been asked to give sympathy out of the impoverishment of terror? "Don't go," she said. She had a compulsion to explain herself. The room swam around her. She was sick. She looked at John hollow brained by the open door, wanting love and sickened by the sight of it, wanting it on his terms while her thin legs shook and her narrow shoulders heaved. The room swam around her. She grabbed a towel from her chair and twisted it in her hands. "I haven't a kind thought left for myself except that I thought I had conquered myself, but it's not true. I have been to church many times and have been told to fight self pity, to fight bitterness and despair. I have read Jesus, Mohammed and Buddha, but my eyes are a prey on the world, hating the young and the healthy. I pray for old age, ill health, for decay, weakness, infirmity. I would put the world in my arms and ask it to forgive me. My hatred is not what I ever meant it." John had not wished himself into this part, he recipient of someone else's confession. Born free, he had chosen for himself a role of discretion, common sense and commitment, that of the courtier, the knight, man of reason, diplomat, teacher. He felt nothing but the desire to escape and closed the door behind him. He heard her crying and looked up and down the corridor, fretting that someone might come and hear her. John, his soul whispered, you are better than this. You are better than history and civilization. You are all that's left of understanding. Where is your will to use it? John laid his aching head against the door. 

5

He sat on the train and watched the scenery go by. He was traveling north. His emotions alternated between panic and disbelief at what he set out to do, his appetite between none and frenetic hunger, his movement between apathy and a restless pacing to the water fountain. When not in pain, or when in pain and to contract pain, he thought about Lilly. He could not fathom her. Her acquiescence outraged him. For the want of a nail her household was shattered. He sat on the train and looked at the other people in the car and wondered what their strategy for survival was, or if they needed one. Surely he wasn't the first to have had this happen, or the only, or the last. What was anybody else's solution? No one paid him anything for his thoughts. 

Chapter Four

Section One: Towards Athens

He went to his bedroom. It was as it had always been, sprawling its childhood essence into the present. Bamboo patterned wallpaper, denim spread, a bust of Socrates, a wood painting of the Spirit of '76, a life-size plastic skeleton, a print of Botticelli's Venus rising from the half shell, his bookcase as familiar to him as his hands: Shakespeare, the Bible, the romantic poets strung on a lower shelf, the Victorians above them, the Koran, William James, Euripides, the Agamemnon. Books that were the gifts of relatives, books that had been school prizes wrapped in gift papers, the uxuriousness of Macbeth, the uproar of Lear, the intractability of Antigone who knew there was no choice but death. John sat on the window seat and clasped his soul. The day was ending. Light was gone and the windy night blew. Once, on windy nights he had walked the country lanes by himself and life was huge. A white yellow moon was low in the sky and life was huge and as near as the moon. Once he had whipped his bicycle down a road into a white blaze of blossoming dogwood, and life was enormous. His bicycle wheel had snapped a twig and the crack was decisive. He ducked his head under a low branch and made up his mind that life was going to be terribly good when he grew up and that he was going to get all of it. Now he felt the sick knowledge that what was now his shape had always been the shape of things. The world was broken. Night caught him by the heels. Without watching, the house had grown dark, and in the grey penetrable darkness he heard a noise downstairs. The rapidity of his fears startled him. He toppled over his night stand and groped for the lamp, ran out into the corridor and turned on lights.

Terrors sprouted in him like mushrooms. He threw open the doors to all the bedrooms, ran down the steps to the hallway and turned on the lights downstairs. Believing and disbelieving in ghosts, as if he had a choice of realities, he heard a key turn in the door. The sound ground him into a final dust . For a few second he was hardly conscious. Life returned in the ludicrous thought that he was suffering heart failure. The realization that a world existed outside his pain came back to him. He thought of the telephone, a doctor, the operator, He ran to the window and saw his mother with a black coat splayed out behind her, running down the path. He pulled open the door and ran after her. "Come back here," he shouted. "Damn you, you damned murderer, mother, mother, mother." The car drove toward the gate and turned down the road. The world, the whole white dogwood blossoming world sped down the road with her. His flesh tore from his bones. Without noting the momentous point he had come to, he shouted after her, "I'll get you for this." His head snapped with the underworld expression. Image and reality clamped him in a vise. He was John, child of reason, law and government. He was his father's son, John born of Basil, but his blood had an unrecognizable heat to it and burned the image away. He went back into the house and locked the door behind him. A gargantuan appetite consumed him. He went into the kitchen and rummaged through the refrigerator, found a half chicken, Italian salami, pickles, anchovies, a cold noodle pie, ate it all, not bothering to sit down, standing against the oak cabinets his mother had modernized the kitchen with, got a bottle of wine from the highboy in the dining room, old carved rotted piece of Viking wood his father had hauled in from some land or dream, ate and drank and felt bloated and unsatiated. He looked down the seven foot length scrubbed oak dining room table his father had exulted in. It was all so damned vast.

Even their bedroom exuded a sense of realm. A huge bow window swept the landscape into view with impact, down a slope of acres to the river and across the river into a stretch of woods. He went back into the kitchen and found a can of sardines. He found a jar of peaches and ate those too.

It was no use eating. Nothing was sharp enough or sweet enough. He went back to his room and lay down on his bed, with his clothes on, all the lights in the house on, his bedroom door open, knowing that whatever ghosts he didn't believe in had won this battle with him, covered his eyes with an arm and tried to sleep, and gave it up after a few minutes. Grief stirred in the corridor. Fighting pain, waiting for morning, trying not to think, he paced the floor, looked at his bookcase hoping something might distract him, and felt monumental unreality, distance from life, his tongue like wood, his spit ropey. Fighting pain, waiting for morning, trying not think, he paced and thought of the small town two miles away, its one bar, its one brothel and the two miles of dark road to get there.

He thought of Jesus in his agony in the garden, waiting for morning, Socrates, Boethius, Abraham on Mt. Moriah, waiting. No strength passed from them into him. Each had died with the secret of his agony, or had it been the same for them, praying for distraction and unconsciousness. He bumped into his plastic skeleton and knocked it down. Venus sailed towards him from the wall, wound in hair waiting to be unwound.

"My dear," Antigone said and held her arms out to him.

"I can't make it," John said. He put his forehead against the window and closed his eyes.

"I've lost the connection to life." "I know," she said and put her arms around his waist. There was milk on her lips. It was an invitation to dance, and he put his arms around her. "Do you know the waltz?" he asked. "Very well," she laughed. "I've had my eye on you." "Am I going to die?" he asked. She put her hand on his shoulder. "Does it matter?"

She dipped and picked up the hem of her skirt. "I'm afraid of tripping. That's why I couldn't run the race. But you're graceful." They waltzed around the room. John relaxed and looked inquisitive. She put a warning finger on his lips. "Please don't ask me why I did what I did." She raised a shoulder in self mockery and then reneged on it. "I lost the taste on my tongue and became diseased. I wanted to die while I still remembered my youth. Life is a long sickness and I had no patience for it."

"What happens as one grows older?" he asked, moving her past the dresser.

"One finds some comfort in living."

He pressed her to him. "Do you think I ever will?"

She looked away over his shoulder. He felt her grow light in his arms. "What are your terms?" she asked, and left him with the night still ahead.

He grabbed a sweater from a drawer and walked the two miles into town, stood on Main Street and watched the night. Rain began to fall. People hurried by, hand on hat or at the collar, hurrying for home and safety, the plan of their lives stamped into their habits in avoiding holes and strangers. The rain fell harder and Main Street was deserted, the stores closed, Bette's Beauty Parlor dark, the professional building dark, the Grab Basket dark, Wanda's Workshop dark. Elsie Maier lived down the street in a white wooden house with a white porch, Elsie Maier with flaxen hair to her waist and lovely thighs. Her father was a factory hand, but Elsie Maier was a water nymph. She dwelt in the caverns of men's minds and wore bangs cut square on her forehead. John looked up and down the street for a direction. He walked somewhere and mingled somehow. Light streamed through the torn curtains of a tavern. The only people out were drunks and the young. The others with domestic roots had taken flight. The street took on the quality of a sexual prowl. Groups of girls hugged the doorways of closed stores and houses, blatantly waiting, some so young their corruption looked naive. He looked at them standing against the buildings. Some sat on stoops, squatting, knees akimbo. He watched a dirty Dolores in her poverty asquat a stoop, hands on knees, knees swaying in the light rain. Her black eyes looked at him avariciously. Hamlet fell between Ophelia's thighs. She knew something he ought to know and he would know it too if he came closer to see that she could look him straight in the eye, red hair and swarthy nose, knowing she had no panties on she could look him straight in the eye knowing what he knew when he looked at her that he could think of nothing but how there was nothing on her, nothing between her thighs, nothing to stop him, refuge all the way up her legs stretched out front and spread apart, her skirt spread taut across her thighs so he could imagine he saw it already, saw it all, saw everything, saw his way to Babylon.

Babylon?

Babylon, she said.

It's a long way to Babylon, as long ago at least as the summer he worked as a waiter in a hotel. Was it only six years ago to Babylon? And he still hadn't gotten there, not knowing that no one ever got there. He was paid for the trouble of trying by a woman who clipped the wings of his dreams horseback riding in the cock crowing dawn over a mountain ridge. No Elsie Maier, she was forty with children, a guest at the hotel, a tale in the mouth of every busboy and waiter, oh! gratuity, she was short, hippy, sulky and short tempered, smelled of herring, onions and cold boiled potatoes. He liked the way women looked on tennis courts, athletic, young, tall, fair, even flat-chested didn't bother him. She, a Russian harpy via a Mediterranean freighter, dark faced, black haired, bowed gypsy legs and scowly eyes, brushed past him in jodhpurs outside his window one morning before five, and half an hour later he saw her up on the ridge of the mountain with the cock crowing all about her. The next day, victimized by an unsought desire, he followed her and caught up to her on the other side of the mountain. Her face was sweaty and her clothes smelled of meadow and horse. She looked at him with malice.

"Get going, you sonofabitch, " she hissed, "can't a human being be alone."

"It's a free world," he said sheepishly.

"Yeah, a free world. Yagoddamned right it's a free world." She whipped her horse badly and galloped away.

Later that afternoon she came up to him behind the kitchen, her blouse buttoned low so that he could see her full breasts where the tan stopped and the beads of sweat sat in the valley.

"How far is it to Babylon?" she asked.

"What?"

Her brown eyes narrowed. "To Babylon. The next town from here. Don't you know where you are?"

"Oh, that Babylon," he said, relieved.

"You're pretty lost, ain't you," she laughed. Her revenge was explicit.

Could Elsie Maier make it up? He canceled the thought. Else Maier had four children, ages six, three, two and one, who had flaxen bangs cut straight across their foreheads. May your children bring you joy, Elsie Maier. May the lid on your pot hum forever. There was nothing he wanted but death, and he knew he would choose a gaudy alternative. She was five feet four, propped against a building with straw feelings, dressed in shabby Mata Hari raincoat style. The figure of Lilly crossed his mind: a reflection on fate. He could not say what made this cloak and dagger mirage of desire more appealing, but he knew he would not choose otherwise and was sorry for mankind. Anyway, it passed the time between trains to Athens.

Chapter Four

Section Two: Clytemnestra: A.D.

Son, I have always feared insanity, for no particular reason that I can guess. There was my cousin Loren, Aunt Tilda's son, who was institutionalized at the age of eighteen. That was in 1922, I think. There was nothing seriously wrong with him, as a matter of fact nothing that one could say was the matter with him at all. He used to come home on Sundays and Busby, Ken, Claude and myself would watch him from behind doors and curtains. He laughed a great deal, which made us feel uncomfortable. I was a child at the time and since Loren was the first person I knew who had a reputation for insanity, I was curious about him. His laughing at the wrong times, not getting his cues right so to speak, was the only thing I could see wrong with him. It seemed rather little for so portentous a term as "insanity."

We had been expecting - -I can't say what -- but something that would have been a more definitive term for his behavior. My mother, your grandmother, would never speak about it. Parents at that time took for granted that they didn't share the same world with their children and didn't try to form liaisons with them. As a child I used to think: there is the adult world inside that box, and on my eighteenth or my twenty-first birthday, I'll open the box and see what's inside. The only thing my mother said in our presence about Loren was: "Poor Loren, it's too tragic for words," and Busby, Ken, Claude and I used to stare at him and try to understand what the tragedy was. Loren had permission to eat with the grownups and he came to all the family affairs. He was right behind Aunt Tilda when they came up the walk to a garden party, or to Busby's wedding or my own.

There was talk of what would happen to him after Tilda died. He was forty by then. That was in 1944, I think, and no one could figure out how the thing was going to keep working. He came to the funeral, which startled me. It was his presence, rather than Aunt Tilda's death, which seemed to concentrate our moods. Grief would have been misplaced. Aunt Tilda's death, as everyone says of someone who has died of cancer, was a blessing.

My own indisposition was the matter of recovery from giving birth, the adjustment to a new state of affairs and all that. We had been married ten years before you were born. I often wonder which way the stress falls hardest: to have a child after many years of marriage or at the start of it? But is there a choice between lots? I remember when Tilda was sick -- and her sickened state went on for three years -- Claire Nunnally's father died of a sudden heart attack while he was clipping his rose bushes. Mother said it was a blessing to die like that. We never told Aunt Tilda, who was very fond of Morgan Nunnally. "It would kill her," Mother said, and she outlived Morgan by seventeen months. Loren came home every Sunday during the three years that his mother was sick. Father drove every week to Cranely in New Hampshire to get him. Once he invited Busby and me to go along.

"Is that where he lives? I asked, when Cranely came into view.

"Well, that's where he stays," Father replied.

"I say," Busby said, not having outgrown Eton yet, "them's some digs."

Father winced, but said nothing.

Busby felt his silence as censure because Father did not let us get away with slang. "Do you realize," Busby once said, "that Shakespeare was the slang master of his day?" Mother said, "That cleverness is the price of an Eton education and a year abroad." But it wore off Busby. He has never been to Europe again and has no desire to go anywhere. His trip was regarded as a "finishing" touch; my trips belonged to my husband's profession and were therefore déclassé. People in our circle did not travel for business reasons in 1934, and you have no idea how quickly attitude breeds a culture. It could be wiped out a decade later, but at the moment it has pressure. In the worst of times, Basil found money to go to Crete. In the beginning it was exciting for me to go with him, except for that image of myself gathered from family gossip. Yes, I minded it. Busby's year at Eton was regarded as a rich boy's stunt and everyone enjoyed it for that. Basil's trips were regarded as an "intellectual's" folly, because no one knew what else to make of them. I hate to be the object of mistaken ideas, and I could not stand the family version of me as a femme monstreuse, independent to my teeth, experienced and intellectual, all mental angles and sharp projections. Colette could not bear that image either. Not having met a "professional" intellectual before, my family broke out into a collective rash of inferiority when Basil married me.

"What does he do?" Claude asked.

Busby cut his steak. "I think he's a professor."

"Is that so?" Claude laughed. "What does he profess?"

Well, to teach was Basil's life. To teach, for him, was to communicate a shape to life. I used to watch Basil write his lecture notes and could feel the desire in him to communicate, as if he were salivating at a steak. He would entitle a paper, "The Growth of the Idea of Privacy and Its Effects Upon Sexual Practice," and the modern world was clarified. I myself felt the modern world pulling this way and that, twelfth century roots tingling in my toes. His titles would shape up the soul and trim the psyche. But more than shaping his students, Basil carried their souls around in him. He was always arguing with them, mentally that is. He was bitter when a good student handed in a bad paper, exhilarated when a bad student handed in a good paper. Teaching for him was an experience of opening up and ordering the universe again and again to class after class. The process never bored him. His ideals were too high for that. He believed that man craved knowledge as he craved reality. Man hoarded every bone, tooth and vessel that he could.

"The world was his museum and the museum was his natural home. He was a hunter of life, the hunter of himself." He could say things like that. Father felt adventurous about my marrying a "bookish" man, not to mention a Southerner. Ken and Busby had married the daughters of Boston businessmen and Father knew their politics and connections.

Southern class strata were unknown to us. Every region has its own view of the son of a newspaperman. Father had a natural suspicion of Basil which he was willing to inhibit for my sake, and for the sake of national good sportsmanship. The best thing about manners is that when they are at their best, they are dependable, but it was Loren who accepted Basil fully from the outset without a hitch in his mental vibrations. When introduced, Loren stuck his hand out forthrightly, and said, "It's a great pleasure to meet you, Sir." I don't know what gave Loren away. Basil blinked his eyes in that way that meant, "What's coming off here?" You feel like hitting Loren between the shoulder blades when he speaks like that. He drove Father out of his mind that afternoon we took him back from Cranely. Every thirty seconds he said, "Take the left, Sir"; "watch out for that turn, Sir"; "there's a fork right ahead, Uncle." Busby crossed his arms on his chest, tickled that Loren's language was so correct it drove Father into a rage. Everything about Loren was correct. I suppose that's what made him crazy. His manners at the table were so good they made us feel cruel towards him. I think -- this is unorthodox theory, I know, when you think of the money that's been spent on him, twenty-two years at Cranely by the time Tilda died, not to mention the years after -- that there was nothing wrong with Loren except that he drove the rest of us crazy. All the way back from Cranely he sat between Busby and myself in the back of the Packard and I could not stand the feel of his thigh next to mine. No one can control the revulsion of the flesh. I remember when I was young such a confusion of thought and sensation, although I thought I had it straight. We were reading Lawrence, not openly of course -- no one read Lawrence openly -- and by "we" I mean the whole world except Mother, Dad, Busby, Claude and Ken. For Mother, naiveté was not a matter of prudery, but grace in the sexual system. She thought that far from being an expression of inhibition, naiveté was a woman's weapon because it gave the man sexual responsibility. Everyone knows that human sexuality is more than the physical. There was Lawrence and Henry Miller, and there was my passion which was so intense I did not think I could survive betrayal of it. What could I do with these feelings but hold them back until I could "bequeath" them or "sacrifice" them? I twined them around images of Adam and Jason and Sir Gawain and felt myself belittled when we played "spin the bottle," and held conversations about "necking" and "petting." The strategy of how to do it and how not to do it, how to be pure and impure at the same time, how to be clever and innocent, get away with "it," pull "it" off, the "it" being one's impassioned sex. We could do and do and do and still be pure. We could advance for months and never fall. Parlez moi d'amour. "How far?" "What kind of a kiss?" "Did you open your blouse?" I wanted a revelation, not a strategy. Even now, past prime, past Basil and Augustus I can say love should be like that. For me all sexual acts collapsed into one. I never kissed anyone until I kissed Basil. It was an ideal, and I thought at the time that the world shared it. Of course you grow up, and then you say -- it's too bad you grow up to say it, but one cannot help the process -- were Mother and Dad as moral as all that? Was I conned? And Busby, Ken and Claude? Did that morality go down through the pores of their souls? People are so constituted there seems to be no boundary to what you can or cannot rely on in them. Imagine discovering at eleven and in 1927 that Tolstoy who wrote religious parables used such rough language that he shocked Gorki, or that a certain prime minister of England used to dress incognito and accost girls in the parks, or that a famous actor who gave me a fever when I was fourteen, dressed up as a woman at night and accosted boys on the street. You would think that the flesh would know at fourteen that it could not be stirred by what it was not destined for. I was betrayed, but by what? Across three thousand miles this man betrayed me. I dreamed he knew me, but he could never know me. What do you make of such a reaction? Do men have such disappointments? How would I know? I can only judge by Ken, Busby, Claude and Basil. I could not know about Father, not being his peer. There are things we find out that seem to turn the world about. If I could pray and if I had one prayer for children it would be that the world fundamentally would be what it seems at first to be. It's working through those dreadful reversals of understanding that is so unsettling. I remember how Ken and Busby reacted when they found a volume of Marquis de Sade in Uncle Charles' closet. It was bad enough to find it, it was worse to search because they knew what they were looking for. Busby called Uncle Charles something uncouth, but it wasn't said with condemnation, it wasn't even said with hurt, though how could they have read what they did without being destroyed? A line fell between me and Ken and Busby, which they never noticed. They thought that whatever differences there were between us as we grew up was a matter of lifestyles, intellectual tones and so on. A line fell between us. I fell on one side of it, loathing the obscene; they fell on the other side, attracted to it. Was the difference between us our sex? A woman craves chastity. The man craves it for her. It is the aim of romance, but nature is not romantic.

I am trying to explain a conviction that carried me successfully through my first experience of hell. I wrote a story about it once, trying to encompass the world between de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Is romance that? Basically an attitude, and therefore a culture? I called the story, "The Lady of the Castle, because that is the earliest shape of the romantic imagination for us.

The castle was a small, three bedroom cottage in a suburb of Boston. The living room was beamed and had a fireplace. Shelves and shelves of bookcases lined two walls. The couch was upholstered in coral velvet. There were fireside chairs and a tea wagon with decanters of wine on it. The dining room was octagonal, beamed too, with stucco walls, and the kitchen had a breakfast area that looked out on a magnificent lawn.

Two maple trees and a low fieldstone wall were landscape. In the summer the trees hid the house from the street, and in the fall they filled the lawn with leaves. All that it took to produce peace in the mistress of the house was a permutation of sunshine and leaves.

They had been married nine years when Basil's nephew came from Georgia to spend a summer with them. He was of French and Welsh descent, his name had been fetched from a novel that captured his mother: Wain Parzival D'umeville. The lady took him about Boston with her, to the museums, the concerts, historic landmarks. I knew I made an impression on him with my more than female education and my garden hat. Quite a few people told me I resembled Virginia Woolf in her best days, and Basil's nephew was intelligent. He was too intelligent to be belligerent, but he was cautious as probably Basil had been when he had first come north. He had a sense of differences in histories, loyalty, but a sense of what he knew he must come to know about us. Anyway, the kitchen is not my natural habitat, and I was glad to do the squiring. He admired his aunt a great deal, he had enormous respect for her for being the kind of woman his uncle would marry, and his admiration disturbed her. His sexual innocence uncovered buried feelings, romantic chastity, alarming and always on the brink of being alarmed, a stirring affliction, sexual tension taut as a rubber band, an uproar of psychological adventure.

She came into the living room one night when Basil was in town for a lecture. Wain was sitting there, reading. Characteristically, with a self consciousness about what she had come for and an assertion about her independence, she climbed the stepladder to get a book from a top shelf. The book dropped from her hands. The sound got on both their nerves. With a quick "let me," he jumped to get it. The protocol of elaborate respect in soft, hungry accents tore at her. He fled, mortified, and left her in possession of his delicate pride, his innocence disciplined by an ideal of honor.

All night her body exploded. It poured lust in every part of her, her knees, her calves, her neck, her back. It was an experience unsought, unknown before. Her feelings tore her with abhorrence, with mountainous fear that she would not have the power to fight what was happening to her.

Images leaped into her mind that humiliated her, sexual visions of no intention, no knowledge she ever had had before, stunning her with their tenacity. She lay in bed, craven with weaknesses that attacked her.

Morning increased her pain. When she looked in the mirror everything she had built for herself as a person was gone. The sound of his bedroom door opening, the smell of his shaving cream left in the bathroom, the dampness of the towel he had used, flooded her imagination with a thousand sensations, possibilities in love she had never permitted herself. She stalked his every sound, obscene with speculations, inflamed by his footstep. His skin, his cheek! He was a child. Her fingers were feverish with imagination. When he spoke at the breakfast table, her stomach burgeoned with expectations and her breasts went hot under her blouse. The memory of his red cheek made her weep when she was alone. His torment licked at her brain, her power to release him whipped her imagination. His coffee left over in a cup was sweet, and she hoarded it and drank it when no one was around. She licked his plates, and day and night liquid ran in her body. Neither light nor darkness, day nor night, released her from this passion. Ashamed, frightened, humiliated, she excoriated herself and bled herself with insult. At night again, she could not stay in her bed.

She paced the floors, she went out for walks, she fled into corners to hide. She found moments to be alone in the basement, in the attic, where she could crouch with her fear and her passion, groaning and tearing the skin on her arms. She used his toothbrush and was terrified with the madness of it. When she came into his presence his eyes fled with their youth and their fear, but she saw that his skin was burning beneath his collar and her fingers became tense with excitement, her thoughts invaded with the thought of him, his thighs, his bones, his chest. His body became a garden, and she a toad that crept through it, a bird in his armpit, a butterfly on his toe. The tissues of her body expanded at the sound of his voice and she bit her fingers one by one and went rigid with prayer. God! she moaned, honor this madness, and tore her skin from her heretical thighs until they bled. Fidelity was sweet, God knew it was sweet to her because any woman known by two men became a soul divided against itself, hovering between sexual distractions, multiple of sexual visions, corrupt with the knowledge of distinctions, giving to one lover what she saves from the other, withholding what she knows how to savor in her imagination. The head of unity is struck down, the charity of trust is gone.

She received the news that he was leaving sooner than expected with gratitude. But the days that followed his departure brought no relief.

Weeks went by and she succumbed to a terrible depression. Medical examinations showed nothing, but she spent hours in bed, every bit of her energy drained by a ghost. She wondered if the saints who had conquered their lust rose from their beds and sang hosannas to the God of rescue. She drank from the cup of her idealism with stiff and bloodless lips. 

2

Why is the world like that? I stretch my eyes to the horizon and know there there is nowhere that my eyes will come to rest upon a thing that is as it is. Do we all live with that worm in us? How would I know?

No one has ever said to me, "You know, Chlore, I stretch my eyes to the horizon and know that there is nowhere that my eyes will come to rest upon a thing that is as it is." Everyone else seems afflicted with confidence.

I sometimes think the difference between Loren and the rest of the world was his lack of confidence, an inability to pretend. He was stripped to self knowledge, and it quivered like jelly. When you looked in his eyes you knew they never came to rest. They were always flitting and darting and running away. "Poor Loren," Aunt Tilda used to say, "has poor powers of concentration." He couldn't be trained for anything, and it was contagious. I couldn't play a game of cards with him without getting the trembles. Ken once suggested that Loren live with us at the farm. That was to punish me because I had criticized him for leaving Loren with the servants on his day away from Cranely. The farm was lonely, but Loren was not the answer. Not even Augustus was the answer to my loneliness. I spent most of my time with Augustus flipping through che