THIS TIME YESTERDAY MORNING, I was sitting in one of the coaches of the Mayflower, the early New York to Boston train, on my way to take part in a panel at the monthly meeting of the Interagency Council of Supervisors, a professional organization to which I belong. Inside me, that tender, inverse psyche we all carry within us was as usual at once violently proud of its outer costume and at the same time making mock of it: silk suit sharp-creased for speechmaking, all underwear appropriate to legcrossing on platform, handbag by X, shoes by Y—all a perfect beige armor stopping just short of the creature-skin that no Florida can tan, inside which the little lady sits, quiet and not always sad, in her altogether, of that tint so much too nacreously fair.

And a hat—I am always extra careful about the hat. A person who wears a wig has to be. In bygone days—think of it, only a year or so ago—a person who had to wear a wig was still special, and buying a hat was for her, one might say, an affair of the double incognito, the purchase of a crown to place upon the crown that no one must know she already wore. Particularly if at the bottom of it all, beneath hat, wig, armor and skin, there was still caged but not coffined, ready to run if not rampant, the laughing tomboy of thirteen, putative cabinboy of fifteen, dockside loafer, bankrobber’s mascot and Fagin’s modern wonderboy in blue jeans and plimsolls with the tips of his fingers emeried; all shapes and types of tramp-Raffles riding the rods under the scurrying cries of the railway police—confidence makers and takers thumbing their young stowaway noses from soup kitchens to the sub-basements of all the Statler-Hiltons, freeloading and riding all the flowery, Bowery subcircuses of the world. All of them wearing caps, none of them grown past twenty, and none quite yet bald. My present profession makes it possible for me to observe quite selflessly that my imagination only took up its orthodox womanhood at the moment when the head which caged it had lost its last trace of hair.

The train was just getting into Providence, Rhode Island, due at 10:52, and on time. I know every curve and tockety of the Shore Line, having done all my later studies in Boston, with training trips from there to New York City, that even richer source for our stock-in-trade. It was wise of me to come East after Cooksley Normal; though the wig I bought on the way, in Chicago’s Loop, was not very good, it was better than the wrap-around turbans I had been wearing. And Boston, as everyone knows, is tops in social work—there being, further, no mystery as to why this profession should be mine. Even back in Cooksley, I had no trouble with psychological essences and timbres—after all, we had the same magazines as the rest of the country—and my education merely thrust me deeper back upon my own meanings.

For, very early during my practice days “in the field,” as the pretty word for it goes in the profession, I knew that, via my work, the sores and seams of my own romanticism were being kept in sight for me at the very time I needed this—for who can say to what imaginations a bald beauty (I am otherwise comely) might not at any time revert? This way, all the while I toured the underworld I loved, a dainty Dante in her own laurel wreath, I was being kept a lady, or being made into one. None of my supervisors then or now (for all who work with the poor must have comptrollers who help keep our heads clear and well-hatted) has ever had to remind me that my work was sublimating me, though they mayn’t have known in quite what terms.

And it is natural, therefore, that I have risen in it, though still well under thirty-nine. For I have never wholly deserted the field for deskwork, as most do as soon as possible, though I deserve no credit for having now and then a fierce need to carry slops and mealtickets to the midnight alleys, or to slog the mean streets in search of the company of those tucked jolly under the viaduct, around the fire made after the cop has made his last round, there to watch how, at dawn, the waterbugs streak like lizards from the Chinese restaurant, and at any hour men stride like catamounts, from plain doors.

There’s not much danger; this is the neighborhood of my “case-load,” where my hat, with its flowers of charity wired by law, probably affrights them, and I am more than likely to end up for a glass of tea with some old client, my one revolutionary gesture to sit, in all my niceties, on the bedbug couch she warns me away from, “Dun sit, dolling, Om afraid fom de boggles, dun sit dere.”

And I know very well that this is still the world of the poor who live in houses, not vagabondage, just as I know that the poor, at least in cities, are not maypole dancers, their bread not oaten but paper. But their world is still a netherworld ringing from beneath the rich pavements they walk on just as I do. Even the poor in houses are only one step away from the criminal, for they have so much to hide that they can never do it quite honestly. Clean as they might be, they are still gamy, haunted and ridden by barmecide illusion, and I fancied I had almost a right to their underworld by way of my little specialty; I could walk their underside a little way with them, wearing my wig.

The train ran slowly to a stop; the conductor calling out “Providence!” had already been through the train, opening doors. Fresh gushes of air came from them, uniting with the warm, sunny velvet coming in on me from the broad window, outside which houses, running like sixty the minute before, settled into the dull station-scene brilliant in the morning sun, ultimate stillness. The pause at Providence is approximately two minutes, forty seconds, when the train is running on schedule. I was sitting on the double seat just back of the washrooms, the one on the platform side, facing the door. Waiting to get off, there was the usual crowd, trim salesmen with their noses elongated by money-sniffing (the real money flies the air, of course), aunties in hats-on-a-visit, a ruck of the indefinable, middling personages who do crowd-service, starred with the one sweatered girl who is always going down the aisle, jiggle-breasted, to the Women’s. The air, once past the train-smell, came in pure and lively, the fresh vanilla perspiration of spring; it was March twenty-first, one day into spring.

And it was just then that I saw the young man hovering on the step, ready to jump off ahead of them all. He must just have come out of the washroom. I saw him from the inside of the coach, and only the back of him. He was tall, had a good head under a good crop of hair, and was dressed in a suit of which trousers even matched jacket; it needed a second glance to see, doubletake, that, yes, from top to toe, though I couldn’t see his shoes, he was one fatal thread away from the tidy civilization of the train. The head had been to the barber, but not the last time, the suit was tired from making do, and as he leaned, head bent, hands slouched in pockets, shoulder taking bearings from the wall the way a zoo animal does, I caught, though I was yards away, the whole posture and lion-soil of him—a vagrant, in unmistakable aquiline.

He must have been readying himself to make a running jump for it. For almost in that same moment, I saw through the window the bright, gold-rimmed bumpkin face and blue uniform of the railway police, who put out arms to receive him, and behind in the coach, the conductor’s cap, his pale face blotted in the crowd. They handed him over, uniform to uniform. He must have been in the washroom, ticketless. And if he had only permitted himself a hat perhaps or the cheapest cardboard dispatch case, just one patch of greasepaint to keep him on the right side of the line, he might have made it. Perhaps they telegraphed ahead from New London or wherever he had boarded; though it might seem a lot of trouble for just a ticket, it is by taking just such infinite pains that the upper parallel keeps itself from meeting the lower.

For through the window, I saw him led off, and there was that about him which made me sure the offense was no worse than this; he was walking straight and unalcoholic, not with the tension of the really hunted, with the experienced resignation of one who knew himself to be no more than a matter for the railway police. Head still a little bent, hands out of his pockets now and hanging down, he let himself be led along by this round pattycake of a man, winded too, from whom he could have darted like a whippet from its starter. I hadn’t had a look at his shoes, of course, and he may have been too hungry. But I caught the line of his jaw and cheeks, good ones too, but just a hairsbreadth, again just a hairsbreadth too unshaven, and something in me trolled out to him, “Oh la-la, that did it. You might still have made it—if you had shaved.”

In retrospect, I have the feeling he knew that as well as I did. Two days more of that beard, and he could have been a student growing one, even with that suit on him perhaps, but not—no never—not ticketless too. It takes keeping up, any posture of what you are not, takes a sense of fitness to the point of fashion, and the vagrant won’t bother with that sort of thing, not for that purpose, he’s too honest for it, or else he wants to be spotted; maybe it’s his very function in life to wander about thus exposed, so that others may find their signals in him. They led him toward the steps of a small, official-looking hut a short distance across the station yard, and just then it happened. One of his coattails flipped up, not jaunty, not especially sad either, it may even have been the wind that did it, not his hand, and I saw a piece of white shirt, fairly clean, and a belt going round a human axis. All I had caught was a two-minute-and-forty-second glimpse of his simple, hopeful domestic arrangements. And that was all I needed. I never even saw him go up the steps.

I took action at once—as is usually said of themselves by persons who have been hearkening for twenty years. Such action, boiled up out of meditation, is often absurd unless it goes straight to the heart of the matter, and I did not do that at once—I was not quite able. To unprepare oneself for such a journey is not easy, particularly when it is one that may occupy the rest of your life. I told myself—timidly, I agree—that my proper embarkation would be from that place where so much of the rest of me was, from all that other paraphernalia by which we extend our pet fantasies of ourselves without ever risking the depots of travel—from home.

Inside the washroom, meanwhile, I removed gloves, stockings and girdle, and thrust them under the sink, into the receptacle for used paper towels—a ridiculously minor performance to be sure, but in the light of the whole, it doesn’t matter now. As for baggage, it has always been my grief that I could never travel as executively light as even the ticket-world now can. I had, to be sure, my little modern portfolio of articles that thimbled or stretched or reversed themselves, of paquettes that exploded for one use, then melted away—but I also had my wig-box, the overnight one. Made for me, like the larger ones, by a theatrical supply house, it had just room enough for the wig I made use of to sleep in—ah, the comfort of mind, when I learned to do that!—plus a fresh one for morning, and of course it didn’t look like what it was.

Nowadays, markedly within this past, disturbing year, wig-boxes have become all too common; though they still keep mostly to the airlanes and the parlor cars, I look for them in the coaches and even the buses by the year’s end—if I myself am able to risk such vehicles at that time. Meanwhile, peeping into mine, I quickly disposed of the portfolio down the slot where the girdle had gone, then tried the sealed window, in vain. The kit itself would have to be abandoned either here or on the luggage-racks outside. Gazing into it, down at the wooden wig-blocks on which my other two rested, I concluded that the latter’s destiny would have to be linked with that of their eighteen sisters, this number being an accident of the calendar, seven for the week, plus certain other considerations. In place of these two, I now left my hat, for the Easter joy of some trainman’s wife in Canarsie or Brookline. Then, shouldering the kit, I looked at my image in the mirror.

“No,” I finally said to it. “Not down an aisle. No drama.” The true vagrant, honor-bright refuser of houses, clothing, income and other disguises, appears as my young man of the coattails had appeared to me, unaware of the comment he makes by existing. I could never be that unsophisticate—or perhaps, only after years of the discipline, by the time I had come to be an old abbess of the byways, worn back into simplicity at last after a misspent youth in the world. My present object must be to conduct myself, though within the framework, with all possible reserve—for there is always the question of sanity raised in re those who give up the things of this world. (And today, I already yearn to do it with—yes, it must be said—with beauty. But yesterday, I hadn’t come that far.)

Smiling wryly, I said to myself, “Take it easy. Give yourself a headstart.”

It’s a thing of mine to make puns like that to myself, which no one else notices, nothing but a compensatory psychological adjustment, quite harmless and quite natural—and one which has helped until todate to keep me well short of the adjustment that is the most natural of all. But that was yesterday. When I reopened the door of the washroom, less than fifteen minutes had passed. I was back in my seat, with all plans figured out except for the final contingency (“case closed” it is sometimes called, in the profession) by the time we rolled into the stop for suburban Boston: Route 128.

I used to know the 128 stop very well. All one summer, a man who, as the saying goes, was once very important to me, used to meet me there with a car. Cars free people; in summer particularly, they are the vagabondage of the ticketed world. And no matter what season of the year I pass that station, I breathe in again the hot organdy smell of my own sleeveless dresses, of sour-wine picnics where the wine couldn’t wait any more than we could, and of meadow-love. Outdoor love is easiest for those who must beware the midnight-rumpling hand. Inside the waiting room, where I had to sit when he was late or it was rainy, the majestically coifed, redheaded stationmistress used to sit eternally in her little box-office, talking now and then in camaraderie with the round-faced policeman whose detail was 128. As far as I could see, he never did anything but point out the phone booth to people who had missed connections, or alert the crowd on the platform to the warning bell rung for an oncoming engine—as far as I could see then. After that summer was over, I more than once dreamt of the stationmistress with her masses of hair, not a wig but dyed, and not the plain dark red, neither bronze nor carroty, of the color which, until I was twelve, had been mine.

“One-twenty-eight,” the conductor called now, jumping off; it’s a very short stop. I had no intentions of getting off there, now or ever again, but as always, I leaned to look. Usually I saw the policeman, the same one, and once, in a snowy winter, I had seen the woman shoveling—and seeing them was always like a momentary return to a village where people are so little on the move that one can see clearly how all the life-stories have worked out, including one’s own. I didn’t see her now, but I saw the policeman, same old pieface in dark blue. They must rear a race of them from the cradle, I thought, nanny-faces all, puzzled, even kindly, with waists too big for wearing holsters. For though this one wore no gold-rims, in every respect there was no doubt otherwise. He was a ringer for the one in Providence. Or else his brother. And suddenly my ungloved hands sought to hide themselves, my nude shins rubbed nervously together, and I shrank away from the window, a warning ringing inside me. “Chickie!” it said. “Watch out for the railroad dicks!”

At first I was disturbed by this menial response, one so much lacking the insouciance I had expected, but then reminded myself that with my clothes still elegant, my purse stuffed, such a halfway state of mind was at least sensitive; I had after all scarcely touched upon, much less completed, my full conversion. The minute I thought of this latter, the fluttering pulse in my throat was silenced, and an enormous but active peace settled on me; only dwell on the crowning event that was coming toward me, and all the smaller stratagems flew to hand. After that everything went swimmingly.

I got off at South Station, filled out a telegraph form “Unavoidably detained,” changed the latter to “prevented,” and grabbed a cab to Logan Airport, in time to board a shuttle plane which would even get me back to New York before bank-closing. Though incomes in my line are never impressive, my mixed family inheritance did include money, not enough, alas, to have allowed me that comfortable eccentricity which might have put me to rights in the very beginning, but there is no doubt that in a modest way I am a woman of property. From now on, the problem would be how to disencumber myself, down to the bone as it were, without incurring the verdict of either sainthood or insanity. I had no wish to decamp altogether, like those irresponsibles who dissolved themselves in a puddle of clothes left on the beach at Villefranche, or from an ownerless car on the Golden Gate Bridge. Any one of these eventualities would make me a mystery, not, as I faintly hoped, a statement. I regret that there’s also no doubt that I suffer from a certain ambition, akin perhaps to that of women just before they got the vote—a kind of suffragette swelling, part yearning and part vengeful, of the chest cavity and maybe even the heart. I am well aware that the true vagrant never even knows the nature of what he cherishes, in his case his right to be out of the organized world. Later on, I hope in my own way to achieve that brahma; I see myself holding up my naked head without knowing that I am doing it. Right now, however, though I deplore it, I want all the civil rights in my category.

And so it’s not surprising that the minute I got on the plane I started mulling what else I could take off, substitute gestures to placate that fire in me raging toward the ultimate one. Inside the washroom again, the only disposal unit that modern transportation allows us, I made friends again with my image. I was wearing my platform wig, its clubwoman curls now blown by airport and emotional currents into a bad semblance of one at home marked in my mental roster as Careful Disarray, but verging more on the brown than the blonde. (It is discreetly known at the office that I dye my hair myself, not always accurately.)

I regarded it, but was glad to feel full and strong in me the power to delay—“No, not yet. No travesty.”

As for statutory nudity, it had no charms for me at this point, indeed the reverse; exhibitionism was at all costs to be avoided. Teeth were excellent and personal, eyes never in need of glasses—the clear green eyes born to lucky people of my complexion.

Just then the stewardess knocked, and I watched my hands seek themselves.

“Quite all right!” I managed to say—this time, God save us, with some proper daring in it, and a minute later I was taking off my rings.

To my left there was a ventilator, whose exhaust slot must somewhere reach the outer air. The shuttles don’t fly very high, not nearly so high as the pan-orient jets on which I suppose I started my hunt for brahma in the first place. Crouched there, in my palm the little hoard to which I had added lapel-pin and pearls, I waited until we were well away from water, over a tiny settlement where I might predict, if not see, spire and gardens, a railway station too perhaps; then with a smile, imagining on whom that shower of peculiar manna, sent them down.

Back in my seat again, I had certain canny misgivings, the tiresome ones of a woman with too many heads. How small did a diamond have to be not to burst its facets from such a height, how light a pearl, not to smash its baroque? I had retained my watch, and I had an hour to consider the lost rings of all those who had loved me, plus that most durable of all, the invisible wedding-band I had never let myself receive.

What of love, then, for such a woman, for any—for anybody, what of love?

My mother’s mother’s snakeband ring with emerald eye and my father’s father’s onyx seal I had worn joined on one finger, cabalistic bow to that minor hitch in the vortex of heredity which had caused me. Dear supervisors all, should they at the agency ever know the circumstances (and I might in time send them the case-record)—I could hear the descant that would follow, in the ballet of headshakes that always formalizes psychological gossip.

… (Would it have been better if the departed’s trauma had come to her through some normal community way such as radiation sickness, instead of having been visited upon her via the single, traumatic shock of birth? … What hopes could be held for a girl whose own sibling would one day ask her, eighteen years to her sixteen: “Haven’t you begun to … lose any of it … all over, yet?” … And who then would add in a whisper, turning away a face already shorn of brow and lash, a head already ennobled to its own bone—“What about … down there?”) …

Ah, we had our ribald humors, my brother and I, but that day wasn’t one of them, not when I had to answer him—for I was never to be as bad a case as he, and still have, though so faintly auburn, eyelashes—when I had to answer him … “No.” And on the record, I had a word of advice for them, my friends at the agency. Don’t be so quick to asperse birth, the plain fact of our beginnings. And don’t believe anything but the facts:

Subject (who is I) and sibling born to elderly well-to-do émigré parents. Perhaps we were menopausal babies conceived after danger of such was deemed over, since both my parents, as distant cousins from same ancestral town, were well aware of hereditary traces.

Both deceased during infancy of children, who were brought up under amiable legal guardianship, to best U.S. standards of oranges, lambchops, orthidonture and quarterly anti-pronation shoe-fittings.

From extant pics of parents aetat 35, my father’s hairline may have been retouched, my mother’s even more susceptible to illusion.

Hereditary condition well documented in European medical annals (though not endemic there) via easier observation in small, genealogically related loci, such as the German, North Sea town where my grandparents still reside.

May or may not be Mendelian recessive, thought by some to be albino-related, no official name. (Not alopecia areata, which is temporary.)

Males invariably lose facial as well as scalp-hair, fem, data less procurable though subject recalls, from youthful visit to grandparents, family portraits ranging back to the medieval, in which coif-line was shown almost as far back behind ears as a bridle.

Classically appears at onset of puberty, when natal hair of a characteristically silky dark-red gives way to carroty coarse growth which in turn disappears partially or in toto, usually by time of patient’s majority. N.B. from subject: We were classical.

And in fancy I could read, over their shoulders, my evaluation (after group study of further history up to March 21st):

Subject, aided by economic status and first-class appliances, has made excellent progress in resolving toward conventional norms the original handicap of birth. Irredentist impulses not to be taken too seriously. As cosmetic use of wigs gains community-wise, subject’s sense of unity with the general population will increase. Subject’s quasi-humorous diagnosis of her sublimation to be taken as a real testimonial to our profession, fine objectivity from one of the solidest gals in the office.

And down in the corner of our biannual personality sheet I could even read a handwritten scrawl from my immediate supervisor: Mildly bizarre thoughts a good sign of nonrigidity. Do I detect a sign that my quiet one may be getting espoused? Hats off!

With all the abstract sociological kindness going about the world, it’s hard to get a true story listened to on the level, even by oneself. What could I say, for instance, of my brother, become that perennial movie star whose trademark is hairlessness (in his case not however like old Von Stroheim, a villain, or a horror man like Peter Lorre, but cast as a straight romantic hero). Rumor has it that he is forbidden by contract to show so much as a single hair, some saying that he complies only by means of terrifying sessions of electrolysis, others that he keeps a young valet-of-the-tweezers ever by his side. When first out in the world, we used to envy one another, I him for his public baldness, he me for my disguise. Now we no longer saw each other, having usefully agreed, like enemies in entente, that we no longer had anything in common. Like many ties of love, ours was too painful to eat dinner with.

And so—I looked at my watch—I was back to love again, only twenty minutes out of Logan. And I had two more rings to dispose of in memory.

On the fourth finger of my right hand, where unmarried women often wear a parental diamond or an engagement ring that hasn’t worked out, I had worn, until yesterday, a small blue-white Tiffany in platinum, of the size given virgins by young men on modest budgets, as indeed it had been, by the one all hands would have said I should have married, the medical student, childhood friend and sole remaining witness of all my real changes, who had followed me East—and who had declined to make good his promise of marriage if I aborted the child he had already engendered.

“We could adopt some,” I said.

“No,” he replied, “I want our own first, if you don’t mind. I’m going to become a gynecologist.”

And so he has done, fat as a woodchuck too, and full of Christmas cards. But he was thin then, and staunch, and what he said sounded unanswerable. I wanted to answer it, at the time still believing that the apogee of life would be to have one secret witness forever at my side.

“But I mind!” I said. “I should mind forever. For them.” He shrugged, and I caught him looking with distaste at the wig I had just bought—the first one.

“Children can learn to be bald,” he said.

I was wounded beyond reason by this coldness.

“Already we differ,” I said. “Not mine.”

I handed him his ring back, strange gesture across the child I still carried (and stranger miscalculation?) for I understood his intent now—to bring me with it, out into the open.

“Keep the ring at least,” he said. “Keep it until you marry. Until you do, girl with your looks and plans might find it useful. You can always tell them I died in a war.”

Though I never did, it’s true that both colleagues and lovers have sometimes murmured to me that one should not cling to the past, so perhaps his ring had been part agent of what he would never have done himself—helped me to hide the present that clung to me.

When I tried again to return the ring, he grasped me, shook me, even repeated his cold remark.

“Ours could learn!” he added, shouting. He stood there, hirsute and flawless, as his cards show him yet, the rufous glints all over the backs of his hands, not a spot of baldness in him anywhere, far as I could see, either of the body or the heart. And he could say that to me. It was a beautiful declaration, and I have never yet had another like it. But I knew at that moment why I was right to refuse him. To be acceptable, such declarations must come to the bald—from the bald.

And so we arrive at the man from 128, if not for long.

In the meantime, I had had my further experiences in the dark, not many, and never with any candidate to whom I could see myself making any such avowal—despite which I sometimes found myself in serious need to repress the more ordinary part of my inheritance: almost any woman’s urge to avow. So I gave up such doings, and returned to the midnight safety of my old alleyways, to slouching in cool raincoats at the hot bedsides of their sick, sitting up at the wakes of their hardy sorrows, or kicking up the orange dawn in the circle of such derelicts as were too far gone to wonder at the presence of a lady at that fire. Weekends I spent emotion thriftily in the colorful melancholia of the museums and the Sunday exhibitions, quietly enjoying the arts and gems that were the property of the nation.

For this conduct, the gods duly corrected my position in life as they saw fit, from the rear. I received a salary increase, my largest block of securities held a stock-split, and there fell due a trust fund for which I had done nothing but get older. In one of the galleries I was in the habit of visiting, there was a small picture, not for sale, a Picasso of a certain period of his so in sympathy with my life that when I stood in front of it my flesh crept toward it as if it were my ikon. I went to see it again, the money shining in my head, making my brain all one large emerald. And there I met him, or rather, his rich voice, coming round a plush, impressionist corner. I fell in love with what he was saying before I saw him.

It was one of the tender, warm April afternoons that climb like vines from the most ruined steppes of a metropolis; rays of Central Park were falling all over the city and amoretti flew the wind. Any woman with verve in her veins was carrying her beauty like a cup. From my apartment, modestly high in Tudor City, I had seen that, and I was wearing my mother’s tourmalines, which are of a peculiar burnt color, like cream glazed by the cook’s salamander, plus a silk shift, sweater and sandals of the same, all designed to cast their tans against a skin that could not tan, and at the last minute I had put on the wig that was my bravest, most costly, favorite, if I could be said to have favorites among them, and unworn since I had last dined with my brother—a wig that was as flat to the face as a wig dares to be, and of a plain dark red. It was a wig that would not suffer a hat, nor would I have asked it to, but had anchored it instead with the best of many long-tried substances, pins not being possible for me. (If I mention these frail beauties, sands of makeshift, it is to remind myself, via all I have abjured, of the sterner exquisite I am to become.)

Anyway, as always happens in these fateful meetings, I got there just in time and properly rigged for it, in time to hear him say to the dealer, in a voice rich enough to buy Picassos, which is what he was there for: “Ah, come on, Knoller, you have me over the barrel, if you’ll part with it. Kept thinking of it all the time I was away. Most of all in Bangkok. Monks with shaved heads, widows too, often just the common people. Modern Giacometti, sculpture without curls. I tell you, you’ve never seen the glory of the unadorned human head before. Of course, set against all that incredible gilt temple-patchwork, maybe any passing human skull is a Buddha. And it may be the Asiatic head only or the African—or that you get accustomed to seeing it in both sexes. I certainly never think of it in Rome.”

There was a muffled remark from the dealer, and another rich, amused reply. “No, I guess the Western head can’t compete, not even the ones bared by nature.” And then, “Well, Knoller? What do you say?”

He was standing, as I knew he must be, in front of my picture.

“Here’s your rival,” Knoller said to him.

I saw the eyes change, lit as if passed over by the salamander. He smiled at me, a tall, powerfully set man not yet fifty and only partially tonsured by time, lean cheeks with a center vertical like a knifed dimple, the strong nostrils that were said to go with large organs of generation, a mouth with a firm ripple. In the end, it was only the dealer who held out.

An affair begun in that season, with the trees just on the point of flower, seems to keep pace with them, with the apple, the cherry and the peach. There was much that was invisible on both sides. His household, which I saw no point in entering, was being supervised for him by his French mother-in-law: I saw the dead wife’s picture, her gamine haircut and tiny phiz, like a stableboy in hornrims, and the two children, all three astride horses and wearing seedy clothes that did no justice to their mounts. They could live the preciously simple life that such money can, the kind that if one can forget what manages it at the top and sustains it from below, can sometimes even have a haystack whiff of the vagrant—and can make love in its own meadows. I was not seduced by its attractions, merely by him. When it rained, we stayed in the carriage-house, a mile from the main drive. I never stayed overnight, being always on the way to Boston, and when he came to the city we met, afternoons only, in the flat of one of his friends.

It was outdoors that I was most daring, though the wig I wore was never again the red one. I got him to tell me, over and over, about the monks in Bangkok, and the widows. His own hairline, receded to well back of the crown and worn in a rough tuft there, I persuaded him to have cropped close by the barber, as many men do. His cranial bump was large, and the effect not very fine, but in certain half-lights, country dusks, I thought I could feel a kinship, surely in my case not perverse. He began even to think of publishing, under the auspices of the museum he served without fee as curator, a monograph on the nude head in ancient entablature (and life, of course); there was even, he said, a question of such as having existed beneath the elaborate Etruscan …

“Ah well,” he said, breaking off and looking down at me fondly, “there’s always some question or other about the Etruscans. And why bother your pretty head—” Like any man, he thought that I was developing a flattering interest in his interests, and I, trembling on the verge of delight, thought that he—God help us, and all pairs of lovers. And, very gently indeed, the gods corrected us, from the rear.

I raised myself on elbow, in the lush grasses on which the first pinched windfalls were lying. “I’ll shave my head for you!” I said. “I’ll—” Pride shook me for what I could show him, for what I could at last bare to that perceptive eye. “Then you can see what a Western head … I mean it.”

His smile showed no incredulity at the depth of my devotion. Then he enfolded me. There flashed before me a sudden picture of the stripling wife, of those buried tastes which men, and women too, were said to have without knowing, but I blotted it out, blaming my over-educated inner eye. Yet I knew that for both of us it was the moment of the not impossible lover—or the moment just before.

“No,” he said afterwards. “I’ll be the bald one. That’s still a man’s job.” He reached for me again. “Silly curls. I like them.” He rumpled them, paterfamilias.

I gazed up at him from my end-of-summer headpiece, so artfully stained with sun-and-saltwater, and made myself remember, as I had been taught, that even in the love-duets of clods, the roles to be played are said to be endless. And then he asked to marry me. And then I invited him home.

He came down the next week, the first of my vacation, and, if we wished it to be, of our honeymoon. Despite this, I had done no extra shopping, having told myself that all honeymoons were—or should be—a mere matter of unveiling. I had asked him to meet me at a downtown theatre-club where an African singer he had never heard was appearing, and before I left my rooms I sat for a moment in their center, shivering in my décolletage, though it was warm September.

The apartment was no nondescript; I had done better than that. It was the proper guise for a professional woman of some means and culture, created for the pleased surveillance of my colleagues, with here and there a few endearing—and safe—touches of family. Before I left, I locked the wig closet which had been put in off the dressing room, feeling as always, as I did so, that in a way I enclosed a seraglio of my selves.

They are very human-looking: wigblocks. At least, mine were. And I had no intention of shocking my dear love by the sudden grotesque of such a lineup, or of in any way taking out on him whatever of the harsher facts had been dealt me. No, I only meant to break to him, by stages, what I already thought he suspected and was waiting for—as courtiers in the old tales waited, in the dark of the robing room or the bedhangings, for the queen’s maid to become the queen.

As I passed a bookshelf, I took up a little Parian bust, of some bewigged English jurist, picked up not long before in a junkshop, only because, aside from its flowing eighteenth-century curls, it looked for all the world like him. I smoothed its marble profile. By gentle stages, stages even of delight, I should lead us both, I to my avowal, and he—to his Etruscan.

Before I left, I paused to look out of my high window. The night sky stood at perfect cloud. Yet I shivered. Perhaps love makes mad only the completely normal.

In the club, he stood up as I approached his table. I saw his look of puzzlement; I had expected it. “You’ve changed your hair again!” he said. “No, that’s not it, you’ve had it done the way you were wearing it when we first … ah, that was sweet of you. I always thought too, that it was redder that day, but I could never be—”

We sat down against all the clashing, to a slow rhythm of our own. He stared at me closely. A nightclub table is built to just such a small radius across which couples may lean stalk to stalk, like negligently stacked flowers, or like two matches fused at the top.

I turned, as if on the swivel of vanity, so that he might see, even in that dusky jazz-light, all I was. A wig is the more risky the less swirls and curls it has to conceal the hairline; every wig has to have some—unless it would be like those poor nothings, the toupees; this wig had almost none. It was cut almost flat, like a young girl’s or a boy’s, almost gamine. Some wearers, of course, can pull out a little of the real hair beneath, to blend. I turned again, to an inner wish—but he was looking at my eyes.

“You’re always changing it,” he said; “if I didn’t know better, I’d say you spent half your time at it.” I looked out on the scene before us, where almost everyone else was pretending to be private right out in public.

“Why,” I said, “I’m in the habit of … wearing wigs.” For how many weeks I had planned that careful phrase, that gay plural! “Didn’t you know?” And when he looked blank—“Years ago, they used to call them … ‘transformations.’”

He said “Ah, is that it?” and after a moment, “Yes … I know that my mother-in-law—but I thought it was only older women—” He was still doting on my eyes, one of his hands, in nightclub manners, with mine a-playing.

And I said, to the same swing-a-ding of it, “Oh not any more, everyone’s doing it now.”

I grind my teeth now, to think of it, how I put my birthright down there with those others.

Then he said, “Well, I may be sentimental, but I like this one best. And tell me … I’ve an idea … I’ve a suspicion—”

A skin that can’t tan can blush the deeper; the hot, expectant dye rose from shoulders, to cheek—to scalp. I awaited him, steadily.

“Now, tell me,” he said, “isn’t this the real one? The original?”

I lowered my face, until that flush should ebb. “It was, once,” I managed to say hoarsely.

“And now?” His cheek was almost on mine.

“And now?” I said. “And now—almost. Not quite.”

Then the singer, Makeba, came in to sing. “Isn’t her head beautiful?” I said. “I wanted you to see it.” My wig, pat to my head as it was, felt clumsy. She stretched back her ebony head, that long, almost shaven head which needed no goldleaf behind it, on which there was merely the faintest blur, only a hairsbreadth of difference between it and skull, a head drawn all in one swelling line which completed itself again, into which setting the face receded like a jewel. He agreed to all these points, adding only that length of neck also was a point of beauty—that singular head, like a music box with a bird in it, on that neck poised. And once more, he doubted that ever a Western—And I stretched so that he could see that my neck also was long. And then we rose, to a rhythm of our own, and went home.

“Very good,” he said when we were inside. Travel-case in hand, he scrutinized the room as if it were a collection submitted to him for the museum, but I had pruned as close to the personality I wanted here as the most careful grower of dull plants, even among the prints permitting myself only that commonplace Cranach nude, the high oval of whose forehead flows endlessly from her other nudity, back, back into the dark, “—very good, but where’s the rest of you?”

I thrilled to the roots of my danger, like a cat in her suit of fur. “What do you mean?”

He put the case down, teetering on his heels, as if he were here for forever. “Come, come,” he said, “anybody talks to you for ten minutes knows you draw your imagery from some other world than the one you look like—I got it the first ten minutes I saw you. And it’s certainly not this one.”

Never before had I been wild enough to dream him into those alleyways I had assumed I must give up for him, seeing him there at best like some large balloon in the shape of a philanthropist, which I might perhaps tug after me, on tour. But now, I stretched my neck for him, delirious with his cleverness.

“Yes, like that,” he said “—and then you’ll say something with a joke at the back of it, or a pun even, that I can’t catch. But there’s no joking to this place.” He surveyed the room again, scanned the books with a nail. “Ah, I begin to see,” he murmured. “For the other ‘workers,’ eh, as you call them. Your fellow workers. That avocation of yours, that I can never quite believe in.”

Yet he was marrying me. My legs trembled toward our pleasure, like some girl of the trottoir married by a young roué for her purity—which she has. His hand strayed toward the sugar-cheap marble bust of the English jurist, the ripple of his mouth turning down.

“He looks like you,” I said. My voice tremored. “That’s why I bought it.”

He shrugged, smiled, and said, “Sculpture with curls? Or beneath them? D’ya suppose they were his own, powdered? Must say he doesn’t look too honest.”

Oh, he was keen. Somewhere, a little lady, sitting quiet back there in her altogether, had observed this, adding gaily to herself, “all as it should be, invisibles on both sides.” I smiled back at him. “I haven’t been to your place,” I said.

“Ah, nothing there,” he answered. He was holding the bust to the mirror, its profile parallel with his own. “Guess I carry my crimes with me,” he murmured, mugging at himself like a man sure of only a few hearty blemishes. Then he put the bust down, smoothed his own crown where it was tan-bare, and sighed, in the bluff way men can, when they refer to that—fact. “Uh-oh. Soon.”

“Soon!” I echoed greedily—what lechers hope makes! I pushed him toward the bathroom, left towels in his hands, turned on lights for him. “In ten minutes.” And I went into the bedroom and closed the door.

My vanity there was pillows. There must have been dozens piled in rows against the headboard, all of the tenderest fabrics for hot-weather nudity, in all of the softest aurora tints—dozens of small pillows all cut to the same replica oval, so that if a head had a fancy to lie there in its own altogether it would seem in any mirror opposite to be lying half in a camouflage of repetitions, or if it sat up, to be rising in the midst of innumerable crescent convexities of itself. Egotism—or beauty—always tends itself most saddeningly in the boudoir. And that was the way I meant to appear, to rise for him, no rubicund Titian rosy-packed in her own curves to the forehead only, but calm crescent of the earliest hour, a Western Aurora.

I embowered myself, taking up a mirror. On my lips I left only the faint vermeil one finds on the lips of bisque dolls, for whom, as they sat bare in the shop, I sometimes felt a sororal—ah now, leave that! But I added more eye shadow, knowing from experience that our so perfect orbs, when left unshaded below that other high oval one, tend to occupy more of its beauty than their fair share. Then I stripped.

He was a gentleman, and gentlemen do not knock. More than that, he was a courtier to the end—or almost. What had he expected of me, other than those innocent capers for which the maribou and the veils might be bought in any bridal salon? We were to marry, and with the respectable zest of the song-of-the-week, he wanted “all of me”—but perhaps not quite so much as he saw. He uttered my name. Again and again he uttered it. Then, in a whisper … “You didn’t … you—” Then he came forward. “But … my darling!” he said then, “… you shouldn’t have done it. Not even for me.”

Already I knew my mistake, made from the moment I heard him at Knoller’s, from my first wig, from age thirteen and before, flowing endlessly back. Any mystery or hope I had made of him—it had all been in my own head from the beginning. But women are slow to unfreeze from their own legends. So I sat there, the draft cold on me in the hour of my only avowal.

“Don’t you see how artificial it is?” he said. “Unless it comes from the culture? Otherwise—it’s … depravity.” He forced himself to look at me, even tenderly. “My dear,” he said, “there’s a difference between art and life, you know.” He sighed. “But women never see it. They always overdo.”

And though I held myself upright in silhouette, meanwhile repeating inner aves to Cimabue, Ghirlandaio, Piero della Francesca, he never said a word about the Western world.

Then he carefully turned down the light, and came to bed with me. He was a gentleman, even if one interested only in statutory nudity. And I think now that he may have had his own wistful legend of me that I violated: either that I was not all I should be—meadows!—or most romantical of all, to the rich—that I was poor. Perhaps, and this is hardest to say, I was his vagrant.

For in the end—I’ll come to that. But then and there, hell had its furies, and I my vengeance. Men know earlier and better than we what the razor can do and what it can’t. I waited until we were fully entwined, then I rested the crown of my head—which his hands had avoided—on his lips.

After a moment, he shuddered, but I held on firmly, moving it only to caress. And after another moment—though strong nostrils indicate what they will to the contrary—we were parted. Willy-nilly, a small sob escaped me.

“Oh my God,” he said, not in ecstasy, and even through the dark I could see how he was aghast.

Then I rose, locked myself in the wig closet, and stayed there throughout all his protestations—a weak opinion of which we both shared—until, at dawn, he at last left me. Art and life, was it? I had taught him the difference.

Three days later, attired in a new Beehive-with-Double-Guiche, and carrying a spare, I left for Bangkok, telling myself that I had good powers of recuperation, perhaps a hairsbreadth too much humor ever to find my solution in ars amoris—and two more weeks of vacation. And who should know better than we of the Agency that when people lack love affairs, or pressing money ones, they turn to a study of the ethical world?

Just before I was leaving, the switchboard rang to ask me to take delivery on a package. “Keep it for me!” I snapped, but the doorman said “No, we can’t, Miss. It’s come in an armored car.”

It was the picture that we had both wanted, from Knoller’s. I saw the tremendous justice of this, that I should have what so suited me—and what I hadn’t paid for, so dearly. But there wasn’t time to open it, so I locked it up with the wigs to keep them company, and didn’t read his card until I was well out, on the plane.

“Forgive me,” he wrote gracefully, “and forget me. I am a dilettante.”

Ah he was clever, clever enough even to speak the truth about himself—though I should have phrased it differently. The half-bald often are. Later on, in the hotel, I meant to send him a cable of acknowledgment, then thought better of it and settled for a postcard on which I wrote obscurely, and may never have sent at all. “I have seen them,” it said. “The monks of Bangkok.”

They walked the streets in the early morning in their orange tunics, going from house to house with their begging bowls, young boys to old men; a man could shave his head to be a monk at any time, could leave his marriage, his children, his aged, and people would understand his reasons; indeed it was expected of every man that for at least once in his lifetime he would live hairless. And agreed, they were beautiful as they walked the dawn-hours with their concept. And their heads (though merely shaven), when met at any angle—the high twin-domes of the forehead brooding toward the welkin, or that sweet rear haunch above the neck muscles, nakedly working—when met at any hour, these were golden unaided, of themselves. But monks though they were, they were men also, and though some women can study up ethically to be anything, I am not one of them. Now and then, I glimpsed the lean-headed, black-garbed widows, but after all, as yet I hadn’t had their successes either. And finally, there were the common people, denuded merely to be sanitary, which I already was. There remained—if I were to insist on a group solution to both philosophical problems and practical ones—one simple course I had never considered myself temperamentally suited for, which however, via an awkward incident in the hotel swimming pool, was brought again to my attention.

At certain hours the pool, a handsome one surprisingly free-form for the East, was deserted, when it was my pleasure to float on my back there in equally free meditation, reviewing the temple-shaped lamps which bordered it, and other more distant pagodas. Actually, the Thai civilization was in many ways also a heavily hatted one—rooftops, headdressed goddesses, dancers—and I found this mentally very supportive. What at home seemed the inexcusable doubleness of the world here seemed merely inexhaustible, and—oh blessings of travel—not my burden.

At these times, due to my having only a spare wig with me, I wore bathing cap merely, one of those shaggy rubber flowers, silly thing, but with a chin strap that buttoned securely under each ear. It is also germane that on this day, the bathing suit I wore was black. For, as I floated, quite suddenly I was jounced, splashed, dived under, sent upright and grabbed round the waist by a man who said, “Tell by that cap you’re from the U.S.—hi!”

It was my fleeting impression that he was one of those pink-eyed jockey-types who might be either in the opium trade or a representative of American business; it was my firmer one that he was drunk as blazes on gimlets, not frangipani. I batted him away, but he hung on, saying, “Come on baby, don’ wan’ drown you, jus’ wan’ see more of you,” and binding both my wrists with one of his hands, he tore off my cap with the other. And there we were, treading water vis-a-vis.

Right then and there in the water, he crossed himself. “Omigod, sorry Sister!” he managed to say before he clutched his own head and turned tail. “Sorry omigod, Sister. It never entered my mind nuns went to bathe.”

Dressed and downstairs again, I saw no trace of my attacker, but there was now a party of French nuns on the terrace, their enormous, paper-boat-shaped white coifs in full sail. They were several tables away, but in a sense we took tea together. Is it indeed a beautiful arraignment, I asked myself and them, that one in which the skull is first adorned with itself and then forever hidden? I thought of how it must be done, that holy barbering, in community, in gaiety even—a bride. But almost at once I answered myself, hearkening nearer today than I knew. No, even in community, even in communion, I said to myself, it would be an ugly baldness, not a holy one, that tried to hide its birthright under the coif.

One more incident of my tour might be reported. Under the hotel’s porte-cochere, a wide advance of steps led up to the doorway. To the left of these, against the façade of the building itself, a line of pariah dogs always rested. Thousands of them, it was said, roamed the city, since it was forbidden by Buddhist law to destroy them—though the police reduced their numbers on the sly. These particular dogs were smart or discreet; they had sought the better part of that public safety whose gradations—from park bench to lamppost, from the outer doors of churches to the underside of bridges—are known to strays the world over. And just as I went up those steps for the last time, one of the dogs—not the mangiest but with a few bare patches—keeping his head on his paws, the way dogs do, rolled his eyes up at me, unmistakably me, and slowly thumped his tail. Dozens of other travelers were going up and down, and to my certain knowledge he and I had never met before, yet he lifted his coattails to me, as it were, in signal.

That day, of course, I ignored it, and continued up the steps of the Hotel Erewan in Bangkok, with exit visa, passport and other credits necessary to the upper parallel, intent only on packing my bags and my conclusions. Half an hour later I had done both, after the fashion of most vacationers. These people here, I told myself, were foreigners, working out their destinies according to foreign reasons; despite our common plight, neither their religion, their bereavements nor their lice as yet were mine.

So I skipped back home, not unfrolicsomely on the way, unlocked the wigs and recurled them, unpacked a picture and hung it in the wig closet, put away my pillows and one wig forever, gave a brunch for some colleagues, after which I spent the night on the wharves, sharing my Aquascutum with I-don’t-know-who, who was harmless—in short I went back to being myselves. And there I had been ever since—until yesterday. And to con it all over in memory had taken only as long as it takes to fly from Logan to LaGuardia. Brahma itself comes more slowly.

When I disembarked, I tried after all to leave the kit behind, stowed in the overhead rack under a blanket, but the second stewardess came from the rear and handed it to me, shaking her head like a coy goddess—“Tchk, tchk!” I agreed with her estimate of me—“Tchk!”—ran down the ramp, passing two women carrying familiar boxes, and caught a cab which deposited me at Rockefeller Center at 2:48.

Standing in the entry to the Morgan Guaranty, there was a woman not carrying one, but wearing one. It was the best of its kind, every hair human, delicately Aryan and singly sewn, but she had been ill-advised on the streaking, which was contradicted by several small tufts of reality she had coaxed out at the sides. I even knew her procurer, who turns such cases over to an assistant. Under my stare, she reddened, then bridled—there’s never much finesse to these liars-without-cause. I waited coolly, until I was sure her eye had certified my carefree, blown strands as being dumpily my own, then I murmured, “Next time, get Duvoisin himself,” and swept on. Let them cover the earth, these towhead triflers, layercake beauties, fake Marie Antoinettes who will never know the guillotine; they would never catch up with me, who had, as it were, one more head up my sleeve.

For meditation, there is no place so pure as one of the patrons’ cells in the safe-deposit vaults of a bank like the Guaranty; the silence whines on diatonically, set to a combination whose tumblers never fall. After transacting my upstairs business in a gay welter of powers of attorney to attorneys, and notary seals each as firm in design as one large drop of blood from a cardinal, I went downstairs to the vaults. The men there greeted me profoundly, like butlers trained to be grandfathers, or vice versa, and I them, in the proper responses—over the years we had trained each other well—and then I took my long box, of the usual raggle-taggle of certificates and costumery (which I meant not even to open), went into my cell, and sat down.

Though the vaults also have a powder room which might be recommended to wandering duchesses—chairs Louis Quinze, soap Roger & Gallet, and as far as I had ever known, never another customer—I had no intention of staging anywhere within these precincts my recognition scene with myself. But in this air, thick with the dead-storage promises of thousands of keys, I ought to be able at least to settle on the punctilio of my new life—was it allowable to carry money with me from the old, and what kind of portfolio? Tramps carried kerchiefs on sticks, or used to, sailors their duffel, and so forth—what would be classed as strictly O.K. and necessary for such a vagabond as I? Some of the strays I knew toted gear which was surprisingly personal, like the beggar who carried a bus conductor’s coin-gadget—that was it, let the personal be my law! But for the time being I must give myself a little leeway; it would be a shame if, through the overscrupulous zeal of novice or convert, for want of a fiver or a kerchief, I should end up in looney-bin or pokey, instead of where I should be, afloat upon the marts and purlieus, quietly on view.

I sat there for some time, daintily ticking over my little etiquettes—and goodbyes. Say goodbye to R. and Gallet!—where I was going, and in what guise, I’d be lucky to get past the matron in a Howard Johnson’s. Say hello to the life of honest dirt, where hot baths are for kings or Salvationers, and every amenity except air has to be fought for. And say farewell to the romanticism of those who work among the poor with their hats on. Admit that the hardy maintenance of my birthright would entangle me in a thousand ruses and stratagems to which my present one was child’s play. Accept the fact that honesty requires the most artful dodging of all.

In the tara-tara of that thought, bugled through these halls where everybody else was hiding something, I stood up and almost saluted, hand on curls—but managed to bring my hand down again, empty. Not yet. One more place to go—and one more little white lie wouldn’t hurt me. So, though my curls burnt my fingers, with that in mind I was able to leave the cell, go through the little ceremony of the key, and walk past my grandfathers the way I had walked in—having kept trust with the Guaranty Trust.

As a reward, I suppose, I was allowed to catch the next cab immediately. But the minute I heard myself give my destination—the office of the attorney to whom I had already given so many powers of—I knew my own weakness. How often I had seen it in the profession!—how those who are merciless in self-criticism often feel enough absolved by it to stay right where they are. True, I had business with George, but after that there must be no more offside destinations. Cringing there in the cab, I came to grips with the one power I hadn’t delegated away and couldn’t, the one little estate of dull memories, cranky habit-grooves and old private nosepickings, that was locked in my brain forever and is the one which keeps most people from revolution—the power of home.

Matter of fact, it was George who helped me on and away, merely by being who and how he was; in the years to come I shall remember him as we do the last person we saw on shore.

In appearance, George is attractively speckled (with gray, of course)—a silver fox in pepper-and-salt suiting. One doesn’t shock George, at least verbally. As with most conservative lawyers, the bulk of his files records a steady round of those good little Czerny exercises which practice money. But George’s absorbent manner—that of a man who has gone through everything from divorce with mayhem (if only by proxy), to the problems of setting up trusts for the most secret illegitimates or monsters—is guaranteed to set the putatively criminal layman at his ease.

Behind this limber crime-side manner, he conceals a personal family life of the most Euclidean convention. If I could have depended on this alone, I’d long since have told him my secret, thereby acquiring the comfort of a sounding board, and yes, perhaps a little legal flirtation across the already admirable image he has of me. But his vanity—which certainly would have been to reply that such as I weren’t at all new to his experience—until yesterday would have offended mine. The need to be unique dies hard with those who already are—and how to get out of that corner with sincerity will be my worry from now on.

“Cruise, eh?” said George. “Archeological—you pay to dig? Or once round the Greek isles before the engine explodes? Or a schooner for suckers? I know you.

And how I counted upon it! “Tramp,” I said. That’s all—I left the rest to him.

“My dear girl.” In George’s eyes, I can always see how I look to him—a pleasant sensation, even yesterday. “Tramp steamers went out some years ago. They all have tile baths now. Any that would take on passengers.” He squinted at me, and I could see myself sitting on the axial line of his binoculars, a small client of charms just right for the afternoon tea-break, but not as tidy as usual. “You’re not thinking of doing a Birdsall?”

“What’s that, George?”

“She crewed it. Round the Horn, and the crew never knew she wasn’t a—until … Let’s see now, what year was that …?” He leaned back, intent on bringing in Birdsall in the happy, duckshoot way he always brought in all such citations.

“Oh, no, no.” I lowered my lashes. “Not in this partic—not in my situation. I just want to—get away from it all for a while. And though there’s no reason for us … I mean, for people like me to be anonymous, I mean, incognito … I mean of course we already are. But it’d be kind of fun.”

“Ah.” He twiddled with satisfaction. “Us.”

I said nothing. George does not leer, and I did not blush. But from then on, our business went with dispatch.

“I agree with you,” he said, in process of changing my will. “Ernest doesn’t need it. Not he.” His disapproval of my brother is based on what he believes to be E’s exhibitionism. In time, I shall wonder—and perhaps hear, from a distance—what he will think of mine. “But it does seem a shame that a girl like you can’t find a better beneficiary than the Seamen’s Institute.”

“Oh, I could—” I said. “There’s a friend—but so rich already.”

“Oho,” said George. “I mean—oh no. Not in that case.” He beamed at me, “Rich enough already, eh. Sure you don’t want to change your mind and let me book you on the United States Line. Get you a seat at the Captain’s table. And for, er—any companion, of course.”

Just then, the secretary brought in the tea-things. George’s windows are high, located in a cozy circle of other enormous buildings nestling round their view. There was a freckle of sun still on the harbor, and from within, the sense of lucid well-being that comes to one, toward end of day, in business offices dedicated to some furnishment which has been running quietly and profitably for a long time.

I envisioned myself at the Captain’s table, on my head—which I would hold a la marquise, with the creamy arrogance of those models who know themselves to be the impresario of some extraordinary fashion—perhaps the narrowest chaplet of gems, custom-fitted to be worn banded Indian-wise, across the forehead. For, wouldn’t I do better to strike a blow for my rights from the topmost purlieus of the upper parallel, instead of grinding away at my own moral behavior like some sidewalk artist, or from even farther below?

On the Shore Line, for instance, on the west side of the tracks somewhere past the outskirts of Harlem on the way to Port Chester, a large sign always caught the eye, as it had mine only that morning: Madame Baldwina’s Bridal Salon, so help me God. Though it was probably merely the ornate fancy of a lady named Baldwin, its possibilities had always amused me, a railside salon of the imagination, never to be patronized except in the mystic flash of empathy as I passed it, but its clients all in my category, all, like me, crouched in the ultimate creature-skin. And now I saw myself, a sudden bride from that salon, rocketed out in the name of my patronne upon the clean, savory, hot-bath-and-massage world of fashion promotion: Madame Baldwina model photo’ed at the Fontana di Trevi, at the Colony and on a bicycle in San Luis Obispo, Miss Baldwina at the Opera, at a first-night, at a Fair. At the Captain’s table. Or taking tea with her lawyer.

“What’s so funny?” said George.

“They run color ads of the fashionables, don’t they?” I said. “On the U.S. Line.”

Just then, the secretary made one of the squashed noises given forth by the free and equal of the democracy, to remind us that they are. Celebrities—she’d often seen them lined up at the rail on sailing-days, or coming into port. She’d even seen my brother. And at her picture of him, the small, clean whirlwind of the morning bore me up again, high enough up—or low—to see that if I joined him, in the world of fact-exploitation where he waltzed with his image, I should merely be upholding the single standard of Myself.

“No?” George said. “O.K., have it your way. At least you’ve cut that dreary job of yours. Why a girl like you … I never. Let those women I’ve seen you with—let them do it—spinsters who wear Femme. Why should a girl like you wear a hairshirt for the rest of the world?”

Such references always give me pause. I raised my lashes, short ones tinted but not added to, as I must so often have done everywhere—in hope. “A girl like me, George?”

He smiled at me. “A golden one. I always thought so.” George had a very Edwardian father—who often thinks for him. I smiled back at them both.

At the door, he even patted my shoulder. “Give you any trouble,” he murmured, “just you run to papa.” I stood still as a totem, and let him do the waltzing and weaving. To deceive, as I knew so well, one often need merely stand still and let other people’s conventions do the lying. Otherwise, I couldn’t have got him to make all these arrangements so blithely—but it was for the last time.

Perhaps he caught an ave atque vale echo; so many of the Edwardians were poets, or Latinists. “Listen,” he said, “it’s spring, so even a lawyer can say it. Gather your rosebuds, honey. You’re one of the few women I’d say it to. Go on and do it; live a little. Just don’t lose your head.”

Do nuns, on their last novice afternoon, make puns? What could I do but kiss him and hope that this would help him to remember, when he came to judge my state of mind at the time, his own last words to me? And then I said goodbye to him and all the offices of well-being. And then I caught the last cab.

Why is it that when we return home unexpectedly soon, doubling back on the lone prowler of last evening, the stumbler into clothes of the early morning, that we seem to smell the prowler just left, on whom we even seem to be prying? I stood on my own threshold, one of a life already repudiated, and already so nostalgically dear to me for its angel-pains of good or bad, that even to shut the door behind me was an act of dissolve. Then I went round the windows, letting in the last tender shoots of sun and air. The place was to live out its lease in dust covers, and if I hadn’t returned by then, my man of so many powers was to use one of them to pack it all off to the warehouse, where, as long as paid for, it might rust for my return under the best possible preservative conditions for sentiment, a little town of life in one room, among so many others of the same. (I had once paid a chance visit to the Manhattan Storage; like a tour of Pompeii, everything sooner or later is grist.) And on the new roads to come, if ever I needed a conundrum to put me to sleep, I could meditate on the odds of my returning to rescue it.

So now, after my morning’s hard work at discarding goods, money and other irrelevancies, there was very little else to dispose of, except—the crux. I had kept cut flowers about, but had never had plants, or close friends I must board them with. The air here was only mildly impregnated with the damp, lily-pad affections of some of my co-workers, mostly those whom George had taped so shrewdly, plus a few livelier echoes-in-stereo of the married ones, women of such bursting mental health that they exhausted their families in the expression of it, and had to get away now and then with the girls.

Going down the hall to the bathroom, I had my sharpest moment of—what? The hall is four feet wide, perhaps three times that in length. Nothing hangs there but a few dim lithos. To the right, almost brushing one’s arm and looming toward the eyeball as one passes, there is a high lacquer chest, dark and ungainly, put there because it will fit nowhere else. The light is poor. In short, it is a hallway, with no emotion of its own. One goes down it mindlessly, thinking of other things, or of the room at the end of it. Yet when I started down it yesterday I had to stop, whelmed, mourning exactly those unmarked moments. I could have wished for a bundle of them, an old cluster, to take with me. The power of home is in the unmarked moments. My shoulder, my soul, fitted this groove. Is this commonplace? Since I needs must follow the ordinary at a wallflower distance, I have no way of knowing.

Then I went to the wig closet. I knew all about my feelings here, a half-lifetime of them having brought me where I was, so had my answers ready, and experienced no pang. I had come to make my adieux.

The quality of the wig closet is intentness, less ordered than in a laboratory, not as cluttered as a beauty parlor is, but more desperate than in church. Its aims are smaller. Sometimes, when I entered and stood before that long line, I understood, for an ancient, frightened pause, the Old Testament’s fleshly fear of idols. There exist wigblocks whose smooth, oval headshapes have been vulgarized with bright cloth covers on which faces are even sewn, simpering masques with patchwork lips and sequined eyelids. Mine are all of the simple, natal wood, their only face that same planed abstraction of one, like the frontal of a casque, which serves them all equally for countenance. All have therefore the same blind, downward look which seems to know the service it performs. They are without obligation to be female. Nevertheless, they are demure, enough so that if one could attach to each block a body molded in its own spirit, I have often thought one might find oneself with a fair replica of the little lady who sits within the skin.

As I faced them, eighteen in all, I remembered the two who had refused to be discarded, and taking them out of their box, set them beside the others. They were none of them in the state I liked them best. Suddenly, I whipped off all their wigs and cast these aside, in a pile. (My sentiment toward the wigs themselves is clear enough; close though we are, I have for them the same feelings I harbor toward women with hair.)

Then they faced me, lyric abstracts of the human head, even almost the poem of it, but too much the appendage of human use ever to be sculpture, and being all alike, one sad step away from art. I suppose that is what most idols are. I stood there for quite a while saying what I thought was goodbye, long enough until I understood what I was really saying. Hello.

Oh larks and gaiety!—for that’s what it can be, sometimes, when we finally desert everything we have, in order to greet everything there is. Did you never wonder how it feels to be one of those—the men who walk out of the door one morning natural as life but are never to be seen again, at least not in the proper places? Or perhaps one of those whose unlaid ghosts are still reported—the owners of puddles of clothes left on beaches, of the ownerless car, left for all to see, on a bridge? I often used to wonder how it felt to be one of those—the de-campers. And now I have a notion of how it must be, even for the wife-deserters, the fathers of five who tiptoe out and over a back fence of broken bottles—how it feels for all those who light out and start walking the underside of the pavement, upside down, like a child’s drawing of Chinamen on the lower rim of the world.

Glee—that’s what it feels like. Half of it, of course, is for the stone rolled away from the neck-bone, but the other half is the glee of running. Queer then though, how they’ll still give each other little helping flips of the hand, or sit, though silent, in each other’s company—for the fire perhaps, but even on a warm day, as if each saw the same, funny, handmade grail in front of him. Or not really. For I never met a manjack among them who didn’t believe he was running toward the facts.

Rough champagne, that, and the price is high—but it’s the drink we’re made for. On the fizz of it, I went round gathering up my portfolio, while the door to the wig closet, a silent choir loft looking down, remained open. I chose toilet articles, at first trying to stick strictly to a philosophy of need, but that’s not to be had for the asking; in the modern world, what is need? I would be taught it.

I took a plaid car-blanket of consoling Scotch warmth and color, and a change of inner and outer clothing—unfortunate that the lightest and warmest should be cashmere and other silky telltales—to supplement the sturdy undergarments, slacks and stout shoes I had already donned. (If the vagrant is often dressed too warmly for year-round weather, it’s because Aesop is a liar; it’s not the ant who knows most about winter.)

To these I added a head-scarf (for colds) and then, thoughtfully, one of my old turbans from Cooksley. Even nudists must be practical, and I would in time have to get my living. Did I mean to beg, steal, or wash dishes?—here again it came to me that circumstances must be my moral instruction. (It’s so hard to remember that just because one is running toward the facts doesn’t necessarily mean that one has got them—or ever will.) And at the last minute I added a short veil of gauze.

The veil was connected with a slight ambition of mine already burgeoning. For it’s entirely possible to be both honest and frivolous, a role that men deny exists, of course, since only women are perfect for it. It seems to me in no way odd that Paris, the goal of so many professions from eaters to lovers, should also be mine. Not that the underside of New York is to be despised; a vagrant who has got even as far as one of its boroughs has come very far. But from books I’ve read, Bohèmes I’ve listened to, there appeared to be no place for one of our sort quite like the banks of the Seine, or perhaps the barges. (After that, with the onset of age and maybe wisdom, perhaps Athens.) And though from now on I mightn’t look it, I knew myself to be very conventional really, if not at heart, as they say, then perhaps from the bottom, where the conventions are more normally located. So, for Paris in the spring, I carried gauze.

Then I shouldered my strap-bag. An Abercrombie pouch of fine leather and canvas, veteran of picnic weekends of yore, it made me look all too much like the poule de luxe of vagabonds, but time would soon darken us both, tanning us not with holiday but with the truths of exposure, like bright pennies in water. Then I turned to go.

And then, it was my heart—which I have, oh I have—that rose in me, bubbled like a drain in which too much had been cast, but stood by for service as hearts do, imperfectly beating. The door to the wig closet was open—what use now, locks?—but I had intended to go straight past it. Had I? Had I forgotten what was hanging there? Have you?

It hung in its own niche, well above the wigs, or did until yesterday—Knoller’s picture, Knoller’s Picasso. I have sometimes suspected it to be of rather too small a size for the general run of those of his works classified as of that period of his known as the “bone period,” but even if it shouldn’t really be a Picasso, neither the donor nor I had been bilked. Surely the blue behind the figures is his blue, the shore they sit on his pebble-crazed, wind-eaten shore, the canvas itself only a pause between two claps of wind. They are his figures, the two terrible bones with knobs for heads and an eye between them. Sad clasped, they sit against the blue, and how human is bone! Who, in their bleak sight, would call for hair, or even flesh, to cover it? But in their lower parts they are joined, as if to remember where flesh was quickest and bone may still be, in the parts where love is made. Sad clasped they sit, against the blue. I took off my last wig, and laid it before them.

Though I might stand there until Christendom come again and all the bones did rise, I should never be as free, white and equal as they were. They were art and I was life, with a hey nonny nonny—I won’t say for which of us. Meanwhile, though I had already disposed of them by bequest—to Ernest—I found that I didn’t want him to have them after all, or not without me. Someday, they and I might present ourselves before him, for such a family reunion as is given to few stars of the cinema. In Californie, on my way to Paris, perhaps, on the odd beeline which is the zigzag one must expect of roads that were to be as open as mine. Meanwhile, I would take them along with me for my personal, the very psalm of my life, as sung by somebody else.

I found they wouldn’t fit in the pouch as yet, someday perhaps, as needs wore out or were discarded. I wrapped them in a chamois—useful for windows, should I go out washing them—and put the picture in a Harvard book-bag, which it fitted exactly. Then I had a glass of water. Then I ate a chocolate. Then I went to the bathroom, came out again, shouldered both bags, and stood in front of the door. Scarved for the journey, but otherwise rather cold about the ears, my head hung down, a donkey awaiting its Giddy-ap and Gee. I stamped my foot at myself, but the door did not open. And finally, I was able to open it and then shut it behind me, first tossing the keys inside. So I abandoned the roost for the road, the long, sweet domestic life of “What-I-feel” for the sterner shake-a-leg of “What-I-am.” It was nothing like my young dreams of going for a cabinboy—though it might turn out to be the most masculine thing I’ve done yet.

In the elevator, luckily self-service, I was nervy. All of me felt weak and exposed, like an invalid up on his pins again but not without a suspicion that there’d been more to the operation than supposed. I got past the doorman without difficulty.

“Taxi, Miss?” he said, but of course I declined. Ever since a certain event in both our lives he had been particularly respectful; unless my scarf slipped, he would remain so.

“Cheerio, Duggins,” I said. “And watch out for more armored cars.”

It wasn’t until I boarded the subway that I realized those words had been my last address to the first-class-with-loungeseats world I was leaving. I decided they would do.

It was just dusk when I got off in the neighborhood of my case-load, the locale I’d chosen to start out in. Honeymoons might be nothing more than unveiling, but all unveilings were not exactly—well, yes it was cowardly of me. But I couldn’t afford to start out on 42nd, a street under constant patrol for all the exhibitionists that were there already; yet in the subway, where the bashed-in people will tolerate anything, I would never be noticed at all. Later on, when I was really in practice, in that happy future when all would be ordinary again—at least for me—I planned to work my way uptown, even to hare off to the better country resorts, at weekends. Right now, I found myself not really conservative, but choosy. Which means timid. I suppose there’s no exactly right place to be reborn in, but I’ve not done so badly. This neighborhood is ruined, but lively. If the same is said of me, I shan’t be sorry.

One way to start the ruination was to get rid of all the extra money I had by me, all in packets thin enough to be slipped under a door, but when totaled, rather a sum. The teller had been horrified; banks so disapprove of cash one would think they hadn’t got any. It’s credit, of course, that makes the planet whirl smartly; cash is for scum. I was scummed to the ears with it. It wasn’t that I still kept any special brief for the poor-in-houses as people; I had long since been aware that their mechanisms of kindness or the reverse were at best about the same as anybody else’s; nor was I even any longer romantical enough to expect any change in that area in those of the viaduct, though I preferred them. But the difference between rich and poor isn’t only cash or credit; it’s scope. To my professional knowledge, windfalls were scarce down here. These were my reasons; the facts were, that even in the most decently uncovered heads, the poor can still be a damn headache.

I had a modest forty-five cases in my load—and they were all special, of course; that is, they were the ones I knew. As the evening darkened, and I toiled up one after the other of the tenement stairs as I had done so often before—one couldn’t trust the mailboxes, from which even government checks were regularly burgled—I carefully kept myself from any sly satisfactions of charity that I might have dragged with me from Tudor City, but couldn’t help being merry. I delivered to dark fanlights only, but had all their habits so closely by me that few return visits were needed. Now and then I stopped at a stall to have a slice of pizza or a knish or an ice, and almost every other one of the old hallways still had toilets—the whole evening was like an old household whose marvelously simple conveniences I was learning.

In my envelopes were bills of small denomination, in sums ranging no higher than $250, the limit I had set in order not to have the matter noised about, or to alarm the receivers, to many of whom good fortune was never anonymous or gratuitous. On most, I had written something not instructional, just enough to show good intention, and that it was for them. And on each, I tried to hit a note median between their fantasies and their needs—“For Rosie’s piano”—she would never play it; “For Mannie’s funeral”—he had already had it; “For luck” to the gambler; “For the patent leathers”; “For the pimp”—since after all, wasn’t this what I was doing for myself?

As I went up the stairs to leave the last envelope—for my old client whose politeness was always to warn me away from her own bedbugs, I felt relaxed and yet a-tingle, greased for the long birth-canal and ready to slide into the light. The fact was that my scarf, a Liberty tie-silk, ill-chosen to stay on a bare skull, must have slipped its knot sometime back—later I found it caught inside the lining of my Aquascutum. But I was by now too tired to notice anything but that the old woman’s door was dark, or to recall that her insomnia went without electricity except when visited. Her hearing too, was as sharp as the rats she kept at bay with her broom handle. I had no sooner stepped to the door, hand not yet in pouch, when the door opened. She knew me, almost at once, I think. But she was a resourceful woman. She didn’t want to.

“A dybbuk, a dybbuk!” she shouted—which wasn’t likely to wake anybody in this house of Italians. Then she shut the door. But she was lonely. A minute later, it opened a crack. “If you are a dybbuk,” her voice said, “touch the mezuzah on the door above, it will rest you, then leave yet, hah? If you are the worker from the agency, come in.”

Her kindness to dybbuks melted me. I entered. She was ready for me, already moaning and ritually gnashing. “Oy, what an accident. What to happen, Oy.”

“Not … an accident.” Confiding was new to me. “I—we—” I don’t know where I meant to begin.

She opened her eyes. “Those Italienisches. A fight maybe?”

I opened mine. Could she think they had scalped me? “No—no—”

“So, ah-hah, I thought so. Those crooks,” she said. “You go to the priest,” she said. She hissed it. “Go to their priest; he’ll get it back for you before they sell it, such a beautiful wig.”

I wept then, from shock.

“Oy, dolling,” she said, rocking me. “All of them you have, so byudifful. Musta cost a fortune. Those crooks.”

We were on the couch. I noticed she no longer bothered to warn me about the boggles. It’s no trick at all to come down in the world.

That cheered me. I dried my tears. “Does everybody know? That I wear them?”

“I don’t know wedder from everybody?” she said sulkily. “Me. My friend Mrs. Levin the beautician, she said it. And maybe we told Mrs. Yutzik in Hester Street, she’s an invalid.”

“And the Italians,” I said. I thought it best to leave it at that.

When I was ready to go, having found the scarf, she scuttled off, telling me to wait, and returned with something wrapped in newspaper. “Put on to go home,” she said. “And good riddance to it.” She struck her own brow. “Such connections it has, in the mind. Wait till donstairs, hah. To put.”

It was a sheitel, the ugly wig worn after marriage and meant to be known as such, shiny red-brown and bumpy as their Friday bread. That reminded me. Down the block, yes, there the baker was already at his ovens, it must be half-past three. I missed having a watch, but the disciplines must begin; later I would be rewarded for its loss by a spryer time-sense, the total loss of One that comes to those without watches. For every so-called loss, I could look forward to other gains.

I went in to buy rolls, and while the baker’s back was turned, dropped the sheitel lightly on a tray of the breads which would always tell me, newspaper-less though I might be, that it was indeed Friday. I did this in imitation of my friends under the viaduct, who saved as queerly as anybody who was not on the move, but when they threw something away, did so with an indefinable elegance. Then I retraced my steps to the old lady’s house—she would have to chance it on the mailbox—and dropped in my last delivery, whose inscription read: “For a couch.”

On the way to the viaduct, I looked back at what was already yesterday. Yesterday is a village now, already a place so little on the move that I shall always be able to look back to see how all the life-stories have worked out, including mine. I moved on.

The viaduct is a particularly coveted one, having at its opposite arch a public convenience, far enough away so that there is no smell, even downwind. Fires are not allowed by the city, of course, nor sleeping, but several niches in its fin-de-siècle architecture are excellent for either. The neighborhood, too, still a family one though on the fringe of the peculiarly livid hells of the Bowery, attracts a remarkably high class of loiterer, few winos, no hopheads, no feelies. Old men with Joaquin Miller beards still abound in the world; young ones “on the beat bit,” as they like to say, are setting up their new generation of the same (though I sometimes think it a shame to waste all that sincerity on such little experience); then there’s usually a scattering of Puerto Ricans who haven’t made it to Harlem yet or are making away from there, also now and then a crone or two (princesses-royal of the paper bag and always the least chummy), and here and there a tart. The Seamen’s Institute is nearby; though we see none of them here, it lends a churchly presence. Down the alley is the all-night Chinese restaurant. Altogether, in the gradation, not a bad setup for a novice.

As far as I could see, no one was installed there yet, certainly no fire, though that might be due to time of year. Down here, the obscurities of night become doubly soft as one approaches the river, doubly tender, as if hiding only babes in cabbages. The cop’s last round was at four, but some of the nicer ones rarely made it—what they don’t see don’t hurtem. Doesn’t. (Hmm—why not?—don’t.) Out in front of the arch, some yards distant, there is a public bench, under a lamppost.

I sat down on it, weary, not gay any more, but not sad either, perhaps in just that state of mind when the noumenon stops nagging and not-so-blind young phenomenon gets its chance. Or perhaps it was just that in the bad sections of New York the old lampposts are so beautiful. This one hung its long, graceful urn against a sky dark as the inside of a much larger urn that enclosed both of us. It swung itself a creaking inch or two; get born, sister; get born. The wind that blows my shore is a small one. I wished for the society of my kind—those under many hats in many places, or at home in their most private wigs a-sleeping. I wished for my brother. But my crusade is the smallest also, running to a company of one. So it was just here, that it began.

Without scarf, I could feel how the light shone gladly on the forehead that keeps us from the apes they say—with the help of that even whiter, high naked oval above it—below which my eyes, without their false shadow, must be gleaming beyond their fair green share. I didn’t need a mirror to unveil in, or swear a resolve to, but arched my neck like a swan’s, shifted my scalp, reserved ear-wiggling for a less sacred moment, but let the breeze play like a sixth sense around them. When the time comes, it’s like grace or death, perhaps. When the time comes, it’s nothing much. Except that you don’t always hear the cop behind you.

It was my first formal confrontation. I spoke first, as one always should to the establishment, and very distinctly. “Good evening, officer.”

He gasped; he must have thought me a boy. It was rather a comfort that he didn’t gasp more than he did. The New York police have of course seen everything and twice around, including the man who regularly walks lower Fifth Avenue in tam, perfect Glenurquhart kilt—and lace panties—or the beggar who stands in full beard, a costume out of Parsifal and a smile like a sneer from a pulpit, in the West Fifties, on wild-weather Sundays. At the thought that I might be classed with these, I held my heritage the higher, if wanly. What could I say to him, except as it has been said by plumpers-for-the-fact eternally: Officer, it’s mine.

He drew nearer; my uptown accent had stayed him, but he came on nevertheless. “Wotyer doing here … Miss?” Nearer, he looked puzzled; perhaps he had caught a resemblance. I decided to declare myself, thinking that this might settle it. One learns.

“Don’t you know me, Officer?” Delicately I framed my hands over my brow, just enough to bring out the face.

“Why, Miss—” he said. “Why, Miss—” Pity crept over his cheeks with its mild, coronary pink, and I knew I was lost. “Why, it’s the lady from the agency. Whatever are you doing here?”

“Oh … just … taking the air. Lovely, isn’t it?” It was no use; he was already backing away from me.

“Work done now, eh? You’ll be getting along home, eh. Not a place to hang around this late, even though we—” he gulped—“know you.”

“Oh, after a while. It’s the first night of spring, you know.” That was a mistake.

“Mmm,” he said. “Live far?”

“Not very far,” I said. I was learning, but one last try. “Officer, would you oblige me in something?”

“Why yes, of course, Miss.” Eager. “Get you a cab?”

“No. Just take off your hat.”

Without the hat, I could see that his hairline was well receded, almost gone. He was a middle-aged man, not bad-featured but heavy-headed, with small ears and a flaccid, white jowl; when that faded red line had finally left him, he was going to look, from the front at least, like a polar bear whose grandmother had come from County Kildare. Yet, if he took off his hat, no one would run him in for it.

“Thank you,” I said. “That’s all.”

“And you’re welcome, dear,” he said. “Fine evening, indeed now. You enjoy it, love.” He crooned it. “Stay right where you are.”

When he came back from the call-box, of course I wasn’t there. Ruses and stratagems were all coming on as well as could be expected. But I was still an apprentice, on a warm evening. I had left behind my precious Aquascutum.

From the side-window of the Chinese restaurant, where I ordered a pot of tea, I watched the officer come back and go away again. Under the lamppost, in the pool of light where I had first asserted my birthright, the bench was bare. Except for the loss of my raincoat, it seemed almost as if it had never happened. I was as used to this “except-for” brand of kismet as anybody else on the planet. But I found I had no desire to live by my losses only, no matter what graceful interpretations I might make of them. Oh, I had so much to learn, and at this hour, all of it stared at me at once. Is there a preferred style to be honest in? Was it quite the rough-and-ready to do a bunk on a cop by having tea?

The restaurant, empty now, was just that sort of land’s-end in which people so often sit at the end of their own wits, or at the beginning of them. The tiled floor, of the pattern of beer parlors in the days of Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model, had had scratched on it all the intervening sorrows of grime; the walls had once been painted in landscape, in those peculiar Corot-forests of varnish and gravy-fleck down which one could never wander far. Yet, over even the dingiest of such Sing Wu’s, there hangs always a certain paper fantasy, something of fans and kites, and out there in the kitchen, moth-plaints of a language not cognate—not the worst kind to hear in the background when one is taking stock. I wasn’t out to be a heroine—I wasn’t serious enough for it, I just wanted to be ordinary. But I didn’t seem to be Freudian enough for that either, at least not to the police. From his croon I was sure he was a man who knew all about how to be. The ones who do, they’re always the enemy. Watch out for good will, sociological and psychological—all those of kind intention who would kill me for my own good, either by keeping me in my place or sending me back to it. Oh, up with the coattails and all that, of course, but it was a long way between signals, and already the second day of spring. And right now, at the hour before dawn, when the blood-sugar level is lowest, I needed to be told that taking something off could be as positive and worthy an act as putting something on—a policy our children aren’t bred to. I could make use of a fortune cookie that said it.

When I shouldered my bag again, and put down the money for the tea, the two Chinese who had been cluttering in the back came forward. Though the old Chinatown tongs that brought them here were said to be dying, recruits like these still arrived regularly in the poorer eating-houses. Two pale boys with coarsely shining hair, lips swollen with youthful serenity, and inquiring nostrils, they had waited upon me together, teaching each other how to learn by serving a single pot of tea in unison. Three weeks ago, perhaps, they had been in Taiwan, and their landscape still walked with them; I could see their bent backs sculptured in the field. There is a kind of innocence that hangs for a long time about people who leave their homeland early. They don’t know precisely what events, which people in the new land, must be called strange.

And now once more, as these two ovaled up to me, bowing and curving, I was reminded of how, in Bangkok, Oriental gesture had always seemed to me to be fluently addressed to a point beyond me, its immediate object—as if all but me were chorus to a play whose main roles were being played elsewhere.

Surely my tip, modestly suited to my new status, couldn’t have caused all this twittering. “English?” I said into it. “Do you happen to speak any—”

In their seashell language, they deprecated themselves, humbly powerful. Grow grass they could, or set a table of teakwood thoughts in this wilderness, or mend the sky—with a gesture—when it was in danger of falling—but no, they spoke no English.

When I finally understood them, I couldn’t speak either. For, finally, one brought me a small wooden salad bowl, cupped my hands round it gently, as if valet to a personage, and even more humbly set my money—the quarter for the tea also—inside it. So, once again, I saw myself in somebody’s mirror, and this time I smiled.

As I left, tucking the bowl under an armpit, I pressed my palms together and bowed over them, glad that my travels had educated me enough to say thank you in monk language. In their final flurry of bows, they seemed even to be pointing me on my way—to the viaduct.

When I looked back, they had stopped bowing. One leaned in the doorway, staring out into the neon-thumbed night. The other, head bent, studied the carnation reek of our gutters. And I?—I’m a silly woman—I tripped along mystically, thinking of all the new roles my new head might have in store for me. I thought I saw the pattern of the life it held out to me and all wanderers, a life that was all episodes, through which I was the connecting string. Though these were to fall tangential as snow, it was my fate to unite them. Is this ordinary?

And is it customary to stand still on the pathway and give thanks to the general scene that you are in it, uncomfortable as you are? I did that! When the wild jackass coughs by night in the desert, bringing up all the poetry he has chewed by day, that’s what it must sound like. For, think of it, I had never before felt the absolute hilarity which comes of knowing that one’s equipment is equal to one’s intentions! Face to face with the diorama of where I could go—(and would) up to and including captain death’s table—my head fairly dizzied itself. I turned it yet once again—this large, superbly bare fact on my shoulders. I wanted to thank the boys back there for being my signal. Then it came to me—that I had been theirs. And that this was the inexhaustible doubleness of the world.

When I got to the viaduct, I found out why they had urged me here. One of the niches was occupied, by I-don’t-know-who, rolled up in my raincoat. I sat down next to him, pushed my pouch against the wall for a pillow, and considered him, snug in my coat there, if it rained.

Would he lend his half, in that case?

Does the future of the world depend upon it?

And would I steal it back for my own, when I woke?

Does the future of the world depend upon it?

Along toward dawn, he roused himself, stumbled toward the public convenience, didn’t get that far, but in a gentlemanly, sleepwalking way, managed to put a fair distance between us. Behind him, the night went up one lucent step. Head bent, he looked from the rear as if he were praying. I appreciated his courtesy.

So, when he came back, I said in a cheery voice, “I’ll lend you back the half you stole, eh?” Bleary-eyed, he nodded, without another look at me, and so we lay down to sleep, back to back, in mutual trust, or a draw. He and I were harmless.

I lay for a while on my elbow. Before me, the ordinary phoenix-fire of day was rising. We are born, we live and we die; crouch and adore. I watched the waterbugs streak like lizards from the Chinese restaurant, the men stride like catamounts, from plain doors. In the inexhaustible doubleness of the world, are there signals everywhere, wild as grass, that unite us? Or must we unite them?

What is imagination? I used to think it was to struggle against the facts like a fly trying to get out of the cosmos.

Come, you narks, cops, feds, dicks, railway police, members of the force everywhere! Run with us! If the world is round, who’s running after who?

In the cold of morning, I wrapped a scarf about my ears, but loosely, no deception, and lay down to rest with plenty of leeway until well after sunup, when the first rounds are once again made. Children can learn to be bald. And so to bed. What is imagination? And so to dream the answer, which I knew of course, but could never say. And so—I was born.