SEVEN

It was one of the Egan boasts that our progenitor who brought the family name to America was not, like so many contemptible pig-in-the-parlor Irish, fleeing the potato famine that year. In fact, he was fleeing something considerably more drastic, namely, as the phrase goes, a short shrift and a long rope.

My great-grandfather must have been an exceptionally pugnacious member of a notoriously pugnacious breed. He was a Belfast bricklayer who had already served a couple of jail sentences for riot and disorder when he capped all past performances by killing a fellow bricklayer in a brawl. He fled the country one step ahead of the law and turned up in New York City in plenty of time to take an active part in the Draft Riots of the Civil War. Again one step ahead of the law he moved upstate, and having discovered that in the town of Maartenskill there was a brickyard he turned from the laying of brick to the manufacture of them. Ten years after this, by dint of hard work and a profitable marriage he was sole owner of the brickyard.

From then to the day my father abandoned the brickyard Maartenskill was, in effect, the Egan township. It was a good long reign of sixty years, but when it was all over it left no monuments, no public buildings with the family name inscribed on them, and no mourners. All it left was an economic and political vacuum which the Gennaros were ready and willing to fill, and which they filled more than adequately.

Ben’s grandfather had started as a laborer in the brickyard and had risen to foreman. His father and uncles had continued the tradition, all of them serving as foremen in, the yard, but they had also steadily expanded their interests. They bought land, added to it, and went into dairy farming on a big scale. They bought stores and tourist homes in town, leaving the operation of them to the women in the family, stout, hard-working women imported from Italy. In the spirit of the clan they always lived together and worked together; they built their homes on the communal land and expected their children, when married, to do the same. They built the new church to the glory of the Sacred Heart and ran the parish. They elected themselves to the town council, and since the council consisted of five delegates and there were never less than three Gennaros on it, it made the council pretty much a cozy family affair. As my uncle Charles had observed, they were very much a feudal family operating effectively in a Hudson Valley town in the twentieth century. It may not have been much of a town; it was small and placid, a stopping-off point on the Hudson River between Kingston and Albany, but I always had the feeling that the Gennaros could have done just as well in a large and flourishing city. They had the touch.

Although I spent all my childhood summers at the Egan house outside Maartenskill, I never came to know the Gennaros very well until after my mother died, and Margaret and I lived for three years in the old homestead. Now I know that those earlier summers on the farm must have been bitterly unhappy ones for my mother, ailing as she always was, and saddled with two small children and the company of a pair as dull as the Schupfields. I suppose that my father could not see wasting the empty rooms in the house during vacations, so instead of our going to some resort which might cost money we were shipped up to Maartenskill at the end of June to live in isolation until September. It was an isolation I didn’t mind since I could live full tilt on the farm, and since I hardly saw my father at all during those months, both of which considerations were marked as assets in my mind. For my mother each summer must have seemed like a lifetime in limbo. My father was abroad on business much of the year while we were at home in the city, so she didn’t see much of him then. And then knowing that he was in the city while she was off in the backwoods could only have filled her cup of unhappiness to the brim. The fact is that despite everything in him that was cheap and bullying and cruel she loved him completely. The hour after supper every night was set aside for a long letter to him, and on Sunday evenings she would phone him long distance, and would, from what I can recall of her voice and manner while on the phone, have desperately affectionate little talks with him, probably worried to death all the while about the cost of the phone bill.

For myself all this was something that touched only on my peripheral vision. It was something that came into my ken only as I learned that there was a good deal of the world which you had to turn your head to see. After all, I had the river before me, the countryside around me, a sister who did not share my interests and so left me to my own devices, and a mother who put up only feeble resistance to my most risky projects and who could tell wonderful stories. So my memories of Maartenskill are a tangle of fact and fancy, all of them somehow flowering around the image of my mother. From her I heard endless tales of the Indian boy named Little Tomahawk, one of whose adventures was to journey all the way up the Hudson the day it suddenly dried up, so that he could see what had happened to the water. There at the very headwaters of the river, where it emerged as a tiny trickle from a rock, he found that an evil witch doctor had stuffed a twig into the rock, stopping the flow of water, so he removed it at great risk and started the river running again. And I remember splashing in that same river with a length of clothesline tied around my waist while my mother, holding the other end of the rope, played me like a fish from the bank. She was mortally afraid of water, as she was of so many things, and she had solved the problem of my swimming this way. As for Margaret I don’t remember her swimming at all. She once pointed out that the rocks leading into the water were slimy with moss, and it was disgusting to walk on them. I didn’t find it disgusting; I found it slippery and exciting. And after Margaret’s observation I even found it heroic, doing what she didn’t dare to do.

It was the farm and the old stone house at Maartenskill that made my mother’s death easier to take. For one thing, I couldn’t quite comprehend the death—that took a long time—and so when I learned I was going to live with the Schupfields, all I knew was that I was going to be for the year around at a much happier place than in the city with my father. And it was while living at the farm that I came to know the Gennaros. Thus, at the time when the permanence of my mother’s absence was coming home to me like the dull pain of a knife wound after the first unbelievable shock of it has passed, I had Ben and Mia to help me get over it. And beyond them their brother, Aldo, and their father and mother, and a seeming host of uncles and aunts and cousins, all of whom, with overwhelming kindness and with the grave consideration of a ruling Gennaro for the motherless son of the abdicated ruler, made it their business to befriend me.

But it was Ben and Mia who possessed me, heart and soul. I had been registered at the district school by Mrs. Schupfield, and the first morning I entered the school bus full of fears and tremors I saw Mia sitting there, the delicate ivory and ebony image of her incredibly lovely among that lumpish crew around us, and I fell in love with her on the spot, with all the pulsating, heart-pounding love that the poets sing of. It was not a love that went below the navel, any more than a dose of liquor enough to set you reeling goes below the navel. I was too young for that at ten, too ignorant of what I was feeling, although I had already experimented in private with the glandular implications of romance. But this was literally the purest of pure romance, the agonized desire to look without touching, the electric realization that I had my own Lorna Doone close at hand. Lorna Doone was very much part of the picture, because I had pretty well addled my head with the book that summer. I had found it in the attic of the farmhouse, a cheap edition bound in red cloth that had bled profusely through its pages after a leak from the roof had gotten to it, and I must have read it through a half-dozen times, sick with yearning for its heroine. When Mia Gennaro came along it was just in time to get the full impact of that.

I was not an importunate lover; it took me a month to get up courage enough to enter the Gennaro farm, which bordered on our own, and that only came about because of a crisis I had with my sister. An inevitable crisis, because Margaret, like any big sister, was a nag. As far as I was concerned, Mrs. Schupfield was in charge, and Mrs. Schupfield, who felt that she had done her best when she had seen us fed, clothed, and shipped off to school, left a host of details regarding manners and morals to Margaret’s authority. It was a triangular relationship fraught with trouble, and when I finally burst out in loud rebellion, I didn’t omit to call Margaret a few of the choice names I had picked up at district school.

Margaret never lost control of herself, never raised her voice, but her lips set menacingly as she digested this insult. Then she said with cold deliberation, “Daniel Egan, you are a filthy little stinker. If Mother were here she’d despise you. You are a filthy little stinker, and I’m going to tell Father about it, and he’ll beat the life out of you.”

So I hit her. I swung my fist as hard as I could into her face, and when she staggered back and cried out I fled with the sense of the skies crashing around me. I raced out to the dirt road that led down to the river and followed it to the clay bank overlooking the brickyard, and there, out of sight of the avenging world, I stood for a long time, first blubbering softly to myself, and then making pellets of the clay I dug out of the bank and flinging them as hard as I could into the water. It was a soothing activity, and when at last I was tired of it I turned back toward the house, almost ready to make amends. But not quite. Some wild inspiration stopped me midway on the road and turned me in the direction of the Gennaro farm. I pushed through a growth of underbrush, worked my way under the barbed-wire fence that marked the boundary of the farm, and started off across a stubbly field to the cluster of houses that stood in the distance like a small village. There were five houses, and Mia, I knew, lived in one of them. Then I was pulled up short by the problem of an introduction, and so I went back to the barbed-wire fence and very deliberately, holding my breath all the while and squeezing my hand tight around the wrist of my left arm to steady it, drew that arm over one of the barbs. The mark it left looked like a scratch at first, then it suddenly welled blood, and I hastily wrapped my handkerchief around it. By the time I knocked at the door of the biggest and most impressive house on the farm—it never entered my mind that Mia would live in any other than the most impressive house there—the handkerchief was sodden through with blood.

That was how I came to meet and know the Gennaros.

Ben, who was about three years older than I, had just started high school at the time, which alone was enough to awe me. But more than that, Ben Gennaro was one of those fortunates destined to slide over the miserable years between childhood and maturity without fouling up every day of them in some way or another. I know that I went through adolescence as if I were being swung back and forth on a huge pendulum between shouting exuberance and silent misery, between the arrogance of self-realization and the despair of utter insufficiency. That was not for Ben. In the middle of a family that was loud, argumentative, and overcharged with whatever emotion struck it at the moment he was a cool, remote figure, speaking softly, smiling a little at what went on around him, amused by it but contemptuous of it. That was not a pose, nor was it something I saw through the distorting lens of my idolatry. The Gennaros saw it, too, and responded to it with respect, and my father, whom I had talked deaf, dumb, and blind about Ben the few times we had family reunions, finally met Ben and was immediately conquered. According to all the textbooks, I should have been moved to bitter jealousy by that, but I was not. I had at last produced something for my father that he approved of, and I reveled in that triumph.

But idolater I was, along with Aldo, Ben’s younger brother and my closest friend those years at Maartenskill, and what jealousy I had was reserved for Aldo, who, after all, was own brother to the hero while I was doomed for eternity to be an outsider. So Aldo and I fought regularly and bloodily, nearly all the fights being instigated by me when the jealousy in me rose high enough in my throat to choke me. And because Ben was often an interested spectator, nearly all the fights were won by me. I learned early that where a punch in the face may hurt briefly, there is no salve for it like the impact of your own fist landing in return. It was a tribute to Aldo’s inherent good nature that he never picked up a fence post and simply split my skull with it to settle his grievances once and for all.

But there were ways of serving Ben aside from displays of gladiatorial combat. On lazy days when heat pressed steamily down on the valley Ben and a high-school friend of his would allow me to wield the oars of one of the rowboats that the Gennaros moored on the river. He and the friend, who, for the moment, shared Ben’s luster in my eyes, would bring aboard fishing tackle and a bottle of white wine pressed in the Gennaro cellars, and then while I slowly rowed them across the river and back, trying not to splash with the oars, they would set their lines in the water and take turns at the wine. It was hard work rowing in that heat, and nerve-racking at times, because when a freighter, pounding its way along the channel between New York and Albany, would come into sight I would be ordered to ship oars in mid-channel until the steel prow would seem to rise above me mountain high and the warning whistle would deafen me, and then at the last moment I would be allowed to dig the oars into the water and pull clear. It was an insane game to play, but I played it with the knowledge that Ben’s eyes were fixed on me and that the little smile on his lips was challenging me.

That was the same expression I met when, one Sunday morning while the Gennaros were at church and I had ascended the ladder to the hayloft of the barn to await their return, I found at the head of the ladder that I was staring at Ben and a strange girl sprawled on the loose hay, both mother-naked and both taking a heated interest in an activity which I knew only through rumor and anecdote up to then. Then the girl caught a glimpse of me as I stood balanced on the ladder gaping at her, and she squawked like a dismayed chicken and wildly flung Ben off her recumbent body, so that he sat there in surprise, legs straddled wide and outraged nature between his legs clamoring for fulfillment, the most ridiculous position that the male animal can be caught in, and when he saw me he made no move to change that position. He smiled and said, “Think you’re ready for some of this, Danny?” and that sent me half sliding, half floundering down the ladder.

Afterward—and it took me a few days to recover from the experience—I discovered that there are cases where the eavesdropper can feel all the guilt that the sinner does not. Ben did not make it easier for me. Whether out of malice or a sense of obligation I don’t know, but he took pains to explain to me that the hayloft was a sort of Sacred Grove where I was welcome to practice the rites any time I wanted to. Aldo and most of the other Gennaro males my age had already been initiated. Didn’t I think it was time for me to find out what it was all about?

I did, but I resisted temptation. There were two good reasons for that. Since Ben would be the one to obtain my partner for me it seemed likely that he’d be getting a report on my lack of prowess afterward, and I was terrified at the thought of failure before him. But the second reason, and by far the more important one, was Mia.

The trouble was that the scene in the hayloft now sent my feelings for Mia below the navel, and I recoiled from that realization. My head was stuffed with romantic furniture, and Mia sat enthroned among it as Lorna Doone—Fair Elaine—the subject of all the impassioned doggerel and inaccurate drawings I toiled over in the privacy of my own room. Suddenly there was a diminution of that subject, a tarnishing of her halo, and I knew when I lay hotly twisting and turning in my bed at night that I was at fault for that. The picture of Mia somehow merging with the picture of the girl Ben had been puffing and panting over, the dirty soles of her bare feet turned up at me, was enough to make me feel that I was constantly defiling Mia. Unwittingly, I was a fanatic devotee of the double standard, but where this neat device for settling the contradictions between romance and reality is supposed to bring comfort to its adherents, it brought me only anguish. Mentally—and that is a kind word to use in defining whatever goes on in the head of a moonstruck adolescent—I did not want to replace the idealized Mia with the fleshly Mia. Emotionally, I could not help doing so.

It never dawned on me that Mia herself might be interested in this inner war I was waging, or that she might have any hopes as to its outcome. I knew that she tolerated me, and that was all I asked. Only once—we were all of thirteen then—was I offered a clue to something hidden deeper, but it is not in the nature of the romantic to properly interpret any such clues. Not, at least, if they conflict with his own woolly imaginings. And yet this clue was so shoutingly obvious that I can only look back now on my own innocence and ignorance with amazement.

It happened the afternoon I was helping the junior Gennaros carry live fowl from one poultry house to another. The old poultry house reeked with droppings and dirt; it would have to be cleaned and repainted, and meanwhile its occupants would be stored in temporary headquarters some distance away. Their transportation was easy enough if you had strong wrists and nerves; it consisted of grabbing two chickens by their legs in each hand and carrying them upside down, squawking insanely and battering away at the air with their wings, to the wired enclosure that awaited them. Since Ben never carried less than two birds in each hand at a time, it was a point of honor for Aldo and me to do the same. It was not easy to do, but honor prevailed, and I made several such trips successfully.

But disaster was waiting, and it struck just as I had completed my final journey. As I swung my load into the enclosure one chicken pulled free and fluttered off, landing heavily twenty feet away and starting across the ground with the lurching, bobbing motion that makes a chicken the most graceless and ungraceful of all God’s creatures. I raced after it, made a desperate clutch at it, and at that moment the chicken suddenly stopped short. It was too late for me to stop myself. I landed headlong and with all my weight on top of it, and I could have sworn that there was a popping noise under me as I landed. When I got up I was confronted, not so much by a totally dead chicken, as by precious property entrusted to me which I had utterly destroyed.

The only thought that entered my head then was to get rid of the evidence. I started scrabbling furiously at the ground to dig a proper grave, and in the midst of my scrabbling I was stricken by the sight of bare legs—brown, slender, beautiful legs which I recognized immediately—standing before me. I looked up at Mia, my heart in my mouth, and she looked down at me and my victim, her eyes bright with interest.

“You didn’t have to chase it,” she said. “It would have come back to the coop when it got hungry.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“No, I guess you didn’t.” She kneeled down beside me, and the brushing of her bare arm against mine, the smell of sweat rising from her, the queer emotions that the spectacle of the dead chicken had stirred in me all merged together into a potent brew. The impact of my chest on the chicken had not been altogether horrifying. I had gone hunting a few times with Ben and some of the other Gennaros behind a yelping, badly trained pack of beagles, and the moment of explosion when I saw my rabbit leap and twist convulsively in the air and then fall kicking had provided me with that same sort of feeling, a flicker of pity washed away by the excitement of the kill and the sense of power boiling over in me. All this was weirdly mixed up with the closeness of Mia’s body next to mine, with the musky odor of it and the whisper of wind through the tall grass around us and the feel of soft black earth under my hands. I felt a retching in my belly and throat and braced myself on my hands, head hanging down but lips compressed to keep myself from vomiting. All I knew was that I might as well die on the spot as vomit.

Mia pushed my shoulder. “Oh, stop,” she said. “It’s only one chicken. We’ve got a thousand of them. Here, I’ll help you dig.”

I fought off the qualm and I joined her in scooping dirt from the hole until it was deep enough to receive the corpse committed to it. We covered the hole and stood up to tamp down the dirt with our feet, and then facing her I said pleadingly, “You won’t tell Ben, will you?”

She looked at me gravely. “Why should I?”

“I know. But you won’t tell him, will you?”

“Are you scared of Ben?”

“No, but I don’t want him to know.” Then I said reasonably, “A chicken costs money. If I have to pay for it I’ll have to get the money from my sister and she’ll be sore.”

“Then you’re scared of your sister.”

“I’m not scared of anybody. I just don’t want any trouble because of a stinking chicken.”

“I know,” Mia said. “All right, I won’t tell anybody, Danny. Don’t you think I can keep a secret?”

She kept that one until we had gotten back to the old poultry house where Ben and Aldo were busy with shovels and hoes. Then while I stood stunned she walked up to Ben, her skirt flirting back and forth over her buttocks in a strange and special kind of walk, and said to him, “Ben you missed the funniest thing. One of the hens got loose from Danny, and when he was chasing it he fell flop on it. It’s dead as anything now, but you should have seen it, Ben. You would have laughed and laughed—”

And to my relief, my slack-muscled, knee-sagging relief, Ben only said impatiently, “All right, I would have laughed and laughed. What did you do with it?”

“We buried it,” Mia said. “Isn’t that touching?”

“Well, I hope you buried it deep enough so that the dogs can’t dig it up,” Ben said. “They can choke on those bones,” and that, I knew, was the end of it for him.

But not for me. I followed Mia toward the house, and when we were out of sight behind it I laid hands on her for the first time. I caught hold of her arm and swung her around to face me, almost pulling her off her feet. “Why did you do that?” I demanded in a fury. “You said you wouldn’t tell, and then you did!”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You’re a liar!”

“I am not!” She struggled like a snared bird to pull away from me, hitting at me all the while with her free hand. “Let go,” she said breathlessly. “You’re hurting me. If you don’t let go I’ll yell.”

The enormity of what I was doing suddenly cut through my rage. I hastily released her arm, and she stood there rubbing it, not moving away, but rubbing it slowly, and looked at me with veiled eyes. “You hurt me,” she said accusingly. “You like to go around hurting girls, don’t you?”

I was staggered by this charge. Not only was it totally inaccurate, but it immediately gave me the feeling, as in the case where I had caught Ben in flagrante delicto, that I was somehow guilty of wrongdoing when I was in reality only the victim of circumstances. Or, as in this case, of malicious intent. But I was disarmed and helpless before Mia’s anguish. There would be a bruise on that lovely arm, I knew, and, even worse, there would be the shadow of my assault on her lying long between us. I groveled in my eagerness to dispel it.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Honest to God, I didn’t mean to hurt you. If you want to take a sock at me, go ahead.”

She forgave me with her eyes. “Silly. And all on account of a dumb old hen. And it was funny. You know it was.”

“I guess it was.”

“And the funniest thing was the way you were scared of Ben. You don’t have to be scared of Ben, Danny. He likes you. Everybody around here likes you.”

“I know.”

“They like you a lot better than they like your sister. You’re not stuck-up the way she is.”

“No, she isn’t,” I said loyally. “She’s very nice.”

“She is stuck-up,” said Mia, and her smile was very much like Ben’s. “Even Ben says she is, and he kissed her. I saw them. They were parked in the pickup truck right near your mailbox, and they were kissing like anything. So I guess he knows, doesn’t he?”

The picture that leaped to my mind of Ben and Margaret locked in each other’s arms in the cab of the truck left me with a distaste for Margaret that I didn’t want to feel. “I don’t believe it,” I said weakly.

“Why not? All the girls are crazy about Ben. You think there’s something wrong with kissing if you like each other?”

“I don’t know. Anyhow, Margaret’s not like that.”

“She’s a girl, isn’t she?” said Mia. “And there’s nothing to it, really. It’s like this.” And, miracle of miracles, she took a step forward and suddenly pressed her lips to mine in a warm, wet kiss. I stood rigid receiving it, my whole body an exposed nerve to the feel and touch and smell of her, my arms at my sides, and what was left of my sane and controlled thoughts telling me that to spend a lifetime like this was all I could ever ask of heaven and earth. Her lips moved away from mine momentarily, and then returned to the attack so violently that her teeth cut painfully into my lower lip and that only added to my bliss. But when I put an arm around her waist—as much, I think, to keep from being knocked flat on my back as in passion—she pulled away and said sharply, “No!” and we stood facing each other like two enemies under a flag of truce that neither of them trusted too much.

I wanted to say something—anything—but nothing that came to mind seemed to suit the occasion. It was Mia who broke the silence. She pointed to my lip and said, “It’s swelling up. You better go home and put something on it.”

“I can do it here.”

“No,” Mia said furiously. “You fix it up home, and you better not come around here again until it’s all right.” She shoved me hard in the chest, starting me backward in the direction of the highway. “You stupid ox,” she said, and she was really angry and never more beautiful than as I saw her then, before I obediently turned away and went home, feeling—and looking, no doubt—like one of the beagles after it had been caught mangling a rabbit it had only been supposed to scent.

That was my clue to the other Mia, the fleshly Mia, but I didn’t recognize it then, and I didn’t recognize it during the years that followed. Those were the years of growing up when Margaret and I went back to the city to live with my father, and Ben went on to become a football star in high school, and Mia went off to St. Cecilia’s, where good little Catholic girls were sent to stay good. We were far apart then, and the only thing that made life bearable for me was being allowed to spend my summers and holidays at the Egan farm at the very time when Ben and Mia would be home with their family.

My father approved of this, and while that made me wary and apprehensive at first, I soon discovered that he was completely under Ben’s spell. He subscribed to the Maartenskill paper and the Catskill Mountain News and followed Ben’s football career with fanatic interest. Where I had once been the one to talk about Ben to him he now talked about Ben to me, pointing out the good example being offered me and asking, with sardonic emphasis, when I might start following it. And he encouraged Margaret’s relationship with Ben with the kind of fatherly vulgarisms and leers and heavy winks that made her flinch and made me suffer for her. She and Ben wrote each other regularly, although what they found to say to each other in their letters is still a mystery to me. She was an honor student in her first year of college at this time, and he was not yet out of high school, but Ben had his own form of sophistication, and when he visited us in the city now and then to take Margaret on dates I could see that he looked far older and harder and wiser—and certainly more attractive—than the callow college youths of Margaret’s acquaintance who occasionally sat at our table. And when he was in New York he stayed at the Plaza and drove his father’s Cadillac, which, I suppose, were no mean scores in his favor from Margaret’s point of view. As for his point of view, well, Margaret was tall and good-looking and had an ample figure, she was a New York girl, a college girl, and her father and uncle had much to offer. When I first met Ben he had talked of some day going to agricultural school. After he came to know my father and my uncle Charles he had not talked about that any longer. He was already scenting a different future for himself.

I learned about his plans one late summer afternoon, a few weeks after he graduated from high school. We had been digging postholes for an electrified fence that would run around the main pasture when he suddenly said to me, “I want to talk to you. Come on, let’s take a boat out on the river and get some air. We can finish this tomorrow.”

So we took the boat out and the usual bottle of white wine, and I, dazed and marveling at the honor being paid me, learned how easily white wine goes down and how easily it is sweated out in a Hudson Valley sun. The sunlight glittered on the water and seared through me, and Ben, already burned dark brown, pulled off his clothes and stretched out full-length in the bow of the boat, hands clasped behind his head, eyes closed against the glare. His body looked as if it had been carved out of mahogany, and I thought—embarrassed by my own thought and by the sight of those naked loins from which I tried to keep my eyes averted—that if Mia was Lorna Doone, Ben was Apollo. That is what I thought, poet and peasant that I was in my sixteenth year. And I paddled idly, using one oar as a paddle, Indian fashion, as Ben knew how to do so well. And waited for Apollo to confide in me.

He said, “You never fool around with Mia, do you?”

I started, almost lost the oar, and recovered it. When I looked at Ben I saw that he had not opened his eyes. He still lay placid as a god who knew the truth but wanted mortal confirmation of it. “Jesus, no,” I said.

“I thought not. And you had plenty of chances, too, hanging around the way you do. A lot of other guys—you know what I mean?—they would have tried something rough with her a long time ago. But you’re a good kid. Here, give me the wine.”

I gave him the bottle, a libation to the gods, and he took a long drink. “That’s why I want to talk to you about her,” he said. “When she’s away in school she’s no worry; those Sisters watch the girls there like a hawk. But when she’s around here it’s different. Maybe you don’t know it, but I keep an eye on her all the time. And if it’s not me it’s Aldo or one of the other kids. Anyhow, she knows about it, which is the important thing. She knows if we ever catch some guy trying something with her we’d kill him. She’s the kind of girl—what’s the matter, don’t you know what I’m talking about?”

His eyes were open now, fixed on me inquiringly. I said uneasily, “Yes, but I don’t know why you’re telling me about it. What’s it got to do with me? Jesus, I like Mia. I wouldn’t try to get funny with her.”

“That’s why I’m telling it to you. Because I’m going away, and I want to know there’s somebody around here who can take over for me. Aldo’s no good that way. He’s all right, but when you get right down to it he’s a pretty dopey kid himself. Got his head all full of nooky right now, so he don’t even know what’s going on. But you’re different. She wants to go to the movies or the soda parlor or a dance someplace, you’re the one I want her to go with. And if anybody gets fresh with her you can just scare him off or beat the hell out of him or whatever you want. And you’ve got a lot of Gennaros to help you if you need them. Not that I figure you’ll need them. You’ve got quite a name around town for being a dangerous character when you get sore.”

I said wonderingly, “Did you ask Mia about this? Suppose she says no?”

Ben smiled. “She’ll say whatever I tell her to say. She’ll do whatever I tell her to do.”

“All right,” I said, “if she won’t mind—”

“She won’t mind.” Ben propped himself up on one elbow and leaned toward me. “Look,” he said seriously, “maybe you think this is making something out of nothing, Danny, but that’s because you don’t know how it is with us. I don’t even mean all Italians either, because there’s plenty of them nowadays don’t give a damn. All I mean is the Gennaros. What we know is there’s two kinds of girls—the kind you give it to and the kind you don’t—and we know what kind we want in the family. What the hell, you’re gonna get married some day yourself. You expect to marry somebody that’s had it before you even get near her?”

“No,” I said fervently, and only hoped that the picture of Mia in my mind wouldn’t show through my eyes.

“So you see what I mean?”

“Yes. But what’s all this about your going away? When you’ll be away at college Mia’ll be in school, too, won’t she?”

“I mean that when she’s home I won’t be around any more. I’m not going to college yet. I enlisted in the Air Force day after I got out of school. Next week I’ll be off bucking for officer somewhere.”

“But there’s a lot of colleges that want you.”

“Fifteen. I’ve got fourteen places waiting to give me a football scholarship, and the old man’s willing to pay my way, too, if that’s what I want. But I don’t. I’ve got everything all figured out. First the Air Force, and when I get out I’ll know I won’t be pulled out of school or a job maybe and then have to serve my time when I don’t want to. After that, college, and then two, maybe three years of professional ball. I’ve already got an agent lined up to handle my football deals. He told me that if I can make a name in college I can wind up with twenty, thirty thousand after taxes for just a couple of years in pro ball, and that’s good enough for me. After that—well, your uncle Charlie and your father have been saying something about the kind of job they had waiting if I turn down the other scholarship deals and go to the University. The University’s not much on football scholarships—if I went out West I could get twice what they offered—but this new coach they have, Detzendorf, and the big man in the alumni association both told me they can work out something special if I sign up there now for admission after I get out of the military.

“That’s the way everything’s lined up, Danny. But what it means is that I’ll be a long ways off just when all the guys around here will be getting Mia in their sights. That’s what I’m counting on you for. You’re a nice clean kid, you’re like one of the family. If I know you’re watching out for Mia, then I can rest easy wherever I am. All right?”

“All right.”

Ben sat up straight and pointed his finger at me. “And swear you’ll never fool around with her yourself. Swear to God.”

I took a deep breath. “I swear to God.”

“Oh hell, you’re a Protestant, aren’t you? Well, swear to God as a good Protestant you’ll never fool around with her.”

“I swear to God as a good Protestant,” I said with passionate conviction, “I’ll never fool around with her.”

Ben held out the wine bottle. “We’ll have a drink on that, Danny. I only wish Aldo was half the man you are.”

I paddled the boat back to shore at flaming sunset, drunk with wine and glory.