5

Amyas Axel, His Care and Keep

I

As Nicholas Mardachek turned up Hester Street, he felt his anger lift a little, and when he passed a restaurant full of people, he pushed open the door and walked in.

A wave of warm air and the fragrance of food greeted him. Under posters of ruined Greek temples and photographs of President Kennedy, people were chattering and eating: a few glanced up. Looking about him, he spotted one empty seat in the back, at a table already occupied by an elderly man and woman, who sat opposite one another like strangers, and a girl who sat opposite no one but kept glancing behind her toward the kitchen. Nicholas followed her gaze but saw nothing remarkable. The cook was standing at a counter chopping vegetables, and another fellow in a scruffy hat was pouring wine from fancy jugs into plain bottles. The clatter of dishes rose over a hundred conversations. Nicholas pushed his way down the aisle past the long rows of people eating, sank into the empty seat, and hung his knapsack on the back of the chair. The girl frowned at him. She had a thin, pretty face, and although she wore a velvet headband to hold her long red hair in place, she kept brushing her bangs out of her eyes. She looked close to his own age, or at least no more than twenty. Presently she leaned forward and hissed into his ear.

“That seat belongs to Amyas.”

Nicholas pretended not to hear. He picked up the menu and made a great show of studying it, all the while reaching back to feel for his knapsack, once, twice, three, four times. It contained everything he owned, which was not a great deal—a few books, his razor, toothbrush, twenty-five dollars, and his harmonica, which he made himself play whenever he wanted a cigarette. He had started carrying the knapsack on his back, even in his own house, when he discovered his wife was stealing from him. Or if not stealing, then misplacing things—his comb, his razor, the book he had put away so as to have it when he wanted to read it—believing perhaps that if she tormented him enough, he would rather work than sit around at home.

She was wrong. All those days at his father’s filling station in Akron, all those hours of cleaning windshields and pumping gasoline into more cars than he cared to remember, he dreamed of servants, of electric guitars, of a movie projector that he would set up in his bedroom and watch whatever he liked the whole night long. “If you can’t make it, you got to marry it,” his mother had told him whenever she caught him lazing around. So he had gone east and worked even harder and married a buxom girl from Long Island who turned out to be even poorer than himself and batty as well. He had ended up waiting on her and carrying his meager goods around in a knapsack.

Suddenly everyone in the room burst into applause. Out of the kitchen marched a dwarf lugging a guitar and after him waddled a man so large that the diners had to push their tables sideways to let him pass. Under his arm he carried a mandolin.

“Gunther! Amyas!”

“Amyas! Amyas!”

The dwarf waved to the two girls who had called out “Gunther.” But the larger man, who seemed much more in demand, smiled over their heads.

“Amyas!”

Amyas was huge. At least four hundred pounds, Nicholas decided. He could not take his eyes off the man; next to the dwarf, Amyas was overwhelming. Where the dwarf was nearly bald, Amyas’s brown wavy hair thatched his ears. Where the dwarf was cleanshaven, Amyas had a beard that curled halfway down his chest and forked out like a serpent’s tongue. Where the dwarf slouched under the sagging shoulders of his huge tweed jacket, Amyas wore a white shirt and tie and a tiny black vest embroidered with flowers. It hung like a bauble on a Christmas tree.

Behind them came a waiter, carrying a chair which he set up against the jukebox on the other side of the room, directly opposite Nicholas’s table. The dwarf began to tune his guitar, holding it high against his cheek as if he were sighting through a gun. Amyas seated himself and rested his mandolin against his belly. Looking at each other, they thumped out several measures of a fast tune in a minor key. Then the dwarf opened his mouth and shouted a refrain, which Amyas punctuated with hoots and cries:

You and I and Amyas,

Amyas and you and I,

To the greenwood must we go, alas!

You and I, my life and Amyas.

The elderly couple had stopped eating to listen. The girl sat rapt, her mouth repeating the words ever so lightly as she rested her chin in her hands. But now they were playing the verses, which told at great length of a faithless wench whose lover caught her at her tricks and threw her out of the house. There were a few titters from those who knew the song and looked forward to the last words of the angry lover.

Who’s gonna shoe your pretty little foot

with boots of Spanish leather?

The dwarf, singing at the top of his voice, was making as many gestures as his music would let him. Nothing of Amyas moved but his fingers, plinking the strings.

I’ll go no more to her bedside

so let the devil take her!

Let the devil take her! roared the audience, stamping its feet.

Then the dwarf lifted his hands from the strings, Amyas stroked a final chord, and everyone applauded. All over the room, purses snapped open and silver rang on the tables. The dwarf skipped nimbly about, thrusting a breadbasket decked with paper flowers into the midst of the crowd, and the money rang in. Amyas laid the mandolin on his chair and hailed the waiter, who at once slid an extra chair between Nicholas and the girl.

“Move over,” she said, tapping his arm. “If Amyas sits in the aisle, the waiters can’t get by with the food.”

Grabbing his knapsack, Nicholas eased his way out and let Amyas through. The great belly brushed him, the brown eyes peered at him over the forked beard, and Nicholas shuddered. Amyas’s gestures were grander than anyone else’s in the room, his smile wiser as he drew up the chair and sat down, and his courtesy to the girl and to Nicholas seemed to overflow from some kingly largesse. As if summoned by mutual understanding, the waiter laid out before him a basket of bread, a bottle of wine and two glasses, a bowl of clear soup, and half a sheep’s head cut lengthwise, its eyeball shining, on a bed of cooked cabbage leaves. Amyas rubbed his fleshy palms together and smacked his lips.

“My little dove,” he exclaimed, pinching the girl’s cheek as he poured two glasses from the anonymous bottle of wine. Then he noticed Nicholas’s empty place and shouted, “George! Another glass here!”

“Thank you,” said Nicholas.

“Has the waiter taken your order, sir?”

“No,” said Nicholas.

“May I recommend the specialty of the house? Clear soup for an appetizer, then a plate of roast kid or—” he pointed to the dish in front of him—“baked head of lamb.”

“I think I’d just like the soup,” said Nicholas. “I’m a vegetarian.”

Amyas’s beard twitched into a smile.

“Soup and a plate of spaghetti,” he murmured into the ear of the waiter, who flashed away like a bird.

Then Amyas gave himself over to eating his dinner. Nicholas stared at him appalled. His sleeves glided into the soup like sops of bread. He slurped it away in a twinkling and, giving a satisfied grunt, he pushed the empty bowl aside; then, picking up the lamb’s head, he began to scoop it out with his fingers, stuffing his cheeks full and popping the eyeball into his mouth like an olive. At the same time he held out tidbits to the girl, who nibbled from his fingers like a sparrow. When he had scraped the skull bare, he set it on the table, seized the plate, and licked it till it shone. His tongue was as pink and elastic as a cat’s. Then he replaced the skull, belched a little, and turned to Nicholas.

“Have you a handkerchief, sir? I seem to have lost my napkin.”

Nicholas unbuckled the knapsack, rummaged through it, and brought out a toothbrush and a battered copy of Moby Dick. Amyas smiled.

“Do you always carry so much?”

“It’s all I have,” said Nicholas and giggled, for the wine had gone to his head. “I’ve just left my wife. So I’ve no place to go.”

“And making up again is so pleasant, isn’t it?” said Amyas.

“You don’t understand,” said Nicholas, and he suddenly felt himself growing very agitated. “I’ve left her for good. She just got out of Bellevue last week. A whole month she stayed there, and she’s worse now than when she went in. Spying on me, nagging at me, telling me she hears voices that say I’m no good. ‘Nicholas Mardachek is the scum of the earth!’ ‘May his teeth break in his head!’ ‘May a black dog devour Nicholas Mardachek!’”

His own voice choked him. He wanted to lay his head on Amyas’s huge shoulder and burst into tears.

“How old are you?” asked Amyas.

“Nineteen,” said Nicholas, and he opened his blue eyes very wide.

Amyas shook his head and looked up at the ceiling as if he were praying.

“I know nothing about you. You might be a thief, for all I know. A thief and a cutthroat. And indeed, I have made such mistakes before. I once gave shelter to a man who stole one of my boots. Now that was odd, wasn’t it? For of course he couldn’t wear one boot. He might have taken my mandolin. Or my wallet. But he stole only one boot. I never found another pair to fit me. And we had talked and sung the whole night together too. He was a fighter pilot during the war and flew a record number of missions over Germany. He showed me his medals in a little box. You, sir, do not look like a cutthroat. But I might be mistaken. Nevertheless, I can offer you my chambers if you are without a bed and without means.”

When they rose to go, Amyas pulled an elegant cane down from the coatrack and gave it to the girl. Only then did Nicholas observe that her left foot was several inches shorter than the other. She wore a shoe with a built-up sole.

“Janet, my little dove,” said Amyas, and handed her his jacket.

He planted himself in the aisle while she hung it over his shoulders, as if she had long since abandoned the task of easing his arms into the sleeves. My God, thought Nicholas, the smallest things are impossible for him. The girl leaned on her cane and Amyas leaned on her arm, and together they made their way to the door. Clutching his knapsack, Nicholas followed. The waiter handed him the mandolin at the door.

In the taxi Nicholas sat next to the driver, for Amyas filled the entire back seat. Janet perched herself on his huge thighs and whispered like a running brook into his ear, so that Nicholas only caught a few words now and then. Her voice was as high pitched as a child’s.

“So I got the green one. That was right, wasn’t it, Amyas? Green was the color you wanted?”

“Green was exactly right,” whispered Amyas, and nibbled her ear.

“And then I didn’t know whether I should buy one or two. It’s so hard to find them that I thought I should buy several. On the other hand, it’s not very economical, because they don’t wear out very fast. Was it right of me to buy two?”

“It was very wise of you to buy two,” said Amyas.

“Good,” said Janet, and turned to look out the window.

When the taxi drew to a stop, she pulled a little leather coin purse out of Amyas’s coat pocket and counted out the fare. A wave of sleep pulled Nicholas down; he could hardly find the energy to open the door, and he shivered in the night air. But how much more difficult it was for Amyas! His grunting and wheezing shook the entire cab. Slowly, as if he were being born, Amyas emerged feet first from the darkness. Then he turned and offered his arm to Janet, who glided out like a feather and, leaning ever so lightly on her cane, tucked the purse back into his pocket again.

“My place is up there, sir,” said Amyas.

And he pointed to the top floor of the building in front of them.

“Where are we?” asked Nicholas.

For he saw no sign of life except themselves, no apartment windows with bars and curtains, no stairway leading up to the front door, and no cars lining the curb. Some papers blew down the sidewalk and swirled over their heads. It was one of those empty streets given over to printing companies, warehouses, and wholesalers.

“Prince Street,” said Amyas.

Janet took a key ring from her own pocket and unlocked the door. In the vestibule hung an outdated poster for an art show, four small mailboxes, and one large one lettered with two names: AMYAS AXEL, JANET WEST. Beyond them an elevator door stood open. They entered, closed the gate, and rode up slowly. Nicholas watched the layers of plaster fall away under them as they ascended.

“Do you know the Akton Photographic Company?” asked Amyas suddenly.

“No,” said Nicholas.

“They have their main darkroom on the second floor. I’m on the sixth. It isn’t so bad when you ride up. I knew a man on Spring Street who had a loft on the ninth floor, and there was no elevator. He was always tired. I believe he’s dead now.”

Amyas’s face was flushed, and he was breathing heavily; the walk from the taxi had exhausted him. Nicholas found himself admiring the man. Amyas was really beautiful, the way a brawling merchant in an old Dutch painting is beautiful. His face was vivid rather than gross, and his weight glorified rather than shamed him.

“Who else lives in this building?”

“Let me see.” Amyas closed his eyes for several minutes. “A lady welder just moved into the place below mine last week. On the other floors you find mostly private clubs and businesses of various sorts. I rarely meet anyone from those places. But on the fourth floor the Apple Town Players have their loft. Have you ever heard of the Apple Town Players?”

“No,” said Nicholas.

“We’ll go to one of their plays some evening. Janet acts in them quite often. You’ll recommend a good one, won’t you Janet?”

But Janet was falling asleep on his arm. When the elevator jolted to a stop, she straightened up and unlocked a heavy bolt on the door in front of them. It sprang open with a sigh, and Nicholas stepped into a spacious room. Half the floor was carpeted in green, the other half was painted a dull gray, and the door marked the boundary between them. The green half looked by far the more comfortable. It had a window, curtained in yellow silk, which ran nearly the length of the wall. In front of it stood a wardrobe, a bookcase, and a huge bed. The bedposts and legs were carved to resemble hundreds of spools strung together, and on the top lay a bedspread solidly embroidered with tiny green and gold dragons.

In the gray half of the room he saw an icebox, painted bright blue, and a sink under which someone had stacked several fifty-pound bags of cracked corn. There were also a small stove, a cupboard, and a kitchen table, and against the wall to his left were a sofa and a vanity table. But what struck him most were two singular objects in the middle of the room. Placed so as to obstruct rather than save space was a large cupboard with two swinging doors. On an inside hook hung a nightgown; inside was a neatly made bed. Behind the cupboard a huge winged machine crouched as if about to devour the sleeper.

“That’s a glider you’re looking at,” said Amyas, taking the mandolin from Nicholas and leaning it against the wall. “Have you ever flown one?”

“No,” said Nicholas. In another moment he would be asleep on his feet. To his dismay, Amyas was growing lively. Janet dropped her coat on the floor and curled up on the sofa.

“It’s one of the few flying machines that doesn’t require a motor. It glides on air currents, the way a bird does. “You buy the parts in a kit. Janet!”

Janet raised her head.

“What?”

When she saw Amyas roll his eyes toward the ceiling and shrug helplessly, she blinked and curled herself up again, like a cat.

“I could teach her so many things, but she falls asleep,” said Amyas. “I hope you’ll have some coffee with me, sir. I can’t bear going straight to bed. That’s her one great failing,” he went on, pointing to Janet. “She can’t stay awake. I could teach her so much, yes, and all the players in her troupe. Nobody listens to me. Nobody cares about discipline any more.”

While he was talking he filled a saucepan with water, set it on the stove, and measured out coffee into two cups.

“That’s what it takes to fly,” he said, and shook his finger at Nicholas. “Discipline. Do you ski?”

“No,” said Nicholas. And now it seemed to him that Amyas was flying with amazing grace, though pots, pans, and dishes rattled and the floor creaked when he walked.

“A pity. You’ve probably never known the freedom of flight. But you can’t fly without discipline. I learned that when I was a dancer. Don’t laugh! Would you guess that when I was your age, I was a superb acrobat? I was the director of the Blue Angels. We did a spectacular trampoline act on television and in nightclubs. I demanded absolute obedience of my performers and of my own body. Every night we flew into each other’s arms. And we never fell.”

He handed Nicholas a cup of coffee and motioned him to sit at the table; then he disappeared behind the wardrobe at the other end of the loft. Presently he returned wearing a green silk caftan.

“It’s from Morocco,” he said, holding it out for Nicholas to feel.

Nicholas felt it.

“Very nice,” he said. He could hardly keep his eyes open, but he did not want Amyas to accuse him of falling asleep on the threshold of instruction. Amyas pulled up a chair opposite him, brought out a small phial and a silver box, flicked the lid of the box open, and lifted from its velvet lining a hypodermic needle. He filled it from the phial, studied the inner side of his arm for a moment, then plunged the needle in.

“I hope this doesn’t bother you, sir,” he said. “I’ve done it so often I hardly feel a thing.”

Nicholas tried to appear casual.

“I don’t use the stuff myself.”

“No, of course not! Do you know what this is?”

Amyas leaned forward, as if imparting a great secret.

“The urine of pregnant women.”

“Ah,” said Nicholas.

“Don’t try to pretend you aren’t curious. How many people do you know who inject themselves with the urine of pregnant women? It’s said to contain a hormone that controls excessive weight. Excessive bodily weight,” he repeated, as if distinguishing it from some other kind, “due to glandular imbalance.”

“Glandular imbalance,” nodded Nicholas.

“Be thankful you passed through adolescence without it.”

He wiped the needle on his sleeve and laid it tenderly into its case. A loud snore startled them both. Nicholas turned around. Janet was sleeping with her arm stretched out over the edge of the sofa.

“If only I could keep her awake! I’d teach her everything I know. And I know so much. Look at that body—light as silk. I could teach her to fly if only she didn’t fall asleep. My little pigeon,” he cooed as he bustled over to her. Bending down he tried to lift her. Nicholas ran to help.

“Just set her down in bed. She gets very cross when she’s wakened. But if you leave her alone she’ll wake up of her own accord and put on her nightgown without a fuss.”

“Does she like the doors closed?” asked Nicholas.

“No. She likes to close them herself. It’s a Dutch bed. I had a terrible time finding one for her. And now she wants a bedspread like mine embroidered with a thousand dragons. You can sleep on the sofa, sir. It unfolds into quite a comfortable bed. There’s toothpaste by the sink. The toilet doesn’t flush. Fill that yellow bucket by the door before you go in, or there’ll be a great stink by morning.”

Amyas trotted down to his end of the loft, then stopped and called, “I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Nicholas Mardachek.” He did not remember having given it before.

“Shall I turn off the light, Nicholas? There’s only one switch.”

“Yes,” said Nicholas, for he was too sleepy to take off anything but his shoes. No bed ever felt better. The blanket was very thin. He pulled Janet’s coat over him, let his knapsack slide to the floor, and stretched himself out. In the darkness he could hear Janet moving around. The door slammed shut. Now she was singing in a high scratchy voice. A thin streak of light from outside touched the door, like someone listening to an old-fashioned radio. The last thing Nicholas saw was Amyas’s belly, under the skins of one thousand dragons, silhouetted against the window like a hill, waiting for the crest of morning.

II

When Nicholas woke up, he heard Amyas singing over a commotion of cooing and a flutter of wings.

“My little pigeon! My honey dove!”

And then a snatch of song:

Who’s gonna shoe your pretty little foot

with boots of Spanish leather?

Nicholas stumbled to his feet. His throat was raw and his head felt stuffed with cotton; had he drunk that much? The loft was so hot he felt cooked dry, and his own flesh weighed him down. Behind his bed sunlight streamed in through a door he had not noticed before. He padded out on the fire escape in his stocking feet and found Amyas, in a tweed hunting jacket, walking on the adjacent roof among cages and cages of pigeons. Out of the corner of his eye, Amyas saw him coming. One by one he opened the cages. With a beating of feathers and much clucking and crying, the birds soared out so eagerly that Nicholas ducked and covered his head.

“Watch,” said Amyas.

He drew up a chair and sat down. For several minutes the birds twittered about him at random, then settled into an enormous circle around his head. Wider and wider the circle grew, like the rings that flow out from a stone tossed into water, till Nicholas would not have known it as a circle if he had not seen it from the beginning. To see all of it, he had to tip back his head and stare up into a bright sky. And then a strange thing happened. A flock of unknown birds, flying north after the winter, cut through the circle and passed on. But Amyas’s birds did not swerve; only gradually the circle grew smaller until they lighted on the tops of their cages. Amyas positively glowed as he opened the doors and lifted the birds in.

“You know, when I was six, I asked the elementary school librarian for a book on flying. She took me over to the section on airplanes. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I want to fly with wings.’ Well, she was a resourceful woman, and she gave me a book about Icarus. I sat down and read it through twice, to make sure I hadn’t missed a word of the instructions. But it didn’t give many details. And even if I’d had the wax, I couldn’t have gotten the feathers. My father was fastidious, a real Prussian. When the army rejected him, he turned to making uniforms. The only outrageous thing he ever did was to marry my mother.”

Inside the loft a door slammed. Both Amyas and Nicholas hurried inside. Janet was setting a bag of groceries on the table.

“I found everything except the pickled udders. You’ll have to do without them.”

“But the recipe calls for udders,” exclaimed Amyas.

Janet gave a little shrug.

“Do you want me to try somewhere else?”

“No, no, I’ll make do with pickled tripe.”

“Well, I’ve got to go back out again to get some white makeup for the play tonight.”

“Why didn’t you get it just now?”

“I couldn’t carry any more.”

“What is the play?” asked Nicholas.

“Tonight we’re having a pantomime workshop. If you want to come with me now, I’ll wait for you. Prince Street doesn’t look like much at night.”

She and Amyas retreated to the far end of the loft. As Nicholas pulled on his shoes, he heard them talking in loud voices, pitched at the edge of anger.

“What’s the good of cooking sea urchins if they taste bad?”

“My little dove, how do you know they taste bad? You’ve never eaten any. The Romans ate them.”

“That’s because they didn’t have anything else.”

“Of course they did. The average Roman citizen had a far more sensitive palate than you or I. No eat-and-run places in ancient Rome. No waiting at counters.”

“And I can’t stand five courses of soup.”

“I wish you’d let me teach you about these matters. There are soups and there are soups. Joan of Arc ate nothing but soup five times a day.”

“I’m ready,” called Nicholas rather awkwardly. He stuffed his harmonica into his back pocket, closed the knapsack, and pushed it under the sofa.

“Good,” said Janet.

They rode the elevator down in silence. Nicholas stared at the ceiling, Janet looked down at her cane, at her white stockings and white gloves, and picked a spot off her navy blue coat.

“Nice coat,” said Nicholas.

“It’s new. Amyas got it for me last week.”

She offered him her arm, and they stepped out onto the street. He had been right about the neighborhood. The doors and windows were inscribed with the neat gold lettering of an earlier time: Doll Manufacturing Company; Bolts and Parts. They walked to the end of the block in silence and came to a newspaper store. A small sign in the window advertised egg creams.

“You want one?” asked Janet.

“I don’t have any money with me.”

“I have some. Amyas usually buys me one. We’ll get one on the way back.”

In the handball court on the other side of the street, a pack of young boys was starting a game.

“Let’s watch,” said Janet.

They crossed the street and stood with their faces pressed against the wire. If I were alone, thought Nicholas, I’d join them. But the heat in Amyas’s loft had made him lethargic.

“How old is Amyas?” he asked.

“I don’t know. About forty, wouldn’t you think? Or maybe thirty-five.”

“Where is he from?”

“Why, I guess he’s lived in lots of places,” said Janet vaguely. “His parents used to live in the city but they moved up the river a few years ago. I forget where.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“Nineteen!” Nicholas pretended to be greatly surprised. “I thought you were younger. Maybe sixteen. Or fifteen. It’s the way you dress. And that headband you wear.”

“Amyas likes me to wear it.”

He wanted to ask her how she had met Amyas, but that seemed rude. Instead he asked, “Where are you from?”

“Buffalo.”

“And you left home and came to the city.”

“Yes,” answered Janet, and she fixed her eyes on the boys who were now shouting and scrambling all over the court. “I left home and came to the city. With friends. You’ll meet some of them tonight.”

He very much wanted a cigarette. He felt for his harmonica and sucked out a blur of chords. It was a spring day and he was much younger, loitering around the playground after school. The sound wailed up and down; it was almost summer.

“Tell me,” said Janet. “What is your wife’s name?”

“Norma. Norma Mardachek.” It sounded unreal to his ears.

“Is she pretty?”

“Not as pretty as you are,” said Nicholas. The truth was, he suddenly couldn’t remember what she looked like. Her features swirled away when he tried to pinpoint them: a nose. Take that first. What did it look like? Her eyes. What color were they?

“What does she look like?”

“Dark-haired, and a little on the fat side.”

Jostling each other and shouting, the boys ran off the court, past Janet and Nicholas, and headed up the street.

“Let’s go,” sighed Janet.

They passed the courts and stopped at a dingy little shop that had a large piece of cardboard taped into the empty window. Glass lay scattered on the pavement below. On the cardboard someone had written in a huge black scrawl:

THEATRE MAKEUP. NO MINORS ALLOWED.

Janet led the way inside. A large, frowsy woman in a housedress and cardigan rushed out from the back of the shop. She had painted her eyebrows and eyelids so that the outside corners turned up. Behind her hung a rack of gorilla and skull masks, hats, trumpets, paper snakes, spangled vests, and tambourines. On a shelf over her head were round tins of greasepaint and a few wigs and beards.

“What can I do for you?” she asked, and rested her arms on the counter. They were heavily bandaged to the elbow.

“A can of Max Factor white—why!” cried Janet, “what happened to you?”

The woman shook her head mournfully.

“Kids came by here and broke my window. They broke it so bad I cut myself when I tried to fix it. Can you reach that can up there, mister? I’m so clumsy I don’t dare.”

Nicholas slid behind the counter after her.

“That one,” she said, pointing her arm up like a primitive wing. “Thank you, sweetheart. I ask myself, why do those kids want to come in and beat me up? Why me? So I put up a sign to keep them out. It don’t help though. They come around just the same.”

One night in Amyas’s loft had passed like a thousand years in the sight of God. Was this 1963? Not until he found himself beside this old woman, heavily rouged and lined as if for the drama of staying alive, did he feel again the terrible urgency of the streets.

When they returned, Amyas was stirring a large kettle at the stove.

“There’s a little prune butter on the table and some Russian pumpernickel if you’re famished,” he called out gaily.

“That’s all right,” said Nicholas. “We had egg creams.”

“Did you! Don’t spoil your appetite for dinner.”

“Are you cooking dinner?” exclaimed Nicholas, very much surprised. “Why, it’s hardly noon.”

“There’s more to a good dinner than meets the tongue. Come and look.”

He threw open the top door of the cupboard beside the stove. Neatly stacked on the top shelves were various hooks, pitchers, poachers, scoopers, pepper mills, racks, and broilers of every shape and description. There were more kinds of strainers, forks, parers, grinders, and graters than Nicholas had ever imagined existed; there were pressers and cheese bells and cruets, there were four coffee pots and a mortar and pestle and half a dozen sets of pots, pans, and casserole dishes.

“Very nice,’” said Nicholas.

“And over here—”

Amyas opened the bottom door to reveal stacks of tins, jars, and fancy little crocks. Nicholas bent down and examined the labels: lambs’ tongues, mushroom nibbles, quiche Lorraine, tender young cactus, tripe à la mode de Caen.

“What are we having tonight?” he inquired.

“Smell it!” Amyas lifted the spoon. Nicholas bent over and sniffed. “Not bad. What is it?”

“An early Roman recipe: sow’s udder stuffed with salted sea urchins. Janet couldn’t lay her hands on an udder, so I’ve had to substitute tripe. Oh, I know you’re a vegetarian, Nicholas. You may beg off from the main dish if you like, but I hope you’re not allergic to dandelion wine. I made it myself with dandelion blossoms from—where did we get those blossoms, Janet?”

“From the Chinese grocery store,” said Janet. She was standing in the doorway, looking out at the dovecote.

“Janet shops and I cook,” said Amyas, stirring briskly. “I feel that taste and smell are neglected in our culture, Nicholas. Don’t you think that each person has his own smell?”

“Why, I suppose so,” said Nicholas. The stirring of the spoon was beginning to hypnotize him; he turned away quickly and began to walk restlessly around the loft.

“I believe that when a man falls in love, he is attracted by some subtle scent of which he is hardly aware,” Amyas went on. “I don’t mean perfume. I mean the scent of—of the soul.”

And then suddenly, out of nowhere:

“I’ve arranged a job for you.”

Nicholas thought he had misheard. He stopped walking.

“What kind of a job?”

“In Akton’s darkroom on the second floor. Have you ever worked in a darkroom?”

“I worked in a camera shop for five months. But never in a darkroom.”

“You’ll learn. And it’s so terribly convenient. You won’t have to go out of the building at all.”

“I don’t mind going out of the building,” said Nicholas.

“In the winter, the wind is excruciating.”

“But it’s only April! We’ve the whole summer before us.”

“Oh, dear!” Amyas dropped the spoon in the kettle, and seized both of Nicholas’s hands in his own. “I just thought you’d be happier if you had something to do.”

“It’s all right,” said Nicholas. “I’ve always wanted to work in a darkroom.”

“Have you really? You can start any time.”

He hurried back to fish out his spoon. Nicholas edged his way over to the elevator.

“Are you going to sing with the dwarf tonight?” he asked.

“No. I promised the players I’d sing for them. My dear fellow, where are you going?”

“Outside,” said Nicholas, “if I can get the door open.”

“We’re boring you,” cried Amyas. “How dreadful.”

“No. I need—I need exercise.”

Amyas sighed deeply.

“Janet, unlock the door for him. Or would you prefer to try the stairs? The other door is by the wardrobe. One thing before you leave—please be back in plenty of time for dinner. It’s going to be an occasion you don’t want to miss.”

Outside on the landing Nicholas felt blissfully alone. He hurried down the stairs past a precipitous landing and arguing voices behind a closed door. Across the next landing someone had set up a picket fence to prevent accidents. Nicholas quickened his pace but paused at the third landing to read messages scrawled on the doors that seemed to challenge each other from opposite ends of the corridor: CHINESE MEN’S CLUB—PRIVATE. KEEP OUT! LEATHER AND FURS. Presently the corridor grew light, and he plunged out into the street.

It was a spring day.

He pulled out his harmonica and tried to recapture the feeling: it was a spring day and he was much younger. He walked slowly up Prince Street, sucking at a tune. Twenty blocks away his wife was eating her lunch alone, or washing her hair, or sleeping. Would she call the police to find him? Would she call up her old lovers? The first week of their marriage all sorts of strange people had shown up at all hours of the day and night, and he had thrown them downstairs. Like a test of strength in a carnival booth. Pizza makers, salesmen, even a piano teacher.

Who’s gonna shoe your pretty little foot?

He came to the end of the block. A group of older boys were playing handball on the court. If this were yesterday he would have gone over and joined them, but today he could not make himself do it. He was not tired but shy. Blowing a tune to himself, he turned and walked slowly back to the loft.

All afternoon he hung around on the roof and listened to the murmur and crying of the doves, still calling to themselves in the forest that years of breeding had not dislodged from their memory. Janet had gone off to rehearse and Amyas was napping. Nicholas settled himself so close to the cages that he could see the brown rings on the throats of the white birds and the irridescent sheen on the breasts of the slate-colored ones and the pale rings around the eyes of all the birds, as black and blind-looking as shoe buttons. He watched until he heard Amyas moving about, then he stumbled inside.

Dinner was a slow and elaborate affair, punctuated by shouts and crashes from the loft below. On a silver platter in the middle of the table sat the stuffed tripe, like a baked volley ball. The sink held a tower of dirty pots, dishes, strainers, and knives. The five soups, variously made of chicken and crayfish and snails, left Nicholas feeling bloated. He sat solemnly opposite Janet while Amyas served them and kept up a running chatter.

“I hope you won’t let our neighbors downstairs spoil a good meal. They have the most dreadful arguments. She’s a welder. I don’t know what he does. But I assure you, it’s far worse to be out on the street. Sometimes they throw all their furniture out of the window. Once Janet caught a bottle of olives. We ate them in a salad the next day. Didn’t we, Janet?”

Janet was sawing a sea urchin with her knife and making terrible faces. Amyas watched her as he beat whipped cream.

“The meal would have been much tastier if we could have found an udder, I assure you. A meal fit for Caesar, if I hadn’t had to substitute tripe and if Janet hadn’t insisted on serving string beans. Caesar had an aversion to string beans. He said eating string beans was like eating hairs. And we ought to have worn togas. Meals taste better when you dress for them.”

Crash! Something fell over in the room below and the table gave a violent twitch. Nicholas filled his mouth with rubbery pieces of tripe and washed them down with great gulps of wine.

“Tomorrow I want to try carp à la Napoleon. Only think how you would feel having to eat with a peruke on your head. Once Monsieur de Souze, the Portuguese ambassador to Paris, was dining at the house of Talleyrand, prince of Benevento, and as the servant placed the soup before him, he caught the gentleman’s wig in his cuff button. Whisk! The ambassador was completely bald. Do you know that story?”

He turned his eager eyes on Janet, who was staring off into space and chewing as if to a secret tune.

“I could teach you so much, but you fall asleep,” he whispered into her ear, pinching her lightly. “What an actress I could make of you, my little dove!”

“Amyas, sit down with us,” exclaimed Nicholas. “You’ve cooked a big dinner and you don’t sit down to help us eat it.”

“I eat as I go,” said Amyas, and he began to clear the plates. “You may well imagine, Nicholas, when I sit down, I don’t do it lightly. It involves making a sort of commitment to the chair.”

Raucous singing came up from the corridor below, then died away.

“What time is the play?” asked Nicholas.

“Eight o’clock,” said Janet. “It’s seven now.”

“Seven! That leaves us barely an hour to dress and get there,” cried Amyas. With a grand sweep of his hand he pushed all the dishes into the sink. “We’ll do them tomorrow morning. I hope you’ll excuse me. We haven’t the advantage of an elevator when we visit others in this building.”

And he hurried back to his end of the loft. Janet followed him in silence, leaving Nicholas alone at the table. His stomach sighed loudly. He got up and lay down on the sofa to wait for the others.

“The only inconvenience of this loft is not having bathing facilities,” called Amyas’s voice from the wardrobe. The words sounded curiously muffled, as if he had clothed them in one of his tweeds or caftans. “It’s a nuisance having to bathe at the houses of friends or drawing tubs of water. I should like to get something installed.”

When he finally appeared he was wearing the white shirt and flowered vest he had worn in the restaurant the evening before. But now he had added a kelly green ascot and red suspenders. For a few moments he studied Nicholas appraisingly.

“Have you nothing else to put on?”

“No,” said Nicholas. His old chinos and sweat shirt and his ragged windbreaker suddenly embarrassed him.

“We must buy you some clothes. The man who runs the fur and leather shop downstairs sells suits. I’ve asked him to stop by tomorrow.”

Janet emerged from behind her bed looking very demure in a high-waisted print dress with full sleeves and a high collar. Amyas beamed approval.

“My little dove,” he whispered, and stroked her hair. “Go and fetch my mandolin.”

They set out down the stairs. It was certainly easier for so large a man to go down rather than up, thought Nicholas. But two flights in any direction were too much for Amyas. He huffed and groaned and leaned first on Nicholas and then on Janet, not because he couldn’t manage the stairs but because he was afraid of losing his balance. He trembled and gasped but never broke off his shrill chatter.

“One can’t be too careful—there’s no light and nothing to take hold of,” he panted. “This is where the lady welder lives. A club for Lithuanian refugees used to meet there. And do you know, whenever a Lithuanian met a Chinese from the club downstairs, they passed without speaking. Ah, if I could only fly!”

A sense of deep injustice filled his voice, as if he alone of all men had been born with the defect of gravity. Breathing heavily, he held Janet’s arm and clutched at Nicholas’s shoulder, and soon they heard voices and saw a light that fell on the railing of the fourth floor landing. A man was leaning over and looking up at them.

“Amyas!”

As they reached the bottom of the stairs they heard singing:

You and I and Amyas

Amyas and you and I,

To the greenwood must we go, alas!

You and I, my life and Amyas.

Puffing and limping, Amyas entered the loft with his two faithful servants. Several dozen people were sprawled on both sides of the doorway, leaving a center aisle free. Down the aisle walked Amyas, so joyfully he might have been walking in his own wedding. Nicholas felt a brief surge of pleasure that he was part of this procession, though even before he could name it as pleasure, it turned to quiet anger.

“Amyas!”

There was a round of applause. Bearded and costumed, Amyas waved. He was a play unto himself; what need have we of players? thought Nicholas. Amyas smiled his kingly smile and shook the hand that reached out to him. A boy in a striped poncho hurried up to Nicholas.

“I’m Homer Sax. Welcome to the city of strangers and dreamers. Mike, bring Amyas his chair.”

As if by magic, an upholstered armchair appeared in the front row. It was the only chair in the room. Amyas sank into it graciously. Nicholas sat on the floor to his left, feeling embarrassed. He looked around for Janet but she was nowhere to be seen.

Suddenly Homer Sax stepped out in front of them and clapped his hands for order. Gradually the voices stopped and everyone fell quiet. Three men and three girls sat down in a line to the right of him. Nicholas was startled to see Janet at the far end.

“This is our workshop of dreams,” said Homer Sax, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. “Anyone from the audience can come up and tell his dream. Afterwards we’ll have music and dancing—” he turned toward Amyas—“and wine. Did someone bring the wine?”

A few snickers from the back.

“Yaaas!” shouted a voice.

Everyone laughed. Homer Sax took off his beads and threw them on the ground.

“Well, who wants to go first?”

No one moved. At last a shuffling sound in the back row broke the silence, and a pimply blond boy lumbered up to the front, hopped up on a little wooden box at the back of the stage, and cleared his throat.

“I dreamed I was looking out of the window. Looking down at Prince Street. It was early in the morning.”

A black boy in jeans and a sheepskin vest leaped up from the line of actors, picked up the beads and hung them around his neck, and stared over the heads of the audience, keeping his hands behind his back.

“It was cold. Down in the street people were beating each other up.”

The boy wrapped his arms around himself and shivered. Janet got up and limped out of the line, leaning on her cane. A red-haired boy in black pants and a black sweater seized the cane and pretended to beat her with it. She cowered and sank to the ground. Amyas made a strange noise in his throat. Nicholas looked at him. His enormous hands were gripping the arms of the chair.

“Then I heard the humming of many bees. I looked up the street and saw a procession of animals, all holding each other’s paws and dancing the hora down the street.”

The rest of the players scrambled to their feet and began to bow and skip.

“And it stopped being cold. And people stopped beating each other. And I woke up.”

Janet rose and shook hands with her assailant. Leaning on her cane like an old woman, she hobbled across the stage. Janet the old woman, Janet without Amyas, living out her days alone, turning into Norma Mardachek. Nicholas tried to shake her from his mind, but she hung with sharp claws like a fierce bird.

Now everyone was clapping. The dream teller plumped down on the other side of Amyas.

“A splendid dream, sir. A splendid dream.”

Slowly the players returned to their line.

“Amyas,” shouted Homer Sax, coming to the front of the stage. “You tell us a dream. Yours must be extraordinary.”

Amyas glanced at Janet who was sitting on the floor among the players. She was drawing circles on the floor with her cane.

“Nicholas,” he whispered, “help me up.”

Nicholas jumped up and offered his hand.

“Steady the chair,” whispered Amyas.

Nicholas held the back of the chair. Amyas rocked to and fro several times; then giving a great heave, he threw himself on his feet and thudded across the stage. Somewhere behind him empty wine bottles clinked their heads together. He mounted the box and faced the audience like an elephant on a barrel. There was a sharp splintering sound. Nobody laughed. Amyas stepped off without embarrassment. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and began to shout as if he were delivering a sermon into the wind.

“I dreamed I was a shepherd, leading a flock of sheep across the red desert.”

The black boy in the sheepskin vest threw down the beads and walked slowly across the stage, leaning on an imaginary staff. Janet and three other girls crawled on all fours after him.

“Then I saw an old woman and a little boy whom I knew to be very evil.”

A tall, skinny girl led the red-haired boy to a place in front of the shepherd. Crouching on the floor, they grimaced and pointed to him.

“To prevent them from destroying us, I changed my entire flock into stones.”

The sheep curled up into four limp mounds.

“Yes, I even changed myself into a stone, except for my right ear, which I left unchanged so that I could hear if any evil was being plotted against us.”

The shepherd hunched himself up like a beetle but laid his hand against the side of his head.

“Then I heard one of my sheep escaping.” Amyas’s voice trembled a little. “Yes, indeed, I heard one of my sheep escaping. And I thought, have I not changed them all into stones?”

No one moved on stage. Amyas’s eyes glittered and seemed to bulge from his head. Not a sound could be heard but Amyas’s heavy breathing and the clump clump of Janet’s shoes, like an animal dragging a trap. When Amyas spoke his words hissed out like steam.

“Then I said to myself, though I am stone, yet I will fly!”

He let out a yell and lunged toward the door. Nicholas flew after him, sprang on his back, and hung on. They tumbled through the doorway together in time to see Janet running down the stairs. Amyas heaved himself this way and that but Nicholas locked his arm around the other man’s neck and pinned him against the railing.

“Janet, run!” he shouted.

A terrible cracking followed. The railing snapped and split and Amyas dropped to the stairs below, with Nicholas riding him like a boy on a dolphin. It felt stranger than any dream, this sudden loss of weight and support, this falling through space, this turning into a pair of struggling swimmers who suddenly hit rock at the bottom of the air. Then Nicholas saw only Amyas’s eyes staring past him and a gush of blood from his head spreading over the floor.

Far away he heard cries.

“Call an ambulance!”

“Don’t move him! For God’s sake, don’t move him!”

Hands lifted Nicholas to his feet. He ached in a hundred places but he knew he was not hurt. Amyas had cushioned the fall, and now he lay with bloody head and twisted limbs like a drowned man, bloated and washed up on a strange shore. Janet was wailing like a child. Homer Sax’s voice rose over them all.

“Give him air. Clear out, all of you!”

Nicholas staggered upstairs. The tall, skinny girl took him by the arm and tried to wipe away a thin trickle of blood that flowed from a cut over his left eye. Something unpleasant was thumping inside his skull. He sat on the floor where the players had been but a moment before, and obstinately refused to move. But a little while later when Homer Sax came to help him back up to the sixth floor loft, he took his arm meekly enough. The stairway was littered with broken pickets like toy swords. Amyas and Janet had disappeared.

III

Nicholas woke up suddenly. Someone was pounding on the door.

“Coming!” he shouted. As he eased himself painfully out of bed, he heard a discreet cough. By the elevator door stood a small, dark-haired man with large teeth. He was leaning on a rack of trench coats, slacks, and jackets.

“Excuse me. Your door was open. I assumed that Mr. Axel left it open so that I could deliver the suits.”

“What suits?” said Nicholas. The man was staring at his sweat shirt and chinos, torn from the struggle on the stairs and wrinkled from last night’s fitful sleep.

“You’re supposed to pick out whatever you like. I got some nice Harris tweeds here and some good slacks if you don’t like anything so fancy as a suit.”

“Not now,” said Nicholas. “Come back tomorrow.”

“Oh, I can’t do that,” cried the man nervously. “I have no idea what we’ll come across tomorrow. These may be gone. And we might not get any more tweed in for a week. You don’t find so many in the spring.”

“Please go,” said Nicholas.

“Listen,” persisted the man. “I can’t go unless you pick one. Mr. Axel has paid for two suits, and he wanted them brought up right away. He’s very fussy about his orders. Do you mind if I pick some things for you?”

The man pulled a corduroy jacket and a pair of slacks off the rack and hung them on the open doors of Janet’s bed. Then he pushed the rack into the elevator, closed the door, and disappeared as mysteriously as he had arrived.

There was no point in going back to bed. Nicholas put on the jacket and noticed a cigarette hole in the left sleeve. He felt he should return it at once, but to whom? Furthermore, the loft had grown chilly without Amyas. Nicholas opened the door to the roof and heard the chimes from the church on Sullivan Street, like the twelve clocks of God that his wife once told him would ring the elect into paradise. A man at Bellevue heard it three times a day: the passing of time depends, he said, on the three golden bells that turn slowly inside. Nicholas started to open the first cage, then decided it was too risky. He went back inside and scooped a bowlful of cracked corn from one of the bags under the sink. He was on his way out to feed the doves when he heard voices ascending the elevator.

“My little bird, you mustn’t worry so much. If he’s not there, we’ll wait till he comes back.”

Then the door opened and Janet, looking very pale, walked in pushing a wheelchair. Amyas overflowed it on all sides. Seeing Nicholas he gave a yelp of joy.

“See, Janet, didn’t I tell you he’d still be here?”

It was the same voice, the same fat belly, the same forked beard. But his face was badly swollen and his thick hair had been cut shorter and the back of his head was heavily bandaged. His right leg ballooned out in a heavy cast, like a piece of artillery.

“They wanted me to stay, but I told them I had important matters at home. A family to look after. I see you’ve been feeding my doves.”

Then he noticed the new jacket.

“Richie came, did he?”

“My God, Amyas, I’m so glad to see you,” cried Nicholas. He wanted to embrace him but instead shook both his hands.

“Are you glad, Nicholas? Are you glad? Wasn’t it silly of me to think you would go away?”

“Where should I go?”

It startled Nicholas as he said it, because for the first time he realized it was true. This knowledge made it easy for him to settle into the slow timelessness of Amyas’s recuperation. From that hour on, the past did not exist. None of them mentioned the accident except as a way of marking the end of one life and the beginning of another: the day Amyas broke his leg. In Nicholas’s mind the mornings that followed blurred into one continuous morning without end. Even after Amyas got his crutches, Janet would wheel him out to feed his birds—for he hated to leave his chair—and let them out to circle around the roof.

“I’ve never lost one, Janet. Not one!”

As morning slid imperceptibly into afternoon, Amyas puttered with his glider, Janet went down to rehearse with her players, and Nicholas, following Amyas’s wishes, took a job in the Akton darkroom on the second floor. He arrived knowing nothing at all and wondering if perhaps Amyas hadn’t bribed Mr. March, the manager, to take him on. The first morning he watched half a dozen men and women wash the shining rolls of film in huge tanks while others ran off masses of prints under the red glow of the safelights. The second morning he cleaned trays, numbered film envelopes, and sorted prints. The third morning he was given his own rolls to wash and another set to print.

It wasn’t a bad place to work, he told himself. But when he walked out of the darkroom, the sight of ten old women sitting at a long table and stapling envelopes of photographs depressed him. The packaging room was unimaginably drab, like an airplane hangar. The darkroom, on the other hand, seemed always about to explode. The soft red light which infused all their work whetted and roused strange passions. The women were large and buxom, the men small and hairless, and they worked side by side in a room so tiny that they couldn’t help rubbing against each other. The men sidled up behind the women and pinched them, and the women brushed the men with their enormous breasts, and the air grew hot with sweat and promises. The smallest and most brazen among them all, a retired jockey named Jon Spalding, would sometimes whisper in Nicholas’s ear, “You’ll never have a better chance.”

Nicholas felt at ease only with the two women who worked on either side of him, Charlene Schwartz, a divorcée who had two children and lived in the Bronx, and Barbara Wiggins, a plump girl who had recently quit her job as a waitress and was constantly regretting it. A week after he arrived she began to wear such strong perfume that one of the other women threatened to complain to Mr. March.

“She’s sweet on you, she is,” grinned Jon Spalding, nudging Nicholas significantly as they passed one another in the red light.

But Nicholas had lost his taste for large buxom women. Skinny women, with some defect, these were the kind he loved now. No such women surrounded him here, and not wishing to have his taste challenged, he tried to lose himself in his work. He told himself that nothing pleased him more than seeing the images find themselves in the developing fluid. Slowly filling the blank paper, they would arrive, lined up in their Easter clothes on hundreds of doorsteps all over New York. Children blowing out candles, families crowded and smiling on low sofas. And occasionally an attempt at something serious—a landscape, badly out of focus, from a kid’s cheap camera.

He arrived at one and left at four, well pleased. He knew that if he quit tomorrow the loss of his small income would hardly ripple their lives. Amyas took care of them but knew the value of keeping up certain illusions about independence, and Nicholas was happy to let Amyas think he accepted the illusions as truth. The truth was, Nicholas enjoyed being comfortable.

With Amyas confined to his chair, the great feasts and exotic dinners came to an end. Amyas did not complain, but when Janet put a plate of peas and hamburgers before him, he sighed deeply.

“How much I could teach you, my little dove.”

And afterwards, plucking the stray peas from his beard, he wheeled himself over to inspect his glider.

“Janet, do you think you could get me a pair of wheels?”

Janet was washing the dishes and handing them to Nicholas, who dried them and stacked them in the cupboard.

“How would I get you a pair of wheels?” she asked.

“You could find a pair. You could have them delivered.”

Nicholas stepped behind Janet’s bed to have a look. Amyas had recently installed a cockpit, and the glider looked less like a dream of Leonardo da Vinci’s and more like a working machine.

“Isn’t my blue angel handsome?” exclaimed Amyas, fingering the tip of one wing.

On an afternoon that started out as no more than a brilliant chip off the long dream of their life together, Nicholas entered the loft after work and heard Amyas and Janet arguing. Sitting alone beside the table, which was already set for dinner, Janet was darning a huge black stocking. It belonged, Nicholas knew, to Amyas. She broke the thread and threw the stocking across the room.

“I don’t know why I can’t go with them. You have Nicholas.”

“My little dove,” rumbled Amyas’s voice from the bathoom, “Nicholas isn’t you. I would worry about you terribly.”

She pulled a pale nylon stocking from the pile on the floor beside her, yanked a single strand of hair out of her head, threaded the needle and began to mend a long run.

“And why do we have to eat dinner so close to the bathroom where a person can smell and hear everything that goes on in there?” she called to him.

“I’ll ask Nicholas to move the table,” said Amyas.

Catching sight of Nicholas, she raised her voice.

“Isn’t it odd that the only person who has carpeting around his bed is Amyas? Nice green carpeting. You know why, Nicholas? Green is the color of life, it scares away the rats. On a gray floor they feel right at home. But gray is good enough for you and me.”

From the bathroom came an inarticulate moan.

“And why should Amyas get half the room to himself while you and I share the other half with the kitchen and the bathroom and the glider?”

Suddenly she burst into tears, dropped her sewing, and flew over to her bed. Its doors slammed shut. Amyas burst out of the bathroom and wheeled himself after her.

“My pigeon, what is it? Nobody’s making you work if you don’t want to. I’ve plenty of money to hire someone to clean the loft and fix our meals.”

From behind the doors came a drawn-out snuffle. Amyas turned to Nicholas who stood rooted in the doorway.

“Ah, Nicholas, what to do! The Apple Town Players are going on the road and she wants to go with them. The whole venture is terribly impractical. They’ve borrowed an old truck—I’m sure it will break down—and they’ll earn their keep by passing the hat at performances. Who will look after her there?”

He wheeled himself up to the doors and pressed his ear against them.

“Are you ill? Do you want me to fetch a doctor?”

No response.

“Nicholas, sit down and eat before everything gets cold. I hope you like macaroni and cheese.”

“I’m not going to sit down alone,” said Nicholas.

“Did you hear that?” cried Amyas, drumming his fists on the doors. “Nobody can do anything. We’re completely prostrate. How can we eat dinner when you’ve locked yourself up?”

Still no reply. Amyas sighed.

“Leave a dish of macaroni by the doors. I don’t want her starving to death in there.”

Amyas watched every move as Nicholas spooned it into a bowl.

“Don’t forget the napkin and the fork.”

Nicholas placed it on a chair outside the bed, like an offering to some petulant sybil. Then Amyas motioned him to sit down and fell upon the meal with both hands. He seemed to have forgotten the use of a fork. After dinner they worked on the glider together and conversed without pleasure. Both went to bed early. Janet brooding in her dark nest did not utter a sound.

IV

The first thing Nicholas saw when he woke up the next morning was the doors swinging wide and beyond them the rumpled empty bed. He rushed over to Amyas and shook him awake.

“She’s gone! Flown away! The bed is empty!” he cried.

Amyas, in a peacock blue Nehru nightshirt, opened his eyes and turned deadly pale.

“My chair, Nicholas,” he said.

Nicholas steadied the chair, eased him into it, and settled the heavy leg in its cast.

“Go and put on some clothes,” snapped Amyas. “It’s chilly. Do you want two invalids up here instead of one?”

Then he wheeled himself over to Janet’s bed, peered inside, closed the doors, and backed over the empty dish on the floor, smashing it. Under Nicholas’s gaze, he rolled around the room, pausing to look into the wardrobe, the sink, the cupboards, until he had examined everything.

“At least she had the sense to take enough clothes,” he said. “She also took a new loaf of pumpernickel she got for my breakfast this morning. We shall have to make do. Nicholas, put on the coffee.”

Slightly annoyed at being ordered about, Nicholas filled the coffeepot and plugged it in.

“Move the table please. It is really too unpleasant sitting so close to the bathroom where the most offensive smells mingle with the odor of the food. I suppose she took the pecan roll as well.”

Nicholas peered into the cupboard and into the icebox.

“I don’t see any roll.”

“Get out the toaster, then. We’ll have toast. Assuming that she didn’t take the last slice of white bread.”

They sat opposite each other in silence like a quarreling couple until the first slice of toast popped up. Amyas gulped down six slices as if they were crackers. Nicholas managed to save one for himself. He shook the bread bag for the last slice, but it was empty.

“Well,” said Amyas, pushing himself away from the table, “what do you think of carpeting the whole floor, Nicholas?”

“Why, I’d like it, I guess,” said Nicholas. Amyas’s reaction made him uneasy; he was taking Janet’s flight too lightly.

“So would Janet. But one mustn’t give in too fast. It’s not worth compromising one’s character to settle an argument. The most important thing to remember is that she’ll come back.” A glazed, dreamy look passed like a film over his eyes. “She always comes back.”

“Oh,” said Nicholas, greatly relieved. “Then she’s done this before.”

Amyas nodded.

“She goes away sometimes to test me. And when she comes back, the bond is even stronger. Don’t think she’s left me behind, Nicholas. When she first arrived, I sewed my gold Saint Christopher medal into the lining of her jacket.”

“Are you Catholic?” exclaimed Nicholas, very much surprised.

“No. My mother was a convert. I don’t know whether Saint Christopher will do much for Janet; he never helped my mother. What matters is that she hasn’t really lost me. Whenever she goes out, she carries some part of me, some small token of myself. And one day she’ll be feeling in her jacket for some change and she’ll feel a coin buried deep in the lining. She’ll be curious. She’ll fetch scissors and open the lining. And out will fall my medal, engraved with my name, Amyas Axel. Then she’ll remember where she lives and come home.”

Nicholas got up and started toward the door.

“Are you going to the darkroom?”

“Yes, I thought I’d work a little today.”

“You don’t have to work, you know, if you’d rather not.”

“I know,” said Nicholas. He wanted to get away. “But it gives me something to do.”

To enter the darkroom, to plunge his hands into its mysterious baths and bring out the faces of the past comforted him. He hurried past the gray ladies packaging prints to his place in the darkness between plump Barbara and boisterous Charlene.

“Oh, God. One more picture of kids in Easter bonnets and I’m quitting,” cried Charlene.

But Nicholas was leaning over his tray of fluids, transfixed. A bride and groom were slowly coming alive on the paper, figures torn from the past, looking a little bewildered until their features clarified and they recognized one another, and now they were smiling forever. Where are you now, thought Nicholas as he dropped them into the fixative bath. For the bride wore the graceless style and curled pageboy of an earlier time. Once it pleased Nicholas to mediate between the past and the present, to remember again the centuries of lives and cities that stretched in all directions away from Amyas’s loft. To remember and touch nothing.

“She’s testing me,” said Amyas every morning. “She’ll drop us a line in a day or two.”

He quit work on the glider and began reading cookbooks and planning the menus he would prepare when she returned: stuffed dormice, snails fattened in milk, violet wine. To Nicholas he gave the task of ordering groceries from the Chinese grocery store once a week. Monday night a young boy deposited them in the elevator and Nicholas accompanied them up to the loft, where Amyas ordered him to put everything away while instructing him in matters of the palate.

“The paper belongs on the top shelf—that’s right. Now where was I?”

“The Frankish dishes,” said Nicholas wearily.

“Yes. I’m glad to see you’re really listening. The Frankish dishes bring to the meal a—how shall I describe it?—a primitive flavor. Oh, Nicholas, do remember to order me some snails. Janet will adore them.”

But when two weeks had passed without a word from her, Amyas’s calm began to crack. Before she left, the days flowed around them as indivisibly as a river. Now they counted not only the days but the hours. On the fourteenth day after her flight, Amyas took action.

“Nicholas,” he said, when the noon mail had brought him nothing, “why don’t you go down to the dead letter office and see if there’s a message from Janet?”

“Why, she knows how to reach us if she wants to.”

“Oh, but she might have misaddressed the letter. Or it might have got lost. Thousands of letters disappear every year.”

“I don’t know,” said Nicholas doubtfully. “If it’s lost, how are they going to find it?”

But Amyas persisted until Nicholas finally gave in. Five days later, on a Friday morning, he took the subway to the main post office on Eighth Avenue. It seemed to him that never in his life had he been jostled by so many people and touched by so many different shades of frustration. Watching the faces of humanity blossom and ripen in the darkroom, he felt he had detached himself from them. Now he sat in the crowded car and tried to gather himself together while thighs, coats, behinds, and packages pressed upon him. The names of streets flashed by on the wall outside like milestones, as if all the passengers were hurtling on a timeline and would step out in an unknown century.

A hefty black woman at the other end of the car let out a cry.

“I left it on the platform. On the platform. No use goin’ back. Somebody’s got it by now.”

The white girl in front of Nicholas gripped her purse and felt for the shopping bag wedged between her feet.

“No use goin’ back,” chanted the other, swaying on her feet as if she were crooning to herself.

No use goin’ back.

No use goin’ back.

No use goin’ back.

Somebody’s got you by now.

Nicholas walked into the lobby of the post office, huge, austere, and empty. In such a room the unbaptized and the unforgiven could wait in vain for a glimpse of the mercy of God. Only one window was open for service. Nicholas walked over to a face as closed and hostile as a fist. The old man on the other side of the grille heard the resonant boom of footsteps and glanced up.

“Excuse me,” said Nicholas. “I’m expecting a letter from someone, and I think it might have gotten lost. Is there any way of checking the dead letter office to see whether—”

He could not finish; the old man’s eyes were widening with disbelief. Presently he answered, so slowly and deliberately that Nicholas had the curious feeling he was watching a dubbed-in performance.

“Do you know how many dead letters we get each year?”

“No,” said Nicholas.

“Hundreds. Thousands. We have rooms full of letters that we can’t deliver. The writers are dead, the people they’re addressed to are dead. Every Christmas we’re flooded with cards to people who’ve been dead for years.”

He was warming to his subject; he slapped the counter with the side of his hand.

“And the worst of it is, not one of those letters has a return address. Then it would be simple; we’d stamp it ‘deceased,’ and send it back.”

“I just thought—that is, this letter would be very recent——” Nicholas stammered.

“You don’t understand! Once a letter goes into the dead letter office, it disappears like a snowflake in a blizzard. The pile is always shifting, so you can’t count on finding the recent ones. In warm weather they may work their way clear down to the middle of the pile.”

“Then I guess there’s no hope, is there?” said Nicholas.

The man shook his head.

“None.”

Amyas took the news bravely.

“She’s testing me,” he repeated over and over. “She’ll come back.”

But already Nicholas found himself making those subtle adjustments of thought and feeling that people discover to help them accept loss. Already Janet had crystallized into a series of snapshots which his mind brought forth whenever he saw a girl wearing a velvet headband over straight hair, or when he passed the theatrical makeup store, which because of fire was now closed indefinitely. When she finally did return, she seemed to have passed through layers of experience so far beyond his understanding that she was hardly the same person.

V

Nothing could have been simpler than her return. It happened on a May evening after a light rain when the smell of clean air blew through the loft from the roof outside, like a friendly guest. Amyas and Nicholas were puttering with the glider when both heard the elevator climbing to their room. It jolted to a stop and somebody fumbled at the lock on the door. Nicholas felt himself go cold. But Amyas, turning as pale as the cast on his leg, wheeled himself to the door just as it sprang open. In walked Janet. When he saw her, he let out a cry.

“My God, what has happened to you?”

Only her heavy shoe and her cane told Nicholas here was the old Janet. In every other way she seemed a changed creature. She had cut her hair short and she wore a man’s pinstripe suit, taken in at the shoulders and waist; everywhere else it bagged outrageously. Yet she was not a comic figure but as sly and cautious as a stray cat.

“Evening,” she said, nodding to Nicholas.

Then she opened her mouth to say something to Amyas, but no one ever heard what it was, for when he lifted his arms, she rushed to him and buried her face in his beard, and they clung together like wrestlers engaged in some bizarre test of endurance. Then her body relaxed and she raised her face and smiled first at Nicholas, then at Amyas, who stroked her hair.

“We’ll celebrate,” whispered Amyas. “We’ll go someplace together and celebrate. My little dove,” he exclaimed, “you don’t have to tell me anything. We’ll go to Tony’s. Nicholas, go fetch my mandolin. This evening I’ll initiate my new crutches.”

In the taxi, Janet perched on Amyas’s good knee and laid her arm around his shoulders. The hair shaved from the cut at the back of his head after the accident had not quite grown back. Janet rubbed her fingers over the stubble, and Nicholas, sitting in front, tried to focus on the meter.

“Are you glad to see me, Nicholas?” she asked.

“Very glad,” said Nicholas.

“We’re here,” exclaimed Amyas. “Nicholas, do you have the fare? I find it difficult to get at my purse just now.”

When the taxi stopped, Janet leaped to the sidewalk and offered Amyas her arm. He spilled out of the cab, puffing and groaning, and teetered unsteadily on his crutches. Like two maimed derelicts, they entered the restaurant together, leaving Nicholas to search his wallet for something smaller than a twenty-dollar bill. He could hardly hide his impatience as the driver slowly counted out the change.

“Five, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen dollars. Thank you, mister.”

Stuffing the bills into his jacket, he hurried inside. How many years had passed since he last walked through this door, in some other life, his life before Amyas? Looking about, he spotted one vacant seat in the back at a table occupied by two young men and a girl in a pinstripe suit who sat opposite the empty place and kept glancing behind her toward the kitchen. A waiter, seeing him, took the mandolin out of his arms and hurried away. There was no sign of Amyas in the kitchen. The cook was standing at a counter chopping vegetables. Nicholas pushed his way down the aisle past the long rows of people eating and sat down opposite Janet.

Suddenly everyone in the room burst into applause. Out of the kitchen marched Gunther the dwarf lugging his guitar. Amyas the giant limped after him, swinging his elephantine leg as he leaned on his crutches. When Nicholas saw again the black vest embroidered with flowers, he could almost believe that Amyas had never taken it off.

“Gunther! Amyas!”

“Amyas!”

Gunther waved to the girl who had called out his name. But Amyas smiled only at Janet. Behind them, the waiter carried the mandolin and a chair, which he set directly opposite Janet’s table. The dwarf tuned his guitar, holding it high against his cheek. Amyas leaned his crutches against the wall, seated himself, and laid his fingers on the fretboard of the mandolin. Looking at each other, they thumped out a few measures. Then the dwarf opened his mouth and shouted the refrain, which Amyas punctuated with cries of joy:

You and I and Amyas,

Amyas and you and I

To the greenwood must we go, alas!

You and I, my life and Amyas.

The two young men stopped eating to listen. Janet rested her chin in her hands and Nicholas felt her eyes upon him. He gave her a quick smile. She did not smile back, nor did she take her eyes from him. Now the dwarf was bobbing up and down as he cantered toward the last verse.

Who’s gonna shoe your pretty little foot

with boots of Spanish leather?

I’ll go no more to her bedside,

so let the devil take her.

Let the devil take her! roared the audience, stamping its feet.

The dwarf lifted his hands from the strings, and everyone applauded. Nicholas rose automatically as the waiter slid an extra chair between Janet and himself. When Amyas sat down, a feast appeared as if by silent command. Where there was nothing, now there was bread, wine, soup, half a sheep’s head, and a plate of spaghetti. Amyas’s eyes followed the waiter’s hands with pleasure, till the last dish appeared on the table.

“Meine Kinder,” he said. He looked from Janet to Nicholas, reached across the table, and took their hands. “My little doves.”

Then he gave himself over to his dinner. Janet twirled the spaghetti around her fork and when Amyas lifted a tidbit for her to take from his fingers, she shook her head. But neither Nicholas’s silence nor Janet’s reticence could dim the luster of his joy. As Nicholas drank, he felt some part of himself drift away in sleep while another part of him entered an elaborate and familiar dream. Of Amyas reaching for Janet’s cane. Of Janet draping Amyas’s coat around his shoulders. Of himself following them outside, into the taxi, into the elevator. Cautiously he stepped into the spacious room and entered his own life as a stranger.

In the darkness he heard Janet tossing and singing to herself behind the closed doors of her bed. Under the embroidered skins of one thousand dragons lay Amyas, his immense belly shaken with snores. Nicholas closed his eyes and drifted back to sleep. All at once someone touched his cheek.

“Be quiet,” whispered Janet. “It’s just me.”

She was sitting on the floor beside him, wrapped in Amyas’s peacock blue nightshirt, barely visible in the weak light from the street.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter. I want to talk to someone.”

“Oh.” Nicholas relaxed a little. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Don’t, Nicholas. I couldn’t fall asleep.”

The silence between them rippled with Amyas’s snorts and sighs.

“Nicholas, do you ever miss your wife?”

“No,” said Nicholas.

“You don’t? I just don’t see how you could love her and go away and not think of her afterward.”

Nicholas considered this carefully.

“You did love her, didn’t you?”

“I don’t think so. I was lonely and she came along at the right time.”

“I wish you’d met me then.”

“Then I would have married you.”

Suddenly she put her lips close to his ear and whispered, “Nicholas, I’ve got us a place to live. Will you come with me?”

“What did you say?” cried Nicholas.

“Not so loud! I’ve got us a place to live.”

Nicholas stared at her in astonishment.

“Do you want me to marry you?”

Her shoulders shrugged under the peacock folds.

“I want to go away for good. I feel like I’m rotting here. Don’t you feel like that? Day after day, always the same thing, the same room. Except to do the shopping. Amyas never wants me to go outside at all.”

“Why did you come back?”

“I don’t want to live alone.”

“I thought,” said Nicholas very slowly, “that you were in love with Amyas. And I don’t think you’re in love with me.”

Janet twisted a corner of the nightshirt.

“You start depending on a person to tell you what to do, and pretty soon you can’t leave.”

Nicholas was silent. He tried to imagine himself not feeding Amyas’s birds, cooking his meals, or working on his glider, and in turn not eating at his table, and sleeping under his roof, and not wearing the clothes that Amyas bought for him. The four walls of the loft seemed to cave in around him, and the winds of freedom blew fear into his heart.

“When are you planning to leave?”

“I want to leave right now.”

“You can’t leave in the middle of the night.”

“Don’t be silly, Nicholas. It’s almost morning. Get up and pack.”

“I can’t pack in the dark.”

“Why not? All you have is your knapsack. It’s under the sofa. Everything else belongs to Amyas.”

She reached down and pulled it out for him.

“There’s no need to sneak off like this,” protested Nicholas. “It’s stupid and ungrateful. I really don’t see why we can’t tell him tomorrow morning that we want to leave and walk out the door.”

“You know he won’t let us go,” said Janet softly. “You know if we ask him and he says yes, we’ll have to come back sometime. Ten years later maybe, but we’ll still have to come back.”

Far away, the huge figure on the bed by the window sighed deeply. Amyas lay with his arm thrown over his face. When they left, he looked like a drowned man saying goodbye.

There was almost nobody on Prince Street. Somewhere out of sight the sun rose. A heavy fog bandaged all the buildings and a warm rain began to fall.

“Smell,” said Janet, drawing in her breath. “It smells like summer.”

That afternoon they moved into a small, shabbily furnished apartment on Ninth Street. It belonged to Homer Sax’s brother, Paul, who had left a month earlier to study painting in southern France. Every wall in the living room was painted a different shade of red; the kitchen and bedroom were Prussian blue. Paul Sax left them all his furniture, some of his books, and a box of Graham crackers on the kitchen counter. That evening Janet bought a book on cockroaches, explaining to Nicholas that you had to know your enemy in order to fight it. She put their names on the mailbox as Janet and Nicholas Mardachek, and after a week Nicholas felt as if he’d been married forever. The six months he’d spent with his wife seemed but a trial to be passed through before he could enter the life he had always imagined. The two months with Amyas were an intermittent season, a time of healing.

It was a spring day and he was much younger.

He did not return to the darkroom. All those days at his father’s filling station in Akron and then the days after that when his wife nagged him to find a job, he had dreamed of someone to wait on him. Of someone with money who wouldn’t make him work. He would buy a movie projector and set it up in the bedroom and they would watch old westerns all night long. Janet was delighted. She did not want to be alone and she was eager to please. They rose at noon and spent the rest of the day browsing in the camera shops around Harold Square.

At Olden’s, the clerk offered them a secondhand projector for seventy-five dollars. Janet took Nicholas aside.

“How much does a new one cost?”

“A couple hundred.”

“Well, we can afford that.”

“We can?”

He was amazed. He knew she had some money, as she never asked him for any, but not so much that she could afford to spend it freely.

“How much have you got saved?”

“Enough,” said Janet.

“You didn’t earn very much with the Apple Town Players.”

“No,” she agreed. “I took money from Amyas.”

Nicholas looked so shocked that Janet tried to make light of it.

“But, Nicholas, he’s very rich. You mustn’t feel bad. He has all sorts of connections and more money than he knows what to do with. Why, Nicholas, he’d want me to have it. He always bought me whatever I asked for. He kept all his money in an envelope under his cookbooks. I’d tell him, ‘Why don’t you get yourself a bigger place?’ But he has this notion of discipline. Even when you’ve got money, you don’t spend it.”

The clerk was smiling at them.

“Will you take this one, or would you rather wait for a new one?”

“I’ll wait, thanks,” said Nicholas. Janet took his arm. They rode the subway home in silence.

Though they did not speak of it again, the source of Janet’s money lay between them like ill-feeling. For it seemed to Nicholas that they had escaped nothing; they were living in one of the many annexes of Amyas’s love. At night, the faces of those he had cast away, Norma Mardachek and Amyas Axel, formed themselves over and over in the darkroom of his mind, and though he could not see them so clearly when he was awake, they fettered his joy. Every afternoon he took long walks alone. Janet saw him to the door with a smile.

“You see?” she said. “I’m not going to keep you locked up like a tame bird.”

She never asked him where he went and he never told her. Sometimes he would describe what he had seen.

“I saw a man walking two goats, a black goat and a white one.”

“Did you? Where?”

“I don’t remember exactly.”

He never told her that he had gone to his old place off Hester to see if his wife still lived there. It would be no use explaining that he didn’t really want to see his wife, that in fact he hoped he wouldn’t meet her. He simply wanted to put his past in order. Yet when he approached the house he could hardly breathe for excitement. Cautiously he climbed the front stairs, entered the vestibule, and peered at the names on the mailboxes. A pang of disappointment shot through him. Hers was not there. He had no hope of locating her now. As he walked away, he tried to call up the dreadful scenes they had played out together.

“I saw a little boy trying to push another little boy into a mailbox.”

“Did you really? Where?”

“Downtown.”

He did not tell her that it was Prince Street and he had gone to see Amyas. No, not Amyas himself, but the residence of Amyas, as one makes a pilgrimage to see Beethoven’s house or Grace Kelly’s swimming pool, comfortably assured of not meeting the real object of one’s worship. That Sunday morning everything felt as still and changeless as a prayer lettered in gold and touched with peace. Doll Manufacturing Company. Bolts and Parts. The make-up shop, its windows boarded over. The vacant handball court. The newspaper store.

Nicholas went in, brushing past layers of magazines clipped on wires like an elaborate quilt. An old man who was reading and stroking his gray moustache stood up behind the counter.

“One egg cream,” said Nicholas.

It was a spring day and he was much younger, loitering around the playground after school.

“Nice day,” said the old man, smiling as he watched Nicholas drink till the air in the empty straw made a loud noise. Nicholas pushed the paper cup away.

“I’m trying to find a fellow named Amyas Axel,” he said. “Do you ever see him much?”

“The big fat fella? I knew who he was, but I never run into him myself. Did you say you’re trying to find him?”

“Yes,” said Nicholas.

“Well, he’s dead.”

“I—”

He could not bring out the words; he did not know what the right words were.

“I didn’t see it happen. Some kids who live in the building told me he tried to fly out the window. He had some kind of flying machine and he stuck a pair of wings on himself and just took off. Jumped clean out the window.”

Nicholas said nothing but felt himself turning to stone.

“He didn’t have no family. There wasn’t nobody to tell about it. The police carted him away like a dead horse.”

The man allowed a few minutes’ respectful silence before he said, “That’ll be fifteen cents for the egg cream.”

Fumbling in his pocket for the change, Nicholas touched the shape of a coin caught in the lining. A coin? A medal, wishing him a safe journey, a medal from Amyas? Wasn’t the jacket a gift from Amyas, too? He tore the jacket off his back, threw it on the counter, and fled.

Although he did not speak of Amyas’s death to Janet, the weight of his new knowledge bowed him. During dinner, he could not concentrate on her plans for repainting the living room white and buying a formica table for the kitchen. That night she showed him a new nightgown she had bought, a high-waisted cotton print with full sleeves and a velvet sash, and when she crawled into bed beside him, smelling of perfume and new flannel, he could not restrain himself.

“Did you buy it for Amyas?”

Janet shrugged. Then she said, “You went to visit Amyas today, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Nicholas.

“How is he?”

“Dead.”

She gave a sudden jerk.

“He jumped out the window last week.”

Silence, broken only with difficulty.

“Oh, Nicholas, even when he’s dead, he’s still got us in the palm of his hand,” whispered Janet, and started to cry.

Nicholas couldn’t bear that; he shook her and pulled her face against him.

“Cut it out. Listen, Janet, can’t you just think of him as someone who brought us together?”

She sniffled a little, then allowed herself to curl up against him, and each knew who the other was thinking of and Nicholas knew it was best to say nothing because he felt that they were lying under one huge shadow, like two creatures curled together in one womb that carried them still. He would not let himself cry until Janet fell asleep. But when his heart showed him that huge man bedded down in the sticks and stones of Potter’s Field, he thought his whole body would burst with grief.