BOOK ONE

Amanda

Snow.

She heard the shovels scraping on the campus walks when it was still dark, and she sat bolt upright in bed and thought Snow! and then almost called out in excitement to the bed across the dormitory room until she remembered Diane had changed rooms and the bed was empty. The word snow rushed into her mind again, and she threw back the covers and rushed to the window. The floor was cold. She hopped from foot to slipperless foot as she wiped the window clear of condensation and peered out over the campus. Snow, and it was still falling, whispering, hushed. Snow, and the university lights were almost obscured in a dizzy swirl of white. A sudden gladness clutched at her heart, squeezing an unconscious grin onto her face.

“Oh, good, it’s snowing!” she said aloud, and she ran back to her bed and pulled the quilt to her chin and crossed her arms over her breasts and lay in the darkness smiling, thinking of Minnesota and the woods, and walking behind her father and her sister when they went out to cut down the tree for Christmas, the air so cold you could break it off and hear it tinkle in your fist, the snow thick and silent underfoot except for the steady squeaking crunch of her father’s boots. She lay in bed with the smile on her face, and she could not sleep. She thought of the way the snow would bank high against the kitchen door behind the rectory, and the tight snug snowed-in feeling of the house at evening prayers, the fire blazing high in the stone fireplace, the smell of pitch, the crackling spit of new wood; she could not sleep. Dawn broke against her window in silent grayness, sunlessly.

She got out of bed wide awake and quickly took off her pajamas.

“Whooo!” she said. “Whooo!” She put on her underclothing quickly, the cold bringing out goose bumps all over her body. She put on a skirt and her thickest sweater, and then she went down the hall to wash and brush her teeth. The dormitory was still. She was the only person alive in the entire world.

The campus was a line drawing that November day, black and white, everything so sharp and so clear. She felt she could see for miles, beyond the low brick wall hemming in the university grounds, and into the town of Talmadge itself, and beyond that into all Connecticut and New England, and to exotic places over the sea; her visibility was limitless that day. The snow lay untouched on the open campus fields and banked high on the sides of each walk. It seemed totally flat and one-dimensional, artificial. The bare trees behind it were black in silhouette against the gray sky. There was no color that day. It was odd. Even the red brick of some of the buildings seemed colorless.

She stopped on the low flat steps of the dorm and scanned the grounds, her eyes traveling in a slow circle, and then she pulled off one of her red mittens and scooped up a handful of snow. She held it in her palm until her hand stung, and then she bit into it, smiled, and tossed the remainder of the snow into the air. She wiped her hand on her coat and started out across the campus, walking rapidly, her hand tingling from the snow.

She passed the three chapels guiltily—well, she would say her morning prayers while she practiced—and then went on past the old campus on Fieldston Street, and then turned abruptly right onto Townsend and past the Townsend Memorial Library and the Town-send Law Buildings, each building topped with a wig of snow so that it resembled a British barrister begging a point of order. She was anxious to get at one of the pianos in the rehearsal rooms. She was hungry, but she could get a cup of coffee from the machine in the basement of Ardaecker. She could not bear the bustle of the student cafeteria this morning, not this glorious morning when she was feeling so wonderfully alive.

I love it here, she thought, but I do miss home, but I love it here, and again she marveled at the miracle of being here at all. She could remember first receiving the Talmadge catalogue, and the frightening entrance requirements for the School of Music and the major in composition. Did she know modal counterpoint? Could she harmonize chorale melodies in the style of Bach? Apprehensively, she had read through the list of topics to be covered in the examinations: the rudiments of music, the perception of rhythm and pitch, modulation, non-chordal notes, altered chords, two- and three-part fugue writing, three-part motets.

She had looked up at her father suddenly and said, “This is impossible! They’re out of their minds!” and then immediately buried her nose in the catalogue again.

There would be keyboard tests in reading scores of two to four staves in different clefs (including alto and tenor clefs), tests in transposition, in harmonizing figured and unfigured parts, an oral test on the theory of music. And, to cap it all, she was required to submit at least four original compositions, one of which had to be polyphonic in character, “such compositions to be delivered to the Talmadge School of Music not later than March 1, 1941.”

“They’re out of their minds!” she had said again.

And yet she had done it, and here she was, starting her third semester, and it seemed she had been here forever. Had she really known anything at all about music before she entered Talmadge? How in the world had she ever passed the entrance exams? A miracle, that was all. The power of prayer. She drew in a deep breath and felt the cold air hammering her body to life again. She smiled suddenly. There was a tinge of expectation to the day, somehow, as if something were going to happen—oh, she just wished it would, just around the turn of the walk; still she knew nothing would happen, but wouldn’t it be great if something did? But she knew nothing would.

And then she heard footsteps on the walk ahead of her, and for an instant her heart stopped, and she caught her breath. She felt as if she had made a pact with the devil. Now I’ve done it, she thought, and stopped stock-still, waiting for God-knew-what blinding explosion of evil.

She almost laughed aloud when Morton Yardley came into view around the bend.

“Morton!” she said, relieved. Her voice rang on the campus stillness, startling him. He stopped on the path and peered out from under the hood of his Mackinaw, billows of vapor steaming from within the cowl.

“Oh, hullo, Amanda,” he said.

She smiled. “Hello, Morton.”

“It’s too cold,” Morton said.

She liked Morton. He was one of the few boys on campus she could talk to. She had first met him in her class on Bach’s Organ Compositions. He was a divinity student taking the course as an elective, and really a pretty fair organist, not as good as her father, of course, but with a good keyboard sense nonetheless. He had been puzzled by the tonality of one of the preludes, and she’d stayed after class explaining it to him, liking him instantly even though there was an air of displacement about him, as if he had already taken a personal vow of poverty and chastity. She had hardly ever seen him without his hooded Mackinaw. He wore it well into the spring, always with the hood up, as though he had secretly joined a monastic order ages ago and was only going through the motions of an uncloistered life. He always made her smile. He had a round cherub’s face, and a well-padded paunch, and guileless blue eyes, and a very high voice, the physical equipment of a jolly Friar Tuck. And yet he was an oddly solemn and detached boy, a thin boy wearing a fat boy’s body, a boy who walked with the curiously sedate and pensive motion of an old man talking to pigeons in the park. Still, he made her smile.

“Winter intimidates the soul,” he said, somewhat balefully. “It’s too cold. If the sun is God’s eye, why doesn’t He open it today?”

“But it’s a wonderful day,” Amanda said, smiling.

“Well, for you, I guess,” Morton said. He saw the puzzlement on her face and added, “Or don’t you know yet?”

“Know what?”

“Well, never mind.”

“Know what, Morton?”

“No, never mind. I’ve got to hurry. I’m late for chapel.”

She caught his arm and stepped into his path. “Don’t I know what yet?”

A rare and secret smile crossed Morton’s face. “Where are you going now?”

“Ardaecker. What should I know that I don’t know?”

“You’ll see.”

“Don’t be mean, Morton!”

“I’ll talk to you later. When are you eating lunch?”

“Fifth hour. Morton, what—”

“I’ll meet you in the cafeteria. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee, okay?”

“All right, but …”

Morton retreated into his cowl and started off down the path in stately dignity. Amanda stared after him, her hands on her hips. An expression of disappointment crossed her face, a translation of emotion into exaggerated grimace, the honest and direct translation of a seven-year-old, curious on the face of Amanda Soames only because she was nineteen. The expression faded. She stood watching Morton a moment longer, and then she turned and continued walking toward Ardaecker Hall.

She unslung her shoulder bag, took off her jacket, and threw it onto one of the benches along the basement wall. She dug into her purse, found a nickel, and quickly put it into the coffee machine. Sipping from the cardboard container, the steam rising about her face, she walked idly toward the bulletin boards on the wall opposite the benches.

She was alone in the building. She could hear the huge oil burner throbbing somewhere beyond the solemn green lockers with their hanging combination locks. The basement walls were painted a sterile pale green. Three overhead light globes cast a harsh glow onto the concrete floor. The heating ducts and vents overhead were painted in the same cold green, and the water pipes were covered with astringent white asbestos. She walked idly and slowly, unconsciously female, totally unaware that she added a badly needed tonal softness to the otherwise drab basement. She never thought of herself as beautiful, or even as attractive. “Vanity is a sin,” her mother had taught, and she’d accepted this unquestioningly, startled sometimes by the sight of her own naked body in the mirror, surprised by the lushness of it, as shocked as if she’d seen a naked stranger, and embarrassed.

The boys at Talmadge did not find Amanda beautiful, but they did think she was attractive. If there was nothing unusual about her shoulder-length blond hair, or her brown eyes, or her mouth, or the gentle curves of her body, she was still pleasant to watch because she looked so incredibly soft. One of the freshman boys had probably described her effect most accurately during a cafeteria discussion, which caused Morton Yardley to leave the table quite suddenly. They were speculating on Amanda’s potential when one of the boys asked, “Did you ever try to kiss her? It’s like invading France.”

“I never even think of kissing her,” another boy said. “In fact, I never think of sleeping with her.”

Morton, eating a sandwich at the other end of the table, retreated further into his hood.

“Yeah, yeah, you never think of sleeping with her,” the first boy said.

“I mean it. I swear to God. Never with her.”

“Then what?”

“She’s the softest girl I’ve ever seen in my life. I think of sleeping on her,” and it was then that Morton put down his sandwich and left the table.

Unconsciously female, Amanda tossed the empty coffee container into the big trash barrel and studied the first of three bulletin boards. There were the usual notices assumed to be of interest to Music majors: a meeting of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, a new award for the best violin-cello duet composed by an undergraduate, a dance recital to be given at the University Theater in co-operation with the Drama School, a revised schedule of fees for practice rooms, Fifteen dollars an hour, that’s outrageous! she thought, a special rehearsal of the marching band before the Yale game on Saturday, had she promised Diane she would go? She wished Diane hadn’t joined a sorority; it made it so difficult to keep up with her. Still, the Sig Bete house was closer to most of her classes. She made a mental note to call Diane and began scanning the second board. Blah-blah, the usual garbage; there was still a notice there about the Halloween Ball, didn’t they ever take anything down? Her eye was caught by a frantic, hand-lettered note.

* IMPORTANT * IMPORTANT *

I have lost three pages of an English theme due in Eng 61.12 on Friday, November 13th! Please, please, if you have any information, please contact me, Ardis Fletcher, locker number 160 in Baker Dorm.

Amanda smiled and moved effortlessly toward the third and final board. It was just like Ardis to have lost those pages. If the rumors about her were true, she’d lost just about everything else she’d owned by the time she was fifteen. There didn’t seem to be much on the last board. She was turning away when she stopped, alarmed because her name had leaped out at her suddenly from one of the typewritten pages. Even as she moved back toward the bulletin board, she knew that this was what Morton had meant, and she felt an anticipatory excitement. She read the notice with slow deliberation, allowing the excitement to build inside her.

TALMADGE UNIVERSITY

School of Music

November 9, 1942

NOTICE TO ALL MUSIC MAJORS IN COMPOSITION

In re all musical compositions submitted for consideration for annual Christmas Pageant. Drs. Finch and MacCauley have now judged all submitted songs, ballets, and incidental music and wish to announce the selection of the following compositions for inclusion in the show:

INCIDENTAL MUSIC
Introduction and Prelude	Ralph Curtis
Vamp ’Til Ready	George Nelson
SONGS
Still and Bright	Francine Bourget
U.S.O. Blues	Louis Levine
An einem gewissen Morgen	Margit Glück
BALLETS
Winterset	Amanda Soames
Surprise Package	Amanda Soames

She stood before the bulletin board, and she read the notice a second time, and then once again, and she thought, Both ballets are mine, and she thought, This is one of the happiest days of my life, and there in the silent basement she began weeping.

“You should have told me, Morton,” she said to him later.

“What?” he asked. “I can’t hear you.”

She raised her voice above the student roar in the cafeteria.

“You should have told me!” she shouted. “About the Christmas Pageant.”

“And spoil the surprise? Not a chance.” He sat opposite her at the long table, spooning vegetable soup into the cave formed by the hood. “I wish I could have been there when you read the notice.”

“Morton, do you know what I did?”

“What?”

“I began crying.”

“Why?”

“Because I was so happy.”

“You’re crazy.”

“It’s what I did,” Amanda said. “I can’t help it. I cry easily.”

“Did I congratulate you?”

“No, you didn’t. And don’t think I didn’t notice, either.”

“Congratulations. I’m very proud of you. You want some coffee?”

“No. Aren’t you warm? Why don’t you put down that hood?”

“I feel fine. Listen, are you going to the game Saturday?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember whether I made plans with Diane or not. Why?”

“I thought we might go together,” Morton said, shrugging. “It’s in New Haven, you know, and I have got the car.”

“Oh, all right,” Amanda said. “Morton, can you imagine it? Both ballets are mine. Do you know how many were submitted?”

“How many?”

“I don’t know, but plenty, I’ll bet. Morton, do you think I really have talent?”

“I guess so. Yes. Yes, you have.”

“I mean, really. I mean, do you think it’s really professional talent? I don’t mean by college standards.”

“Now, how would I know, Amanda?”

“I’m only asking your opinion.”

“I don’t know the difference between just ordinary talent and professional talent. What’s the difference, Amanda?”

“Well, professional talent …”

“Is what people pay for, right? Well, people are going to pay to see the Christmas Pageant.”

“That’s different. They only go because it’s tradition.”

“I would say, offhand, that if you have to ask whether or not your talent is professional, chances are it isn’t.”

“That’s a nasty thing to say, Morton.”

“I wasn’t trying to be nasty.”

“I will have a cup of coffee. Wait a minute, Morton. Just a minute. Do you know how I feel?” She leaned across the table, her eyes bright. “I feel as if the day is just starting. I feel as if that notice was only the beginning.”

“How do you mean?”

“Morton, you won’t tell this to anyone?”

“I promise.”

“Your word of honor?”

“My word of honor.”

“I feel as if this is going to be the most important day of my life.”

“How can you possibly tell that?”

“I just feel it. Inside.”

“Well, okay,” Morton said, and he shrugged.

“Don’t you believe me?”

“Sure, I do.” He stood up. “Cream and sugar?”

“Yes. One sugar. Morton?”

“Mmmm?”

“Do I sound silly?”

“You never sound silly, Amanda,” he said seriously, and he walked away from the table to join the line at the counter.

Amanda sat at the table, listening to the voices all around her, a part of the babble of conversation, the rush of sound, the clatter of trays and utensils, surrounded by people she knew, all talking about familiar things. She felt suddenly proud. It was good to be here, in this chair, at this table, in this cafeteria. She even felt a sudden sympathy for Ardis Fletcher, who came bouncing into the cafeteria from the far end, her red head bobbing, wearing a tight, pale-blue sweater, a string of pearls knotted about her neck, swinging wildly as she walked. She raised her hand the moment she saw Amanda, and came over to the table swinging pearls and hips, leaving a host of turning male heads in her wake.

“Hi,” she said wearily, and she collapsed at the table and rolled her blue eyes. “Oh, what a day, what a day.”

“Did you find your missing pages?” Amanda asked.

“No, damn it, I …” She stopped. “I’m sorry. I forgot you don’t like swearing. Do you suppose someone stole them?”

“Why would anyone want to do that?”

“I don’t know,” Ardis said. “It’s a pretty good theme, you know.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“Somebody probably stole those pages.” Ardis paused. “They were always stealing from Shakespeare, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Sure. They still are. Half the movie plots today are stolen from him. The artist doesn’t stand a chance in today’s cutthroat world.” She rolled her blue eyes expressively. “I just came from home,” she said. “I went through my entire room, I turned it upside down, everything. I found things I didn’t even know I owned, letters from when I was at camp two years ago, can you imagine? But no pages. And I walked to school and turned over every scrap of paper in the gutter. Now, where could they have gone, would you please tell me? I’m convinced that inanimate objects can get up and walk around. Did you get your call?”

“What?”

“Your call. There was a long-distance call for you.”

“When?”

“About a half hour ago. One of the girls told me. I thought you’d—”

“Long distance? From where?”

“You’re supposed to call Operator 23 in Minneapolis. Didn’t you …?”

“Oh my gosh!” Amanda said. “I’ll bet it’s happened!”

She rose from the table suddenly.

“Drink my coffee!” she said.

“What?”

“Morton,” she answered, and rushed out of the cafeteria.

“Mother?” she said into the phone. There was a terrible electric crackling on the line, and she had to shout. “Mother, is that you?”

“Amanda?” she heard her mother say weakly. “This is Mother. I’ve been trying to …” and then the voice faded completely.

“Oh, for the love of … Mother? Mother!” Angrily she jiggled the hook on the wall phone. “Operator? Operator!”

“Operator, yes?” the voice said.

“Operator, we’ve been cut off.”

“Your party is still on the line, Miss.”

“Well, I can’t hear her, so what good is it if she’s still on the line?”

“One moment, please.”

There was more crackling, and then the background noises of a telephone exchange came onto the line, an operator haggling with a soldier in Fort Bliss, who was trying to reach New York, and then the background noises were cut off, and there was a clicking, and a hum, and then the operator came back and said, “Here’s your party. Go ahead, please.”

“Mother?”

“Amanda? What is going on with this telephone?”

“Did she have it?” Amanda asked.

“Yes, dear.”

“Is she all right, Mother?”

Two girls in the dormitory reception room began shouting at each other and Amanda yelled, “Keep quiet in there! I’m on long distance!”

“Well, pish-posh!” one of the girls yelled back, but they quieted down.

“Mother, is Penny all right?”

“Yes, she’s fine, darling.”

“What was it? What did she have?”

“A girl.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Amanda said, grinning. “A girl. But she’s all right? Penny?”

“Yes, she’s fine. I’ve been trying to reach you since ten o’clock, Amanda. Don’t they let you know when you have phone calls?”

“I’ve been in class, Mother. Mother, what’s her name? The baby’s.”

“Katherine.”

“That’s a good name.”

“Yes.”

“I like it.”

“Yes.”

“How’s Dad?”

“He’s fine. I left him at the hospital. I had to get back for the church social tonight. How’s school, Amanda?”

“Oh, wonderful. Mother, two of my ballets were chosen for the Christmas Pageant!”

“That’s good. Don’t they call you to the phone when you have a call, Amanda?”

“Yes, sure they do. I was in class. Mother, would you tell Dad?”

“Tell him what, darling?”

“About the ballets? About mine being chosen?”

“Yes, of course I will.”

“Mother, does Frank know yet? Did someone contact him?”

“Well, darling, he’s in the Pacific Ocean. We sent a cable, but Lord knows when that’ll reach him.”

“Doesn’t the Navy have some sort of a system?”

“I’m sure they do, Amanda, but they are fighting a war, you know. We’re going to get a letter off to Frank tonight, in case the cable goes astray.”

“That’s good. How does she look? The baby.”

“Like a baby.”

“And Penny’s all right?”

“Yes. She’s tired, but otherwise—”

“Tired? Was it very hard, Mother?”

“Don’t trouble your head about that, Amanda. You’re too young to be worrying about such things.”

“Well, I …” She fell silent.

“Amanda?”

“Yes, Mother?”

“I thought we’d been cut off again.”

“No, I’m here.”

“It’s time we said goodbye, anyway. This is long distance, you know.”

“Yes. Mother, tell Penny I love her, and tell Dad about the ballets, don’t forget.”

“I won’t forget.”

“I’ll see you on Thanksgiving. Do you think Penny’ll be out of the hospital by then?”

“Yes, I’m sure she will.”

“Good. Okay, Mother, I’ll say goodbye now.”

“God love you, darling.”

There was a click on the line, and then a hum. Amanda put the phone back onto the hook, stood with her hand on the receiver for a moment, silent, and then turned toward the reception room. “Hey!” she yelled. “My sister just had a baby!”

“Well, pish-posh!” the same girl yelled back, and Amanda burst out laughing and ran up the three flights to her room. She threw open the door and went directly to the calendar on the wall over the desk. She picked up a black crayon and circled the date instantly: November 10, 1942.

“There,” she said. “Kate, that’s a nice name,” and she laughed again and threw herself onto the bed. She kicked off her loafers, rolled onto her back, and lay there grinning, looking up at the ceiling.

My sister had a baby, she thought. Well, what do you know? Good old Penny. “A baby is God’s divine gift,” her mother had said once. Well, you did it, Penny. You sure did it, old Penny. I wonder what it was like. It probably hurt like hell.

She sat up suddenly, almost as if she had said the word aloud and wanted to be certain no one had overheard her. But she expected to be alone, and the girl standing in the doorway startled her.

“Oh!” Amanda said.

“Hi,” the girl answered. “Did I scare you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. Is this thirty-five?”

“What?”

“Thirty-five. Is this room thirty-five?”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

Amanda sat in the center of the bed, shoeless, watching the girl in the doorframe. The girl was wearing a Navy pea jacket over a gray flannel skirt. The collar of the jacket was pulled high against the back of her neck, a dark backdrop for her reddish-brown hair. The hair, hanging in wild bangs on her forehead, was brushed sleekly back from the bangs to fall in a smooth cascade to the nape of her neck. The girl smiled. Her smile was radiant. It lighted her green eyes and her entire face. She put down her suitcase and her handbag and studied the room, still smiling.

“This is marrr-velous,” she said. “I didn’t expect it to be so grand.” She began unbuttoning the pea jacket. Amanda watched her silently. The girl took off the jacket and tossed it over the suitcase. She was wearing a dark-blue cashmere sweater with tiny pearl buttons. She was slender, with good breasts and wide hips. She could not have been older than seventeen.

“You must be Amanda Something-or-other,” she said.

“Soames.”

“Soames, that’s right. The woman in charge of Female Berthing sent me over. Female Berthing, isn’t that a scream? They make it sound like a maternity ward.” The girl laughed. Her laugh was deep and throaty. Her green eyes never lost their sparkle. They darted about the room, absorbing everything, continuously searching, continuously amused, always aglow. Amanda, startled and somewhat annoyed at first by the intrusion, felt her annoyance dissipating. Oddly, she wanted to laugh. There was something contagious about the liveliness of this girl’s face, the impish grin, the glowing green eyes.

“Well, what … what’s this all about?” Amanda asked.

“Didn’t Female Berthing call you? And I thought she was so efficient. I guess I’m your roommate. If you don’t mind, that is. I’m sorry about getting here so late, but my mother and I had a slight difference of opinion.” She pulled a grimace. “Is it okay?”

“Well, I … I guess so. I mean …”

“Good. I think it’s going to be marrr-velous. Is there a john anywhere? I’ve had to go for hours. The one on the train was a pigsty.”

“Yes,” Amanda said. “Yes, down the hall.”

“Thanks.” The girl paused in the doorframe. “Amanda Soames,” she said, testing the name. “Which way? Right or left?”

“Left. The second door,” Amanda said, her eyes wide.

“I’ll be back.”

The girl vanished into the corridor. A second later, her head appeared around the doorframe, disembodied, cocked to one side, the long red-brown hair dangling limply over one eye, the impish grin on her mouth, the green eyes sparkling.

“My name’s Gillian,” she said, “my first name, isn’t that a scream? Laugh now so you can get it out of your system before I come back.”

The head vanished again. Amanda stared goggle-eyed at the empty doorframe. And suddenly the head reappeared, like Alice’s Cheshire cat, floating again in the doorframe, disembodied, grinning.

“Gillian Burke,” the girl said.

And the doorway was empty again.

The incident involving Gillian Burke took place in the University Theater shortly after the Thanksgiving vacation.

Amanda was rather surprised by what happened because she’d known Gillian only as a roommate up to that time, and she hadn’t suspected this deeper side of Gillian’s character. And even when it was all over, she never really knew whether the incident was a revelation of character depth, or whether the entire thing had been an exhibition of Gillian’s intuitive showmanship. She could not ignore the persistent knowledge that the incident catapulted Gillian into the role of a campus celebrity within a single week, and she often wondered if Gillian hadn’t promoted the entire thing with just such an end in mind. But hadn’t there also been a measure of humiliation for Gillian, and would she willfully have caused herself such embarrassment? The entire affair was contradictory and puzzling. But then, so was Gillian Burke.

Amanda learned almost instantly that living with Gillian was going to be an experience unlike any she had ever had before: refreshing, exasperating, and, in a way, annihilating.

The first thing was the swearing. Amanda thought she’d better settle that at once. She had been raised in a home where “Hell” was always spelled with a capital letter and was never used except in sermons by her father and then to illustrate the torments of brimstone and fire. “Bitch” was a female dog. “Can” was a container usually made of tin. “Ass” was what you didn’t covet your neighbor’s wife or. “To lay” meant “to place upon”—not necessarily upon a bed. There were other words that Gillian used, which Amanda had truthfully never heard in her home but which she suspected were scrawled upon the back fences and sidewalks of Minneapolis. In any case, they offended her ear, and she decided to put a stop to the flow of profanity immediately.

Gillian had just returned to the room after dinner. She promptly reached under her sweater and unclasped her bra.

“There!” she said. “Loosen the damn harness!”

“Why do you do that?” Amanda asked. She was sitting up in bed, reading an English assignment.

“Why do I do what?” Gillian answered. She went to her own bed, pulled back the quilt, brushed crumbs from the sheet, and sat abruptly.

“Curse so much.”

“What?” Gillian looked up. She had taken off her right loafer and sock and was examining her big toe. She peered at Amanda through a hanging curtain of red-brown hair.

“You curse a lot.”

“Who?” Gillian said. She flicked her head, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. “Me?”

“Yes. Every other word out of your mouth is a swear word.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Gillian said, and she went back to examining her toe.

“Well, you do,” Amanda said. “Curse a lot, I mean.”

The room was suddenly hung with silence. Amanda bit her lip. She felt there was going to be an argument, and she did not want one. And yet she had to settle this swearing thing. Across the room, Gillian was studying her big toe and nodding, as if she had finally got the message and was pondering it before answering. She uncrossed her legs, leaned back on the bed, propped by her arms, and—still nodding—said, “What is this? A formal complaint?”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Amanda answered.

Gillian said nothing. She rose suddenly, went to the desk for one of her books, and then walked stiffly back to her bed with it.

“I think we should settle this,” Amanda said. “If we’re going to be roommates, I think we should settle this.”

“It’s settled,” Gillian answered.

“I don’t see how.”

“What the hell do you want me to do? Shave my head and take the vows?”

“No, but I think—”

“This is the way I talk,” Gillian said. “This is me.” She nodded emphatically. “It shouldn’t surprise you to realize I’d sooner change my room than my personality.”

“I don’t see that cursing adds anything to your personality.”

“Well, I don’t see that muttering all those prayers adds anything to yours.”

“I was raised on prayer,” Amanda said.

“And I was raised on swearing.”

“Well, that’s no answer.”

“No, I guess it isn’t.” She put down her book. “I’ll contact Female Berthing. I’m sure she can find another room for me.”

“Maybe you’d better do that.”

“I will. In the morning.”

There was silence again. In the silence, Gillian took off her clothes and got into her pajamas.

“I’m sorry,” Amanda said. “I just … I’m just not used to such language.” She paused. “Nobody in my house talks that way.”

“This isn’t your house,” Gillian said, and she got into bed.

“No, but—” Amanda cut herself short and frowned. “Wh … what do you mean?”

“I mean this isn’t Crackerbarrel Falls, Minnesota. This is Talmadge University, part of the great big wide world. And there’s an even bigger world outside Talmadge. And this may come as a great shock to you, but there are millions of decent God-fearing people in this world who aren’t considered lost souls because they say ‘hell’ or ‘damn’ or—”

“That’s enough, Gillian!”

“Okay, the thing is settled. I’ll change my room tomorrow. But you’re here for an education, Amanda. And it just might include something more than Beethoven’s Fifth.”

“I don’t see how—”

“I’m a person,” Gillian said flatly. “You’re going to meet a lot of people between now and the time they bury you. It’s entirely up to you whether you’re going to ask all of them to please change rooms.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean that’s a fine way to live, if it’s what you want. But if they keep changing rooms, you can bet on one thing, Amanda.”

“What’s that?”

“Your room’ll never change.”

“Maybe I don’t want it to change.”

“Great. You’re nineteen years old, and everything’s set already. Don’t move any of the furniture, Amanda might trip and fall.”

“I don’t see how listening to a lot of swear words is going to round out my education. I don’t expect to be hanging out in … in barrooms or … or pool halls … or … or …”

“Neither do I,” Gillian said. She sighed deeply. “Let’s forget it. I’ll call Female Berthing in the morning.”

She did not call Female Berthing in the morning. In the morning, Amanda said to her, “Well, I … I think we were both a little hasty. But since you know how I feel about it, couldn’t you make some kind of an effort? I mean, couldn’t you at least try, Gillian?”

Gillian grinned. Her green eyes suddenly sparkled. “I’ll try,” she promised.

There was a joke current that year, a joke about two nuns who went to see one of the most foulmouthed plays on Broadway. They sat shocked through the first act, appalled through the second. During the third act, one of the nuns reached under the seat and began groping around on the theater floor.

“What is it?” the other nun whispered.

“I dropped my goddamn beads,” the second nun whispered back.

The influence of Gillian Burke was not quite that strong. And yet Amanda found her ears growing accustomed to the sound of profanity. And whereas she never once used any of Gillian’s words herself, she came to accept them as a part of Gillian, an essential part without which Gillian would have seemed somewhat pallid. There was, Amanda discovered, a great deal about Gillian that at first caused annoyance, and then gradual acceptance, and finally seemed to be part of the natural order of things.

The mess, for example.

Amanda was a neat girl who took off a skirt and immediately hung it in the closet, who made her bed each morning before classes, who put her books in the same spot on the desk each evening when classes were done, whose life was governed by an orderly, efficient routine. Gillian, on the other hand, seemed to have no respect for her own possessions, no concern for time, no patience with the ordered cadence of the world around her. Her habits infuriated Amanda at first. Amanda was a music student whose early study of the piano had been strictly regulated by the unwavering beat of a metronome. When she looked at the signature of a composition, she knew instantly the key and tempo, and she knew these would remain constant until the composer indicated a change. The world of music was rigid and unbending. In 4/4 time, there could never be five quarter notes—until Gillian came along.

At first Amanda was at a total loss. She would come back to the room to find Gillian’s sweater hung over a chair, her blouse on the desk, her slip and bra scattered on the floor, her stockings trailing over doorknobs, her books opened or closed wherever Gillian happened to drop them, the radio blaring, cookies crushed into the hooked rug before Gillian’s bed, the bed still unmade, Gillian herself lying naked in the center of it, or, on at least one occasion, covered only by a copy of The New York Times.

She spoke to Gillian about the condition of the room, and Gillian promised to be more careful. But instilling order into the chaotic frenzy of Gillian Burke’s life was an impossible task. Amanda found herself picking up after her roommate, folding her sweaters, placing her loafers neatly on the floor of the closet, even making her bed—and then rebelling against all this when she noticed something telling about Gillian’s seeming disorder.

She noticed that no matter how disrespectful of her own possessions she seemed, Gillian would never touch anything belonging to Amanda. When she tossed her bra casually across the room, it never landed on Amanda’s bed. When she left unwashed glasses around, or open boxes of crackers, they were always on her side of the room. She never imposed her disorder upon Amanda, and Amanda realized it was unfair to impose her order upon Gillian. So she stopped trying. She learned that Gillian’s very lack of order was an order in itself, and her own possessions went undisturbed. In the midst of the maelstrom, she was certain that Gillian would never flop down on her neatly made bed, would never move so much as a bobby pin from where Amanda had placed it. The two separately revolving worlds managed to wheel about the sky without colliding.

She learned besides that Gillian’s seeming slovenliness had very little to do with the girl’s honest concern for cleanliness and good grooming. She had never known anyone who bathed as often as Gillian Burke. “Cleopatra bathed in milk, did you know that?” Gillian said. “I wish I could play her. I’d adore playing her.” The tiniest blemish, the smallest unexpected bulge, was studied by Gillian absorbedly before the full-length mirror on the closet door. For Amanda, who took her flesh for granted, the interest seemed abnormal, almost narcissistic. Gillian would suddenly move close to the mirror and sweep her hair onto the top of her head, holding it there with one hand. “Do you think I should wear my hair up? Does it make me look older?” Or she would put her hands on her hips and scowl at her mirror image and say, “I need to gain a few pounds. Actresses shouldn’t be too thin.” And once she stood before the mirror nude and suddenly said, “Look, Amanda, a Javanese dancing girl,” and struck the angular pose of arm and leg, and moved her head in the short quick movements of the dance, and in that moment even her eyes seemed to slant Orientally. And all at once, Amanda realized that Gillian considered her body only another of her tools. Gillian wanted to be an actress, and learning her own body, its potential and its limitations, was part of her training. Still, Amanda wished she would spend less time before the mirror, and less time in the bathtub.

Her body and her clothes were the two standing edifices in the wake of her personal hurricane, and the clothes completely mystified Amanda. She would never understand how Gillian did it. No matter where she dropped her skirt—on the floor, at the foot of her bed, over a chair—when she put it on the next morning, it never seemed rumpled or wrinkled. It looked, in fact, as if it had just come back from the campus cleaners. Gillian took a long time dressing each morning, in complete contradiction to the speed with which she disrobed each night. It was almost like watching the slow and painful construction of a skyscraper that was destined to be blown to smithereens at sunset. The result was impressive. Gillian’s figure carried clothes well. Her waist was narrow; her skirts, hung on wide hips, dropped in a sleek smooth line over good legs. She wore her sweaters modestly loose, as if denying her own rich femininity. She spent a great deal of time applying lipstick to her generous mouth, brushing out her long straight hair, trimming her bangs. And at sunset, boom! The dynamite was exploded, the entire structure collapsed, the meticulously designed skyscraper was utterly demolished.

It was a building, Amanda soon learned, that had no foundation.

“I don’t like pants,” Gillian said, and the oracle had spoken, but Amanda missed the meaning of the Delphic sibyl, thinking her roommate was referring to slacks. She should have known that Gillian chose her words as carefully as she chose her clothes; she would not have said “pants” if she’d intended to say “slacks.” Gillian Burke did not like pants, and she did not wear pants.

“But don’t you get cold?” Amanda asked.

Gillian winked and flashed her impish grin. “I’m warm-blooded,” she said, implying more than her words actually stated, implying—Amanda knew—more than was true. For despite her cyclonic habits, despite her sailor’s vocabulary, despite her concern with things physical, Amanda knew that Gillian’s actual experience was almost as limited as her own. And this, perhaps, was the one real bond that allowed them to live together in harmony.

The explosion in the little theater was quite unlike anything Amanda had come to expect from her roommate. Or maybe Amanda was simply unprepared for such an outburst. She had been in Minnesota for Thanksgiving and had returned to Talmadge carrying the news that her brother-in-law Frank had been killed in a night action off Guadalcanal. The War Department telegram had been brief and to the point, barely sympathetic in a journalistic way. But by piecing together the news stories of the naval engagement, Penny had come to the dull realization that her husband had been killed before he’d learned of the birth of his daughter. And this magnified the tragedy; this made death an even bigger thief. On the train back to Connecticut, Amanda had wept openly, surprised when she realized she was weeping not for her dead brother-in-law but for her sister, who had to bear the burden of remaining alive. She returned to school with an aching emptiness inside her.

Gillian, on the other hand, was bursting with energy after the holiday. She immediately tried out for a part in the Christmas Pageant and was given a small role, nothing more than a walk-on, actually. “That’s only because I’m a freshman,” she told Amanda. “All the fat parts went to juniors and seniors. I can outact them all.”

But whatever she told Amanda, she worked diligently at the part and seemed moderately content with it until someone heard her singing during a rehearsal one day and decided she’d be just right for one of the songs in the show. She was an excellent mimic, and her command of dialect was impeccable. So whereas her voice was small and rather undistinguished, Dr. Finch, who was directing the show, felt her true ear was perfect for the particular song he had in mind. He told Gillian only that he was fattening her part with a song. He did not tell her which song until the day of the explosion. Amanda was sitting out front in the darkened theater that day. Morton Yardley was slouched in the seat beside her, his hood up over his skull. From the back of the theater Dr. Finch called, “Gillian! Gillian Burke!”

“Yes?” Gillian answered from somewhere backstage.

“Where are you, Miss Burke?” Dr. Finch shouted.

“Here I am,” she said, and she came on stage carrying a container of hot coffee, sipping at it and peering out over the footlights. She was wearing black slacks and a black sweater. The overhead row of Lekos cast a burnished glow on her hair. “What is it?” she called to the darkness.

“I’d like you to try that song, Miss Burke,” Dr. Finch said.

“Oh, okay,” Gillian answered.

“Pete,” Dr. Finch called to the piano player, “would you give Miss Burke the music, please? Can you read music, Miss Burke?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Well then, would you listen to it once, please? Pete?”

The piano player nodded and began playing. Gillian, sipping at her coffee, straddling one of the chairs on stage, cocked her head to one side and listened. The song was a pleasant ballad with a pastoral quality. She found herself humming to it as the music filled the theater. When the piano player stopped, Dr. Finch said, “How do you like it, Miss Burke?”

“I love it,” Gillian answered. “What’s it called?”

“‘On a Certain Morning,’” Dr. Finch replied.

“May I see the lyrics, please?”

“Pete?” Dr. Finch said, and the piano player leaned up over the footlights and handed Gillian the sheet music. Watching from the third row in the orchestra, Amanda whispered, “She’s so professional.”

“What?” Morton said.

“Gillian. She’s so very professional. She looks as if she’s been on a stage all her life.”

“Oh. Yeah,” Morton said, and shrank back into his hood.

Gillian was studying the sheet in her hands. She was silent for a long time. Then she looked up, directing her voice toward the back of the theater, unable to see Dr. Finch, but shouting in his direction.

“I thought this was ‘On a Certain Morning.’”

“It is,” Dr. Finch said. “The ‘certain morning,’ of course, is Christmas.”

“Um-huh,” Gillian said.

“What’s the trouble, Miss Burke?”

Gillian was thoughtful for a moment. Amanda, watching her, saw a curious expression cross her face. She seemed troubled … or was it calculating? Amanda couldn’t tell which.

“That’s not what this says,” Gillian called to the back of the theater. “This says,” and her pronunciation was flawless, considering she had never studied German in her life, ‘An einem gewissen Morgen.’”

“Yes,” Dr. Finch said patiently. “That means ‘On a Certain Morning’ in German.”

Gillian nodded briefly and emphatically. “Count me out,” she said. She walked to the footlights and handed the music back to the piano player.

“What?” Dr. Finch said. “I beg your pardon, what did you …?”

“I said count me out!” Gillian said, louder this time. She put up one hand to shield her eyes from the lights, squinted toward the back of the theater, and said, “Can you hear me all right? Count me out.”

“I don’t understand,” Dr. Finch said, puzzled, coming down the aisle on the right-hand side of the theater.

“I won’t sing it,” Gillian said.

“Why not?” Dr. Finch stood just alongside the piano now, looking up at Gillian. A bunch of kids had come from backstage and were watching her nervously, not knowing whether to giggle or panic.

“It’s German,” Gillian said.

“It’s what?”

“It’s German, it’s German. Isn’t it German?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“I won’t sing it. That’s all. I won’t sing a German Christmas song while the Nazis are cooking Jews in ovens! That’s that!”

“Miss Burke, this song—”

“I don’t want to sing it,” Gillian said, and she walked off the stage.

“Oh my gosh!” Amanda said to Morton. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing.” And she left her seat abruptly and ran backstage to find Gillian, but she had already left the theater. She caught up with her outside. Gillian was walking with her head bent, her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her pea jacket.

“Gillian!”

She stopped and waited for Amanda to draw alongside. Then she began walking quickly again.

“Why on earth did you do that?” Amanda said.

“I don’t like Nazis.”

“German is not synonymous with Nazi.”

“Oh, isn’t it now?”

“No, it isn’t! That song was written by Margit Glück. She—”

“I don’t care who wrote—”

“She’s a student here, a refugee! She escaped Vienna, and German is her native tongue, and she writes brilliantly, and you had no right to do what you did, Gillian!”

“Oh,” Gillian said in a very small voice.

“Yes, damn you!” Amanda answered. “Oh!”

The college newspaper ran the story the next day. It told exactly what had happened in the little theater, and then printed an interview with Margit Glück, composer of An einem gewissen Morgen, in which Miss Glück said she was “surprised and saddened” by the incident. Dr. Finch, commenting on the cause célèbre to one of the college reporters, said, “Tempers are traditionally short in rehearsal periods. I’m sure this is simply a matter of misunderstanding. Miss Glück and Miss Burke are essentially opposed to the same ideology. Miss Burke simply reacted emotionally, the way an actress would be expected to, I might add.”

Gillian Burke refused to talk to any of the campus reporters. Instead, she went to Margit Glück’s dorm the day after the interviews were printed, found her room, and apologized to her. They were both in tears by the end of the session, and some enterprising student recorded the tearful scene on film and sent the snapshot to the newspaper. A fresh recounting of the story appeared the next week, together with the heart-rending photo. Both Gillian and Miss Glück came out of the whole thing rather well, but it was Gillian who really carried the field. She had shown artistic temperament and true patriotism. She had been called “an actress” by Dr. Finch, a respected campus authority. She had refused the vulgarity of publicity by avoiding any of the campus reporters. She had gone privately and in all humility to Miss Glück and apologized. That someone had taken a picture of the soul-shattering meeting was not Gillian’s doing, but the picture and the new story did get wider circulation than the original story had, and the picture proved beyond a doubt that this was “simply a matter of misunderstanding” that Gillian had been big enough and humble enough to set straight immediately. The Christmas Pageant, which was a big student draw each year anyway, sold out immediately the day after the new story appeared. Gillian Burke became a well-known campus figure in her first month at school.

Amanda never knew whether that moment of silence on stage had been a moment of calculation. And she never asked Gillian.

The girls were plentiful in Honolulu, but David Regan fastidiously stayed away from them. There was something too impersonal about the whores, something mechanical and precise, something that made the act of love completely loveless. Besides, though he would never admit this to himself, he had been frightened by the training films he’d seen in boot camp, images of which flashed across his mind whenever he was tempted by a passing skirt.

The ship had come back to Pearl at the beginning of the month, ostensibly for repairs in dry dock. But everyone in the crew knew that the Hanley was there for reassignment to a picket destroyer squadron. The men of the Hanley weren’t too tickled by the prospect. The average life of a picket ship on station, they had been told—and they repeated the story with the relish of true heroes—was three minutes. Hardly time to say a final prayer. So they made the best of their time in Hawaii. David would go to Waikiki in the afternoons and swim alone. Sometimes there were nurses on the beach, and the wives of officers stationed at Pearl, and he would watch them in their trim swimsuits and think of the girls he knew back home in Talmadge, think especially of Ardis Fletcher and the things they had done together. Once a young Wave came over to him where he lay on his blanket and asked for a match. He had taken out his Zippo lighter and thumbed it into flame. The girl looked at him archly as she drew in on the cigarette. She blew out a stream of smoke and said, “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“You off one of the ships?” She stood with one arm crossed over her waist, the other resting on it as she puffed on her cigarette. She was not really a pretty girl, really too thin in the blue bathing suit, her teeth a little too large.

“Yes,” David said. “The Hanley.”

“Just get back, or are you heading out?”

“Just got back.”

“From where?”

“Tassafaronga.”

“Guess you saw some action,” the girl said.

“I guess so,” David answered.

The girl was silent, puffing on her cigarette. Behind her, three boys on surfboards rode in toward the beach. The girl’s hair and eyes were brown, he noticed. Her teeth were too large, but she had a good mouth. She didn’t seem nervous at all, and yet something in her eyes told him this was very difficult for her.

“I saw you here the other day,” she said suddenly.

“Mmmm?”

“Why do you come alone?”

“Just like that.”

“Are you a lone wolf?” she asked coyly. She paused. “Is that what you are?”

“I guess so.”

“Well,” she said, and she paused again. The pause lengthened. “How old are you, anyway?” she asked.

“Eighteen,” he said.

She studied him speculatively. “Well,” she said, and again fell silent. “Well, I don’t want to intrude on your privacy.” She looked at him steadily for a moment, flicked the cigarette away, and began walking back toward her own blanket. He almost called out to her, and then decided not to.

He ate alone at the Royal Hawaiian that night. He ordered pork chops and lots of milk, and then he bought a scarf in the gift shop, a silk scarf with a picture of the islands on it, and he had it sent to his mother, Julia Regan, in Talmadge, Connecticut. Then he went back to the ship. He didn’t know how early it was. They were demagnetizing the hull, and everyone had been asked to turn in his watch for safekeeping ashore because the process could do something to the movement; he didn’t understand quite what it was about. They were showing a movie on the boat deck, something with Joan Crawford. He changed into his dungarees and then went to watch the last two reels, thinking of Ardis Fletcher back home.

On December sixth, they left Oahu for Nawiliwili on the nearby island of Kauai. There was supposed to be some sort of celebration in honor of Pearl Harbor Day the next day. The scuttlebutt said that the people of Nawiliwili were going to give a luau on the beach for the officers and men of the Hanley. The scuttlebutt, usually accurate because it filtered down from the radio gang who saw all communications even before the captain did, could not have been more wrong. There was no luau on the beach. Instead, on the seventh, a group of seventeen-year-old high-school girls came aboard at about 1100 for a tour of the ship. The men were asked to put on shirts for the visitors. As they worked painting the ship (the civilian workmen at Pearl had left this task to the technicians, the sailors who had learned early in their naval careers that scraping and painting were recurring diseases), the girls went through the ship wide-eyed, ogling the guns and the torpedo tubes and the masts and the blinker lights and the signal flags and the depth charges. The men of the Hanley greeted their visitors with remarkable restraint. Like perfect gentlemen, they went about their painting, brushes dipping and swishing. There were no catcalls and no whistles. But three hundred pairs of eyes hungrily devoured the fresh young bodies under the thin tight skirts and full blouses, and three hundred tongues licked lips in anticipation of the evening. There would be a dance that night, the scuttlebutt said, at the local high school. These sweet young maidens would be in attendance, the scuttlebutt said. Greedily, the paintbrushes dipped and swished.

This time, the scuttlebutt was right.

The men of the Hanley put on their whites and shined their shoes and combed their hair and visited the pharmacist’s mate. They found the local high school, and they heard the music inside, and they marched in like conquering American heroes, ready to celebrate Pearl Harbor Day, but there wasn’t a girl to be seen for miles.

Instead, there were the local boys.

Apparently, the good mothers of Nawiliwili had heard of the destroyer tied up at the dock, had heard their good daughters telling about the school trip to the destroyer that morning, had rightly surmised the sailors aboard that ship would invade the high-school dance that night, and had wisely decided to keep their daughters home and in their own safe, snug beds. The men of the Hanley blamed the local boys for this act of perfidy. The local boys blamed the presence of the sailors for their own lack of female companionship. Unfortunately, a lot of the sailors had bought out the local liquor store before heading for the high school. When they saw there were no women, they began drinking. Within a half hour, the fight started. David left the moment it began. He caught a cab to town and went to the local movie. The picture he saw, and he could not suppress a wry grin, was The Virgins of Bali.

He got back to the ship at about 2340, just as the watch was being relieved. Mr. Devereaux, one of the new communications officers, was unstrapping the .45 from his waist and handing it to Mr. Dinocchio, the ship’s navigator. When he saw David, Devereaux turned and said, “Hey, you’re in one piece!”

David came up the gangway and saluted Mr. Dinocchio, who was strapping on the .45. Dinocchio returned the salute lazily.

“Didn’t you go to the dance, Regan?” Devereaux asked. He was a short man with coal-black hair, brown eyes, and a wide chipmunk grin. He had thick black eyebrows, which always seemed slightly askew, and he spoke with something of a sneer in his voice, as if thirty-six years of living owed him more than a miserable existence as a lieutenant j.g. aboard a Navy destroyer, an attitude strengthened by the fact that life aboard the Juneau had been more formal but at the same time more civilized than this.

“I went, sir,” David said.

“How’d you escape the melee?” Devereaux asked, his eyebrows askew, a twinkle in his brown eyes.

“I left when it started, sir.”

“Good boy,” Devereaux said in admiration. His eyes flicked to the dock. “Take a look at this. Here’s an example.”

Two sailors were stumbling toward the gangway, arm in arm, weaving drunkenly. Their whites were stained with blood, the jumpers torn, the trousers streaked with grass marks. Cautiously they helped each other up the gangway, releasing their supporting embrace on each other to salute the ensign on the fantail—which ensign had been taken down at sunset—and then to salute Mr. Dinocchio, who regarded them with sour Boston distaste.

“Reques’ permission to come aboar’, sir,” the first sailor said.

“Yeah, come ahead, Nelson, come ahead,” Dinocchio said.

“Ditto, sir,” the second sailor said.

“All right, all right,” Dinocchio said, annoyed. “Come on, go get out of those clothes. You’re all full of blood, both of you.”

“Sir,” the second sailor said, “do you know who is the bes’ buddy inna whole worl’, sir?”

“Who?” Dinocchio said.

“This fella here. Nelson. This fella. Yeoman Firs’ Class Rishard Nelson. The bes’ buddy onna ship, inna Navy, inna whole wi’ worl’!” The sailor waved his arm grandiosely and almost fell over the side. Nelson caught him and held him up.

“No, sir,” Nelson said to his friend. “No, sir, buddy-boy, nossir. You are the bes’ buddy inna worl’.”

“No, you are.”

“No, mate, you are the bes’, abso-lutely!”

The second sailor turned to Dinocchio. “Okay, sir, so tell me summin, willya, sir? Would you?”

“What is it, Antonelli?”

Antonelli grinned. “Sir, why should my bes’ buddy inna worl’ hit me onna head with a whiskey bottle?”

“I thought you was a gook,” Nelson said.

“I ain’ no gook.”

“I thought you was one.”

“Buddy, you nearly bust my head. You know that, buddy?”

“All right, let’s hit the sack,” Dinocchio said, “before I put you both on report.”

“Two buddies?” Antonelli asked, astonished. “Sir, you would put two buddies on report?”

“Come on, come on, shove off.”

The sailors embraced again and wobbled off toward the aft compartment, arm in arm.

“You should see some of the others,” Devereaux said. “Arbuster came back with a broken arm. Do you know him? A gunner’s mate?”

“I think so, sir,” David said. He hesitated a moment and then said, “Well, good night, sir. I guess I’ll turn in.”

“Just a second, Regan,” Devereaux said.

“Sir?”

“Have you got a minute?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let’s take a walk aft, have a cigarette.”

“Yes, sir,” David said, puzzled.

“What a vessel,” Dinocchio said in his broad Boston accent. “This ship is the last stronghold of baaa-barism in the Pacific fleet.”

“Things are rough all over, Lou,” Devereaux said. He grinned his chipmunk grin, added, “Don’t forget now, the skipper wants to be wakened as soon as everyone’s aboard,” and then began walking with David toward the fantail. The garbage cans had not been dumped. They were stacked just forward of the fantail depth-charge rack, and they stank to high heaven.

“We picked a spot, didn’t we?” Devereaux said, grinning. “Let’s just walk, shall we?”

He handed David a cigarette and then lighted it for him. The two began strolling up the starboard side of the ship. It was a beautiful night. The mountains of Kauai nuzzled against a soft wheeling black sky.

“Is something wrong, sir?” David asked. The gun, he thought. He knows about the gun.

“No, Regan, nothing at all. I just wanted to talk to you.”

“What about, sir?” David asked apprehensively. This had to be about the gun. Somehow Devereaux had learned about the .45. I should have turned it in, David thought; I should have turned it in long before this. He had acquired the automatic shortly after the engagement in the Santa Cruz Islands, quite by accident, a simple matter of having the side arm strapped to his waist during small-arms instruction, and hearing chow-down being piped, and absent-mindedly wearing the gun into the mess hall. And afterward he had looked for the gunner’s mate who’d served as instructor and had not been able to find him, and had been called to stand his own watch, and had put the gun into his locker for safekeeping. And then, somehow, it had been too late to turn the gun in. It was government property, and he was afraid they’d think he’d stolen it. That would mean a captain’s mast, at least. Besides, there was something reassuring about the presence of the gun in his locker, resting in lethal power under his handkerchiefs.

“As you must realize,” Devereaux said, grinning, “I am the newest officer aboard in the communications division. Technically, I outrank the four ensigns in the division, but tenure and longevity seem to be on their side—so I’ve been assigned the somewhat distasteful task of censoring the men’s mail.”

“Yes, sir?” David said, and felt instantly relieved. This wasn’t about the gun, then; the gun was safe. But what … and he thought of some of the letters he’d sent to Ardis Fletcher. Was that what this was all about? Were the letters …?

Devereaux laughed suddenly. “I’m an English instructor by trade, Regan. I teach at U.C.L.A. when I’m not nursing radar. You should see some of the letters that come through. Unbelievable. Positively unbelievable.”

“Yes, sir,” David said. “Sir, if my letters—”

“Especially some of the Southern boys. Not that I’m in any way prejudiced against our Dixie brethren, but they use the language as if it were a foreign tongue. It rankles. I respect English. It’s my trade.”

“Yes, sir,” David said. He wet his lips. That’s what Devereaux was getting at, the letters to Ardis. He’d used some pretty strong language in those letters. Well, what the hell, he was writing them to Ardis and not the whole damn Pacific fleet! He was beginning to resent the idea that letters written to a girl, personal letters written to a girl with whom a fellow had been, well, intimate, could be read by some jerk from U.C.L.A. just because he had a silver bar on his shoulder. He knew his mail was censored, of course, but the censor had been someone faceless up to now. How could he ever write another personal letter, knowing that Mr. Devereaux with his crooked chipmunk smile was going to read it before it got mailed?

“Your letters are refreshing, Regan,” Devereaux said suddenly.

“Sir?”

“Your letters.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I enjoy them.”

“Yes, sir,” David said, and he thought, You son of a bitch, you’ve got a lot of gall reading my personal mail and then telling me you enjoy it. “Yes, sir, thank you,” he said coldly.

“Oh, say,” Devereaux said, “I didn’t mean …”

“What did you mean, sir?”

“I wasn’t interested in content, Regan. I was only interested in style.”

“I thought the two were inseparable, sir,” David said, and Devereaux studied him appreciatively for a moment. The night was still. They could hear the water lapping against the steel sides of the ship.

“Ever tried any real writing, Regan?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Stories? A book?”

“No, sir.”

“Ever felt like it?”

“No, sir.”

“You should.”

“Why?” David asked flatly.

Devereaux shrugged. “I think you’d be pretty good.”

“Thank you, sir, but—”

“Regan, I teach creative writing, and I read a great deal of student material, and I think you have potential. I’m sorry if you felt I was intruding on your privacy by reading your mail. I have to read it, anyway. It’s my job. I didn’t ask for it, but I’ve got it. I only wanted to say that if you ever did decide to try your hand at a short story or anything else, I’d be happy to look at it and offer my suggestions and criticisms, for whatever they’re worth.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Devereaux threw his cigarette over the side. It arced toward the water, its tip glowing, and then suddenly hissed and went out.

“Sir, I’m sorry, but some of those letters were pretty personal.”

“Of course, Regan.”

“And I guess I felt a little funny, knowing you’d read them.”

“Of course.”

“And thank you, sir, for your interest, but I don’t think I’d like to be a writer.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t think I would, sir, that’s all.”

“What does your father do, Regan?”

“He’s dead, sir.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. What did he do?”

“He was an art director, sir. With an advertising agency.”

“Well,” Devereaux said. “That’s very creative work.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I should think—”

“No, sir, thank you. Is that all, sir? I’m pretty tired. I’d like to hit the sack.”

“Sure, Regan, go ahead.”

“Thank you, sir. Good night.” He nodded and began walking aft in the darkness.

“Regan?”

David stopped.

“Think it over,” Devereaux said.

When Gillian Burke got home for the Christmas vacation, the first thing her mother said to her was “Well, how’s the big actress?”

“Just fine, thanks,” Gillian said quickly. “I’ve been offered a part in a Broadway show. I’m replacing Helen Hayes.”

“I asked a serious question,” her mother said.

“It sounded just about as serious as hell. I’m tired, Mom. I’ve been on trains for the past two and a half hours.” She paused. “I want to go to bed.”

“It’s only five o’clock.”

“Are there laws about when a person can go to bed?”

“Of course there aren’t laws!”

“Then, would you mind? I’m exhausted, and I’m about to get the curse, and I feel—”

“I see your language hasn’t improved now that you’re a serious student of the drah-mah,” her mother said.

“I am a serious student,” Gillian answered heatedly. “And, Mother, I think you should know that ridicule isn’t going to help one damn bit. I’m enrolled at Talmadge, and I’m going to keep studying at Talmadge, so why don’t you just get used to the fact that—”

“Your father spoiled you,” Virginia Burke said.

“I thought he spoiled Monica.”

“He spoiled both of you. She isn’t even coming home for the holidays, your charming sister.”

“She’s in California, Mom,” Gillian said wearily. “Do you want her to spend her entire vacation on a train?”

“There are planes,” Virginia said flatly.

“Servicemen are traveling home.”

“What do I care about servicemen? Monica’s my daughter.”

“Servicemen are very sweet-oh,” Gillian said. “I’m going to bed. Wake me when Dad gets home, will you?”

“Very what?” Virginia said.

“Sweet-oh,” Gillian replied, and she went into her room.

She didn’t bother to undress. She took off her loafers—she had refused to get all dolled up for a train ride—and then crawled in under the blankets and was asleep almost immediately.

When she awoke, the room was dark. She lay in the darkness for a moment, disoriented, and then realized where she was. She yawned sleepily and raised her arms toward the ceiling. Well, here we are, she thought. Back at the old manse. Everything cheerful and gay, the darkies singing in the south forty, the smell of magnolias oozing through the windows, the candles being lighted on the long dining-room table downstairs, Scarlett O’Hara stretched her arms to the ceiling and wondered whether she should wear the new organdy or the taffeta, after all the Tarleton twins were coming, and that was an occasion. Besides, there was talk of war in the air, war between the States, and she wanted to be dressed properly for the outbreak of hostilities.

The old manse, Gillian thought, and she climbed out of bed and walked to the window, raising the shade and looking out over the Bronx rooftops and the lights of the Woodlawn Road–Jerome Avenue elevated structure in the distance. She turned away from the window, snapped on the dresser lamp, and looked at the clock. At first she thought it had stopped. Then she heard its ticking, and she looked at the time again. Eleven o’clock. Hadn’t she asked to be awakened when Dad got home? Didn’t they ever do anything she asked them to do?

She went to the door and opened it. She could hear the sound of the radio in the living room.

“Mom?” she called.

“Yes?”

“Dad still up?”

“He’s not home yet, dear,” Virginia said.

“Didn’t he come home for supper?”

“No, Gillian.”

“Well, didn’t he call?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Well, where is he?”

“I don’t know, Gillian.”

She closed the door, leaned against it for a moment, shrugged, and decided she needed a shower. She began getting out of her clothes. She paused at the full-length mirror behind the door, studying her body. I was bigger when I was fifteen, she thought; I’m losing weight in all the wrong places. She shrugged again, examined a blemish near her jaw, and then went into the bathroom. Her father had not yet come home by the time she’d showered and brushed out her hair. In the living room, her mother was knitting and listening to the radio.

“Not back yet, huh?”

“No, not yet,” Virginia said.

“He probably got stuck downtown.”

“Probably.”

“This is his busy season,” Gillian said. “Christmas.”

“Yes, I know.”

She stood silently watching her mother. “I think I’ll go down for a walk,” she said.

“You just took a shower, Gillian.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Did you dry yourself?”

“No, I left myself all wet. I like to walk in the cold all wet.”

“Don’t be sarcastic, Gillian.”

“Well, Mom, of course I dried myself. Do I look like a cretin?”

“It’s too late for a young girl to be walking around the streets alone,” Virginia said.

“Hey, why don’t you come with me, Mom?” she said, suddenly inspired. “It’s pretty nice out. Kind of bracing.”

Virginia looked up at her daughter. In the amber glow of the single lamp burning in the living room, the two—mother and daughter—looked very much alike, the same red-brown hair, the same green eyes, the same angular face, the same bone structure; they looked very much alike.

“No,” Virginia said. “Thank you, Gillian. I want to finish this sleeve.”

“Finish it tomorrow. What’s so important about it?”

“I promised Monica she’d have it for her birthday.”

“That’s not until February.”

“Still,” Virginia said, and fell silent.

“Okay,” Gillian said. She shrugged awkwardly. “Okay.” She started out of the room, thinking, My birthday is in January. Oddly, she could not remember what her mother had given her the year before. “Well, I’ll go down then, okay?” she said. She looked back into the room. “Okay?”

Her mother did not look up from the knitting. “All right, Gillian,” she said.

She met some of the kids in the cafeteria, and they sat drinking hot chocolates. Gillian told them all about Talmadge. One of the girls said Ohio State was a very nice place because the Navy had a V-5 program there and a lot of handsome fellows were training to become officers. The girl was studying to be a teacher, and Gillian said, quite suddenly, “Are you preparing to be a teacher or a mother?”

“A teacher, of course.”

“You sound as if you went all the way to Ohio to date sailors.”

“Gillian, that’s not fair!”

“All right, I’m mistaken.”

“I can get all the dates I want right here in the Bronx!”

“Good. Why don’t you go to Hunter College? It’s right on Kings-bridge Road.”

“It’s an all-girls school, Gillian!”

“Oh, I see,” Gillian said, and at that instant her father walked into the cafeteria. He was a tall man with brilliant red hair and wide shoulders, his face as uneven as if it had been hewn from obstinate stone. He never wore a hat, and his face always looked flushed, and his blue eyes had a way of nailing you to the wall when he spoke to you. He ran a shoe store downtown on Second Avenue, but he was always being mistaken for a detective. When Gillian was a little girl, she used to tell the other kids her father was an FBI agent.

“That’s your father, isn’t—?”

“Shhh,” she said. She watched him secretly as he went to the counter, got himself a cup of coffee, and then walked to a table at the rear of the cafeteria. She smiled.

“Excuse me,” she said to the girls, and she rose, the smile still on her face, and began walking toward the rear table, suddenly wishing she were wearing heels. She walked directly to the table, and she stood there and said nothing until her father looked up at her. He didn’t recognize her for an instant.

“Hi,” she said.

“Gillian,” he answered, “how arr yuh, darrlin’?” with the exaggerated brogue he used whenever he was feeling particularly good. He stood and embraced his daughter and then kissed the top of her head. “Sit down, Gilly. When did you get in? What arr you doin’ down in the streets at this hour, shame on yuh, do yuh want someone to be draggin’ you into the bushes?”

“Oh, Dad,” she said, smiling, ducking her head, embarrassed somehow because he always made her feel like a little girl no matter what he said, and wishing again she were wearing heels. She squeezed his big fist on the table. “Why are you so late, Dad? Didn’t you know I was coming home?”

“I did, darrlin’, I did, but we were doing a lot of business downtown, and I just couldn’t turn them away. Would you like a cup of coffee? Gilly, you’re looking marrr-velous, school agrees with you, I see. I told your mother it would. How arr yuh, darlin’?”

“I’m fine, Dad,” she said, grinning.

“And are you learning your trade?”

“I am.”

“Good, good, let me get you a cup of coffee.”

“No, Dad, that’s all right. Let’s just sit and talk.”

“Did you come down by train?”

“Yes.”

“None of the kids coming home by car?”

“There’s only one girl from the Bronx who has a car, Dad, and she’s a stiff-oh. I’d rather have walked.”

“A stiff-oh, eh?” Meredith Burke said, and he burst out laughing, a laugh that erupted from his barrel chest and filled the nearly empty cafeteria. Gillian laughed with him.

“Really, Dad.”

“I know, I know,” Meredith said. “My, you’re looking fine, Gilly. You’ve got a sparkle in your eyes, and a good high color. Have you seen your mother?”

“Sure.”

“Is she still angry?”

“I don’t know,” Gillian said, shrugging.

“She’ll get over it. You see, Gillian, she doesn’t know what we know, now does she?”

“What’s that, Dad?”

“She doesn’t know you’re going to be a grrrreat actress, now does she? She thinks you’re going to take all those lessons and then go knocking on producers’ doors or wherever it is starving young actresses go knocking, and then taking parts in summer stock, and bits in the chorus, that’s what your mother thinks. But we know, don’t we, Gilly?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Sure we do.” He nodded. “I know, Gilly. I know.” He nodded silently and then said, “Gilly, do you know what I’d like to do right now?”

“What, Dad?”

“I’d like to go into the bar on the corner and show off my grownup daughter to my friends. What do you say, Gilly? Have you taken to drinking beer yet?”

“Oh, Daddy, I’m underage,” she said, smiling. “They wouldn’t serve me.”

“Do they serve you in Talmadge, Connecticut?”

“No, but we sneak beer into the dorm from the grocery store,” Gillian said, giggling.

“They’ll serve you here,” he said. “They’d damn well better serve my daughter. Come on.”

He rose and extended his arm to her, and she looped her hand through it, smiling, and thinking again, I should have worn heels.

David showed Mr. Devereaux his first story a few days before Christmas.

It was a story about a man drowning.

He was a little embarrassed about showing it to the j.g., especially after he’d so vehemently objected to the idea of writing one. But one day while he was leaning on one of the depth-charge racks and looking out over the water, he began thinking of that day at the lake. And all at once he wanted to write about it. He’d typed up the story on one of the ship’s machines, and gave it to Devereaux the next day.

“It’s all in capital letters,” he said. “There’re only caps on the radio shack’s typewriters.”

“That’s all right,” Devereaux said. He glanced at the first page. “‘Man Drowning,’ huh? That’s a good title.”

“Yes, sir.” David looked at the manuscript uneasily. “Sir, maybe you’d better let me have it back.”

“Why?”

“Well … it’s pretty bad.”

“Let me be the judge of that, all right?”

“Well, sir, if you want to waste your time with—”

“It’s my time, Regan. Don’t worry about it.”

“Still, sir, it’s pretty bad,” David insisted.

David was right, Devereaux discovered. Not only was the story pretty bad; it was very bad. It was, in fact, totally lacking in quality, totally devoid of any talent. The worthlessness of the manuscript presented Devereaux with a peculiar dilemma. He was aware that had he not prodded David into trying his hand at fiction, David would have gone along writing uninhibited and emotional letters to Miss Hot Pants in Talmadge, Connecticut, and never given a thought to more ambitious stuff. But Devereaux had planted the thought in David’s head, and this was the result of that seed, and the result was pretty awful. So what to do about it now?

Devereaux was disappointed. But more than that, for a reason he could not understand, he took David’s inability as a personal affront, as if a horse he had bet upon heavily had somehow let him down in the stretch. He admitted to himself that David Regan did not possess the tiniest shred of talent, and then he was irrationally annoyed by the lack of talent. How could he have been so fooled?

I made a mistake, that’s all, he reasoned. The kindest thing would be to tell young Regan I made a mistake. He has no talent. I was wrong. That’s the kindest thing to do, and that’s what I will do.

But that was not what he did. Perversely, he continued to believe that David had willfully tricked him into a false belief. Perversely, and completely unconsciously, he pursued a course over which he had very little real control.

He asked to see David three days after Christmas, long after he had read the story, long after his initial disappointment had had an opportunity to harden into an angry resentment. The black gang had discovered babbitt in the engines and reported it to the captain, who had asked that the Hanley be sent back into dry dock. The two met in Combat Information Center, the radar shack. A small palm tree, which the boys had brought aboard and decorated with homemade Christmas ornaments, sat in the center of the plotting board, lighted from below.

“Come on over here,” Devereaux said, and they went to the table just inside the doorway, on the bulkhead behind the Sugar George. The radarmen usually stood voice radio watch when they were in port, a duty that had been curtailed while the ship was in dry dock. A radio receiver was on the shelf above the table, the earphones dangling. Devereaux unplugged the phones and threw them to a corner of the table. He snapped on a light. “This is a pretty good story, Regan,” he said. “Why’d you choose to write about a man drowning?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“My name is George,” Devereaux said, and then wondered why he had said it.

“Sir?”

“George. Call me George. Let’s cut out this officer-enlisted man bunk. We’re here to get some real work done, aren’t we? This is a little more important than twiddling radar dials.”

“Yes, sir.”

“George,” Devereaux said.

“George,” David repeated hesitantly. He wet his lips.

“Good. Why’d you start your story this way, David?”

“Because that’s the way it …” David stopped. “I don’t know, sir. It came to me that way.”

“Is this a true story? Is that it?”

“No, sir.”

“George.”

“George. It isn’t, George. I made it up.”

“Who’s the man in this story, David?”

“Nobody I know, si … George.”

“Your father?”

David was silent.

“Your father, David?”

“Yes, sir,” he said softly.

Devereaux nodded. “That’s all right. That’s a good way to begin. A lot of writers use personal experiences as a springboard. Is this the way he died, David? By drowning?”

“Y … yes, sir. That … that was the way it happened.”

“I see. Well, I’ll tell you what I’d like you to do, David. That is, if you really want to, if you think you’ve got the stamina it takes.”

“Wh … what’s that, sir?”

“I’d like you to rewrite this story.”

“Why, sir?”

“Because I think we can sell it.”

“Sell it?”

“To one of the magazines. Oh, you won’t get much for it, but it’ll be a start. What do you say, David?”

“Well, George, I …” It was easier to say the name now, somewhat easier, but still a little strange. “I don’t know, George. Do you really think it has a chance?”

“Absolutely,” Devereaux said. “Now here’s what I think is wrong with it.”

He did not tell David everything he thought was wrong with it. In his honest opinion, everything was wrong with it, and nothing was right, and his criticism would have filled three volumes of tiny print. But he did point out a few of the errors to David, and all the while he wondered why he didn’t simply tell David the truth.

He was pleased, he was almost delighted, when David let him down once more with the revisions. If anything, the rewrite made the story worse than it was originally. Devereaux suspected this would happen, but the horror of the writing soared beyond his wildest dreams. This was terrible, absolute garbage! How could he have been so fooled by those letters?

“This is beautiful,” he said to David. “But I’ll tell you something, David, do you mind?”

“No, what is it, George?”

“I think it still needs a little work. Now, take this middle section …”

David took the middle section and, as it turned out, also the end section and, for good measure, a paragraph in the beginning section and sat down in the gear locker opposite the radio shack to begin his new revisions. George Devereaux had no idea how much pain was involved in the rewrite, but he probably would not have discouraged David even if he had known. The pain for David was excruciating. Somehow, all the fluidity of his letter writing left him the moment he sat down at the typewriter. The radiomen’s machine had keys that were blank, and David stared down at their empty faces and despaired he would ever get a word on paper. He was a bad typist to begin with, and the unlettered keys made composition enormously more difficult for him. Silently, he struggled in the tiny compartment, telling himself he could do it, he would do it, and knowing somehow he would never finish this story, knowing he could never polish it enough to satisfy Mr. Devereaux.

The greatest pain was the pain of memory.

The more he struggled with the story, the sharper the memory became. And, paradoxically, the sharper the memory became, the more difficult it was to put on paper. For whereas the day of his father’s drowning, September 9, 1939, would always be clear in his mind, the memory seemed to extend beyond that into a murky distance, extend in fact to the summer of 1938, more than a year before the drowning, so that the edges of the memory were hazy and vague, but painful nonetheless. Nor did he understand why he should consider his mother’s trip to Europe an essential part of the drowning, a prelude to it, and yet the twin memories were irrevocably linked, the trip to Europe seeming to flow inexorably into the summer of 1939 and that fateful day in September at Lake Abundance, Connecticut.

The fringes of the memory were blurred, like double exposures of the mind. Picture overlapped picture until there was no sense of time, no proper sequence of events, until the mind reeled with the task of sorting and cataloguing, each picture leading inevitably to that final image in September, the thing he saw through the binoculars as he looked out over the lake, each picture a seemingly separate and unconnected event, and yet overlapping toward an overwhelming conclusion. He did not know where it began; he only knew where it ended.

There was something about Aunt Millie being sick, he remembered hearing talk about this as early as, yes, it must have been the spring of 1938, yes, his mother standing slender and tall in a green bathing suit at the kitchen phone, yes, they were at the lake, they had just opened the house, he could remember the scent of pines, yes, her brown hair pushed back over one ear as she held the receiver and nodded, “Yes, Millie, yes, I understand,” the sun limning the profile David had inherited, the scent of pines, the sounds of the lake outside, and then another image, the end of June, the lake house waiting for them, the Talmadge house about to be closed for the summer, the sheets covering all the furniture, the big mahogany dining-room table, the gentle clink of silverware, his father’s lean face bent over his soup bowl, “Arthur, it’s her lungs,” the clink-clink of silverware, the shine of the overhead chandelier on sparkling glasses, clink against white china, “She wants to go away for a while, Arthur, somewhere dry,” his father looking up from his soup suddenly, attentively, “She asked me to go with her.”

July, and the full onslaught of real summer, the trees hung with lush foliage, David hitting croquet balls on the lawn in front of the lake house, the sound of mallet against ball, and beneath that the sound of a whispered conversation, the red-and-blue awning, the lawn chairs painted red and blue, the lawn a thick summer green, and the trees dressed in a shining gaudiness. “There’s going to be a war,” Arthur Regan whispered. “Why does she want to go to Italy, of all places?”

His mother’s voice quietly persistent, her fingers moving in her lap, rolling a tall wet glass between the palms of her hands, the glass flashing in the sun, never raising her eyes or her voice, “The climate, Arthur.”

“She can go to Arizona.”

“That’s true. But she wants to go to Italy.”

“She can go alone then.”

“No, she can’t, Arthur.”

“Why in the name of God must you go with her?”

“She’s sick, Arthur.”

“She’s not that sick!”

“She has a chronic bronchial condition, Arthur.”

“Then let her hire a nurse. Or a traveling companion.”

“She’s my sister. I won’t have her going off to Europe alone.”

“Goddamn it, Julia—”

“The boy.”

“Never mind the boy. You listen to me. If a war breaks out, you’ll be right in the middle of it!”

“War is not going to break out.”

“No?”

“No. Hitler and Mussolini may be mad, but they’re not going to mount a winter offensive.”

“Now just what do you know about—?”

“I know that smart generals are afraid of winter offensives, that much I know. And Millie and I will be back before the spring.”

“You won’t be back before the spring, Julia, because you’re not going anywhere. You’re staying right here in Talmadge.”

“We’re leaving on August first, Arthur. And we’ll be back in January. Now, stop behaving like a child.”

The airport in New York, the immense imposing bulk of the airplane, its giant wings casting deep shadows on the concrete strip, his mother and his aunt climbing the ramp and then turning back to wave, the door of the plane closing, the engines suddenly roaring into life, the propellers spinning, a flutter of newspaper scraps across the concrete, image upon image, frightening, crowding into the small compartment across the passageway from the Hanley’s radio room, images, sounds, the telephone call from London. “David? David, darling? Is that you?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“How are you, darling?”

“Fine, Mom.”

“Are you all right? I can barely hear you.”

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“David, I saw the changing of the guard today. David, I do wish you were with me.”

“How’s Aunt Millie, Mom? Will you be coming home soon?”

“She’s all right, darling. Let me talk to your father again.”

The cards from Paris, This is the Eiffel Tower. Millie and I had lunch here yesterday. You can see the whole city of Paris. Guess what, David? Even the children here speak French, ha-ha. Your loving mother, Julia, and the cards on the long road to Rome, This is Dijon. They say it is a little Paris. I am sending you some wonderfully tasty mustards, across into Switzerland, Bern is like a toy town. There are marvelous medieval statues and a clock that does everything but explode, over the Alps into Italy, Stresa reminds me of Lake Abundance. You step out of your hotel and go right into the water, across the Italian peninsula, Everything is sere and sunny, the fields are straight out of van Gogh, the sun is brilliant, tomorrow we will be in Milan, and then Rome! I can’t believe it! A fabulous city, all gold and white, a city within cities, a city beneath cities. Yesterday I walked along the very road Caesar took on his way to the Forum. I could feel the ghosts of dead assassins, and everywhere these wonderful Italians whose faces speak volumes. I shall go back to Rome often. We are only two hours away here in Aquila, and the drive is a beautiful one, and I feel time in that city, I feel time beneath the streets and in the air, I feel history. I shall go there often.

The first snow came to Talmadge at the end of November. He could remember crying in his room alone because his mother was not there to see the model airplane he had started, watching the snow-flakes falling outside his window, and then a new rush of overlapping images, a flurry of speed. “David, we’re going to Aquila for Christmas!” He could not believe his father’s words, weeping and laughing at the same time, hugging his father, feeling his father’s coarse mustache against his cheek, and then feeling his father’s own tears. “We’re going to Italy, David. We’ll take her home with us!”

She was waiting for them in the garden in the villa. She was wearing a yellow dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat, and only a sweater was thrown over her shoulders although it was quite cold, she looked a little chubbier, “as round as a partridge,” David’s father said, and he hugged her, and she said, “David, you’re getting to be a man,” and he blushed and said, “I tried out for the handball team in school, Mom,” and she hugged him, and he felt suddenly happy in the garden in the villa outside Rome. They went everywhere in those two weeks, everywhere, the Spanish Steps, he counted them, St. Peter’s where he rubbed the foot of the bronze statue where the toes were worn away, the Coliseum, “Look, David! See the lions!” his mother shouted, and he turned abruptly to see three scraggly alley cats roaming through the ruins, and Hadrian’s Tomb, the Castel Sant’ Angelo sitting across the golden Tiber with the midday winter sun bright overhead, everywhere, they did everything, he ate tortoni at an outdoor café while his mother and father sipped their apéritifs and he watched two German officers sitting at a nearby table, the swastika bold and black on the white field of their arm bands, it did not seem as if a war were coming, the black taxicabs beeping along the streets, the long shutters in the windows of the hotels and apartment buildings, Aquila, 2,360 feet high and bitter cold, the skiers in their heavy sweaters, and the garden bright with winter sunshine where they sat bundled against the cold and his mother poured hot tea, Father watching with his blue eyes aglow, Aunt Millie coughing discreetly into her handkerchief. Rome, and a cold clear blue sky, a city of white and gold, a city within cities, a city beneath cities, and the promise that Julia Regan would come back with them to Talmadge when they left. He could not understand why they left Aquila without her. He could not understand why she had to stay in Italy longer.

Talmadge in the winter. January and February, the doldrum months. Lake Abundance caught in the grip of ice, the skating parties, he fell and bruised his hip once, there was a new girl in town, he became aware of her at once, her name was Ardis Fletcher, the boys said you could do things to her, her father was an engineer, March and a sudden burst of warmth, the forsythias blooming unexpectedly and then withering under a new attack of undiminished winter, she had told them she’d be home on April tenth, he had circled the date on the calendar in his room, April 10, April 10, hurry home, please.

In April, there was a cable. MILLIE ILL AND UNABLE TO TRAVEL. DEPARTURE DELAYED. LETTER FOLLOWS. LOVE, JULIA.

Love Julia. Cablegrams had a blue border. He hadn’t known that.

The promised letter did not arrive until the next week. Millie was unexpectedly worse, it said; she had begun coughing badly, and each night her temperature soared. A specialist had been consulted, every hope this was simply a temporary thing and not something more serious like pneumonia, in any case impossible to consider traveling home at this time, darlings, how terribly I miss you, understand and forgive me, it is imperative that I stay here with Millie, know that you have all my love, Julia.

June of 1939, the war talk stronger now, the world certain that Hitler would march, the letters continuing from Julia in the villa at Aquila, two a week, one to Arthur, one to David, at the end of June he kissed Ardis, her mouth was soft, she kept it open, “Everyone here seems convinced that Hitler is bluffing. In any case, there does not seem to be a climate of preparation for war, no matter what you felt at Christmastime. I know this is foremost in your mind, Arthur, but believe me, darling, Millie and I are in no immediate danger. She is improving rapidly, and I expect we will be leaving for home in July. I shall contact the steamship lines today on my way to the post office. I’m sure we can book passage for the last week in July or, at the very latest, the first week in August. Carissimi, vi voglio molto bene. I will be home soon.”

Julia Regan came back to Talmadge on August twenty-eighth, three days before Hitler marched into Poland. Millie was with her, looking remarkably well for her ordeal, but drawn somehow, her eyes curiously averted, as if her long illness were something shameful.

David held his mother’s hands and looked into her face and said, “You look different,” and she smiled at him, a rare and peaceful smile, and said, “But so do you, my love.” A hundred things to tell her, a thousand things, “Did you see my finger? It’s all swelled up from where a baseball hit it,” a million things to show her, the strange wild flowers blooming on the edge of the lawn. “Mom, I got an eighty-five in my geometry end-term,” so much to show, so much to say, “Tad Parker is shaving already, did I tell you? He wants to be an actor, Mom,” and his father’s eyes smiling, Julia Regan was home. Julia Regan was home again.

The image blurred, the focus changed, the molecules of memory swirled like fragments of dark metal in a magnetic field, black against white, and from the vortex there emerged a penetrating single memory, the sharp relentless memory of that single day, September, yes, that single fall day at Lake Abundance, yes, crystal-clear, knife-edged, horrifying.

It was Saturday, September ninth.

There was clear bright sunshine that day, and suffocating heat.

“Why don’t we go to the lake?” he said.

“Yes, that’s a good idea.”

The lake was still and calm. There was not a ripple on its surface. It mirrored the pines. His mother was in green.

“Let me take your picture, Mom,” he said.

“Arthur, get in the picture.”

“No. I want to take the boat out.”

“Arthur …”

“I said no.”

Sorrow? Pain? What was it that flashed suddenly in his mother’s eyes? Fleeting, and then gone. She smiled for the camera. Click, the shutter went.

He saw the boat edging out from the dock. The lake was still and silent. All was still. The world was still. Behind the boat, the lake broke in a pie-shaped wake. There was stillness. A bird screamed into the shimmering heat from somewhere in the tops of the pines.

The boat was white on pine-stained water. His father was wearing a silly red straw hat, which she had brought back from Italy. David saw the boat get smaller and smaller as his father rowed to the center of the lake. The red hat became a tiny dot in the distance. From somewhere in the pines, hidden, the bird screamed again, and across the lake another bird answered.

“Where are the binoculars, Mom?” he asked.

He adjusted the focus. He could see the boat clearly now. The boat, and the lake beyond, and his father’s face shaded by the wide brim of the silly red hat.

“What’s he doing, David?”

“Getting ready to throw out the anchor, I think.”

“Why? He didn’t take a fishing rod, did he?”

“No, he didn’t.”

The sun was intense. He could feel it on his head and shoulders. The lake shimmered. The bird was silent now. David could see his father clearly as he stooped to pick up the heavy anchor, an anchor too big for so small a boat. He hesitated a moment, his hands holding the anchor over the side. Then his hands opened. Watching through the binoculars, David saw his hands opening. The anchor was gone. In the boat, the rope was swiftly paying itself out, coil after coil, following the anchor. Suddenly.

Suddenly.

“Mom!”

His father was going over the side.

“Mom, he’s caught in the—”

“What? What is it?”

“The rope! The rope! The rope!”

The scream hung on the silent shimmering air, the single word echoing and re-echoing across the lake, the rope, the rope, the rope, the rope, assaulting his ears in waves of echoed sound. He held the binoculars tight because all reality was suddenly imprisoned in the circle of their focus, there was nothing real except in the twin tubes he held in his hands, reflected in the lens, the shouted word died out, and through the binoculars he watched the lake, waiting for his father to surface, waiting, waiting, he could hear the ticking of the watch on his wrist, loud in the sudden terrifying silence.

“Dad!” he shrieked.

He was running toward the lake front. He had thrown away the binoculars, and he was running now, his heart hammering in his chest. He felt the water touch his trousers. I’m wearing sneakers, he thought, and he made a shallow dive, his arms thrashing immediately, his legs wildly kicking as he swam toward the boat and the widening circle of ripples on the water.

The boat was so far away.

He was crying when he reached it. The tears ran down his face, and his arms and legs were weak, and he trembled with exhaustion, and he repeated over and over again to the awful red hat floating on the water, “Dad, Dad, Dad …”

It was not very long before George Devereaux discovered he hated David Regan. The idea did not surprise him. He accepted it calmly and even recognized that the hatred had possibly been there from the very beginning, a thing that had been growing steadily over the months. He knew, too, that he was acting somewhat childishly in expecting David to meet impossible standards, but the childishness did not disturb him. He did wonder about it, though. He was, after all, thirty-six years old, and he had been disappointed by students before. But if the boy had no talent, why had he put him through the ordeal of a rewrite? Why, indeed, even though his original premise had been strengthened, did he still persist in asking for more revisions on the same terrible story?

He has to be punished, Devereaux thought.

But he would not leave it at that. He was an intelligent, educated man and he wanted to know why David had to be punished. So he turned the question inward, and the answer he found was He has to be punished because he has to be punished. He has to be punished because he fooled me. But I’ve been fooled before; I have singled out a student and come up with a dud. Why does this boy have to be punished? Why am I behaving so childishly? He has to be punished, all right, admit it, he has to be punished because I made a mistake, yes, that is why. I’ve been away from teaching for too long a time. Maybe I’m losing my touch, my grasp. Maybe all this naval-communications bull is beginning to suffocate me. Maybe I don’t know a good story from a bad one any more. He has to be punished because he has taught me I’m getting rusty, that’s absurd.

He recognized the absurdity at once.

He was certainly not putting the boy through the ordeal of constantly rewriting a story about his own father’s drowning simply because he was beginning to doubt his own professionalism. That was specious reasoning, and George Devereaux was too honest to allow it to pass unchallenged. And so, as the revisions progressed, he continued to probe his own motives more deeply, and he finally concluded that he missed his students, that was it. And, because he missed them, he was elevating David Regan to the position where he represented all students; he was trying to make him the embodiment of every good student he’d ever had, a role David could never possibly fill. But that was all; that was the only reason. He missed his students.

And then he began wondering which of the students he missed particularly, and he began to call up names and faces, and he began to remember excellent stories that had been submitted in his classes, and he began to remember the wonderful quadrangles of the U.C.L.A. campus, and the young coeds in sweaters and skirts, fresh-looking, carrying their books to class, stopping to chat with fellow students, always in the casual postures of the very young, Ardis Fletcher, the entrance gates to the univer …

He caught himself and quickly said to himself, I’m thirty-six years old with a pregnant wife and an eight-year-old son, cut it out.

But the name came into his mind again, Ardis Fletcher, and with the name a flood of coed memories, those sweet fresh faces in his classroom hanging on his every word, Ardis Fletcher, so innocent those faces, he would quirk his eyebrows purposely and twist his mouth into an enigmatic little grin, he would deliver his lecture to each and every one of them personally. “He makes you feel as if he’s talking to you alone, doesn’t he?” he had overheard one of his students say, Ardis Fletcher, I’m thirty-six years old, my wife’s name is Abby, she is pregnant, I have an eight-year-old son.

He realized, without shock—it was amazing how none of these revelations seemed to shock him, he accepted them quite calmly, as if he had known them all along—he realized that perhaps he did miss his female students more than he missed any of the male students, well, perhaps he did play up a little to the girls in class, but that was only natural. He was only human, and there was something terribly gratifying to one’s ego, all those sweet clean-scrubbed faces and those innocent eyes searching, so what if he did become a somewhat vain male at times, what if he did assume the role of a freshman matinee idol, even Abby said he had bedroom eyes, what was wrong with that, so long as he never touched any of them. Except that once. And even that was not my fault and not as if I actually touched her, she only rested her, it was quite casual, on my arm, a gentle soft touch, she wasn’t even aware, cushioned by the wool of her sweater, on my arm, how soft, how young, “Yes, Mr. Devereaux, I understand, but I thought I covered that in the second paragraph, here, do you see, here,” how soft, but he had not touched her, not really.

Her name … he had forgotten her name, it was not at all like Fletcher, not anywhere near Fletcher, nor was she a redhead. Black hair, he could remember that well, falling in a hanging curtain over one eye as she leaned over the desk, soft against his arm, he could remember, not a redhead, Alice, yes, that was it, Alice.

And he sighed and admitted that possibly, just possibly, the letters from Regan to the girl in Talmadge had only possibly reminded him of a life he had loved, yes, of course, the campus and the pretty young girls and the balmy California air, Alice, yes, all right, even Alice, all those things, the letters from Regan had recaptured for him a youthful recklessness he once had known, that was all, and so he’d naturally been impressed, the letters were quite vivid, quite a good style the boy had, I wasn’t interested in content, Regan. I was only interested in style. Face to face with it, now, he asked himself whether this was true, and he knew it was not. I should have, he thought, but she was such a child, and yet she was not unaware, I should have, that was no accident, the pressure against my arm. I should have, I should have!

So.

He sat in his cabin and stared at the gray bulkhead and thought, So. So let the boy go. Let him alone. What did he do? Knock over a roundheeled kid in Connecticut? Let him go. Let him go

But he was still angry.

He was angry because he had recognized something about himself, and the knowledge was somewhat painful. And he was further angered because he believed that David, no matter how much anguish the revisions brought on, could not possibly be in as much pain as he was in at this moment. It seemed terribly unfair to him. Unfair that this kid with peach fuzz on his face could have this sweet ripe Ardis Fletcher in Connecticut, and unfair that this encounter, which he had provoked with his letters, should leave him relatively unscathed while it was causing his instructor such pain. Oh, what the hell, I’ve been in the Pacific too long, he thought; eight months is too long a time, I’m not thinking clearly. I’ll tell Regan tomorrow that his story stinks to high heaven and will he please stop bothering me with it.

And perhaps he would have done just that, perhaps he would have spoken to David earnestly and sympathetically, told him that sometimes these things didn’t work out and David shouldn’t take it too badly, perhaps he’d have recognized that the pain involved for himself was becoming greater than whatever perverse satisfaction he derived out of punishing David, perhaps he’d have dropped the whole ridiculous thing if the skipper of the Hanley had not summoned him to the wardroom the next day.

“Sit down, Mr. Devereaux,” he said. “Smoke?”

“Thank you, sir, no,” Devereaux answered.

“Mind if I light up?”

“Not at all, sir.”

Devereaux was familiar enough with the ways of the Navy to realize that all this polite parlor chitchat was the prelude to some fancy chewing-out. He wasn’t particularly disturbed nor particularly nervous, because he’d been chewed out before, and by experts. One senior officer aboard the Juneau, in fact, had been a first-class demagogue, and the captain of the Hanley could never hope to achieve the same subtle heights of derisive oratory. So he waited patiently while the captain lighted a cigar and shook out the match and waved his hand before his face to clear the room of smoke.

“Now then,” the captain said, and he smiled pleasantly at Devereaux, and Devereaux waited, watching with casual interest, not at all frightened or apprehensive, watching the captain as he would watch a movie being shown on the boat deck, uninvolved, impersonally, almost bored.

“I understand you were a teacher in civilian life, Mr. Devereaux, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very interesting occupation,” the captain said.

“Yes, sir,” Devereaux answered, knowing full well that the captain did not think teaching was interesting. The captain thought only sailing the high seas was interesting, only being the hero commander of a naval warship was interesting. “Yes, sir, it is.”

“Taught writing, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Regular discoverer of budding Hemingways, huh?”

“Some of my students were rath—”

“Good writer, Hemingway,” the captain said. “Don’t you think?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How about Regan?”

“Regan, sir?” Devereaux said, puzzled for a moment.

“Yes. David Regan. Radarman, isn’t he?”

“Oh. Oh, yes, sir. Regan.” Devereaux nodded.

“What about him?”

“Well …” Devereaux shrugged. “What about him, sir? I don’t understand.”

“I understand you’ve been giving him writing lessons.”

“Who told—” Devereaux cut himself short. “Not lessons exactly, sir. I’ve been helping him with a short story he wrote.”

“That’s very nice of you, Mr. Devereaux.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Very nice.”

“Thank you, sir. The boy—”

“But of course, Mr. Devereaux, there are certain naval regulations which forbid fraternization between officer and enlisted man, as I’m sure you are well aware. These regulations are based on the sound facts of naval warfare, Mr. Devereaux, the premise being that the power of command is weakened when the person giving the command has become too friendly with the person receiving the command.”

“Sir, I assure you—”

“I understand perfectly well, Mr. Devereaux, that you are aware of the responsibilities of being an officer in the United States Navy. However, I have never trusted the limited intelligence of the enlisted man, and I never shall. I should hate to have a friendship encouraged which would limit the fighting performance of any man aboard my vessel.”

“Sir, Regan is quite intelligent, and he recognizes the limitations of any relationship between an officer and an—”

“Yes, that’s all well and good, Mr. Devereaux, but someone overheard him calling you ‘George.’ Now, that stuff has got to go, Mr. Devereaux. It has got to go.”

“Sir—”

“Regan happens to be a pretty important person in the fighting structure of this ship, Mr. Devereaux. His battle station is on the bridge, and he is our communications link with Combat Information Center, a man who can understand all this newfangled radar gobbledygook and who can give it to Mr. Peterson, our executive officer, without any hesitation or doubt. He is also capable of sifting information and reporting it in the order of its importance without a moment’s hesitation, and I don’t think I have to tell you how vital that is to us on the bridge who are trying to command a ship under combat conditions.”

“I realize that, sir, but I can’t see the harm of working with him on a—”

“I would not like Regan to become confused, Mr. Devereaux. I would not like him to start calling me ‘Donald,’ for example, which happens to be my name, nor would I like him turning to my executive officer and saying, ‘Fred, many bogeys,’ or whatever it is those radar boys say. I wouldn’t want that to happen, Mr. Devereaux.”

“Sir, if I may say so, that’s reducing it to the absurd. I can assure you Regan would never—”

“You can assure me, Mr. Devereaux, that these classes in English composition will be terminated immediately. That is what you can assure me, Mr. Devereaux.”

The wardroom was silent.

“Are there any questions, Mr. Devereaux?” the captain asked.

“None, sir.”

“Very well, then.”

“May I be excused, sir?”

“You may be excused, Mr. Devereaux.”

Devereaux went back to his cabin and almost punched a hole in the bulkhead with his closed fist. This was the first time in his naval career that he had received an order that positively infuriated him, an order that seemed ridiculously unfair, most arbitrary, and downright undemocratic. We are supposed to be fighting the fascists, Devereaux thought, and the biggest fascist of them all is right aboard this ship! It never occurred to him that the captain was doing him a favor, was offering him an easy way out of a situation that had become inexplicably complex. All at once, Devereaux became a champion of democracy. All at once, Devereaux became a person terribly interested in the rights of the common enlisted man.

And this provided another dilemma for Devereaux, and, naturally, he blamed his predicament on David and allowed his anger to feed the fires of his hatred. The truth was that Devereaux didn’t care at all about the welfare of the enlisted man. Devereaux thoroughly enjoyed all the privileges of his rank and accepted them as the indisputable rights of a man who held a Master’s degree and who taught at a university in civilian life. He would no more equate himself with a member of the deck gang than he would with an ape. And whereas he admitted that radarmen were perhaps high on the Navy’s scale of intelligence, he nonetheless knew that no radarman on the Hanley, and perhaps no radarman in the entire fleet, was as intelligent or as educated or as cultured as he, George Devereaux. He knew nothing at all about David Regan except that he had been intimate with a girl named Ardis Fletcher and that his father had drowned in a Connecticut lake, and more about him he didn’t particularly care to know. Knowing as little as he did, he was certain that David’s background and education were not equal to his own, that David’s I.Q. was undoubtedly lower than his, and that David was about as important to him as the man who swept the streets back in Westwood.

And yet the captain’s order annoyed him, and he convinced himself that he was concerned about the rights of the enlisted man while all the time he knew the order was in keeping with a naval regulation that met with his approval. That was the damn thing about David Regan, he told himself. He forced you into these stupid situations where you believed one thing and professed another, where you were compelled to examine with scrutiny your own motivations, and where you always came out the loser.

The next morning, after quarters for muster, he told David what the captain had said, and David instantly suggested that they forget all about finishing the story.

“No,” Devereaux told him. “You go on with the rewrite. Leave the story in my mailbox, and I’ll type up any suggestions I have and leave them for you in the radar shack. We’re going to finish that story, David!”

Two days after the Hanley came out of dry dock, she was ordered to take part in a battle problem involving an American cruiser and five other American destroyers. Considering the fact that the Hanley had been in a great many real battles, it was no surprise that the men looked upon the exercise as something of a lark. There was, in fact, something of a holiday air aboard the ship that day as she maneuvered off Pearl in simulated combat.

David, at his battle station on the bridge, was not immune to the general feeling of gaiety. It was nice to be involved in combat where no one could get hurt. He snapped his radar bearings to the exec, sifted the lookout reports, translated messages from fire control, and generally enjoyed the balmy weather and the mild breeze blowing off the open water. As always, he wore sound-powered phones on his head, the mouthpiece of the set strapped around his neck. And, as always, the left earpiece was in place over his left ear so that he could hear any messages that came over the phones, but his right ear was uncovered so that he could hear any commands given on the bridge. The radar shack was in TBS contact with a squadron of Wildcats flying in support of the group, and George Devereaux was the communications officer directing the squadron and reporting its position to the bridge. Three borrowed Army B-24s were approaching the ships, simulating Japanese bombers, and Devereaux had given the Wildcats their interception vectors and was reporting their progress at regularly spaced intervals. In the meantime, the ships were engaged in some fairly complicated defensive maneuvers against a mythical surface-attack force, and radarmen were constantly calling up ranges and bearings to the bridge, the maneuver constructed so that each ship in the group took accurate position from a previously designated guide ship. The skipper kept pacing the bridge and listening to the signalmen as they reported the flags that appeared on the cruiser, the flags telling the rest of the force which turns they were supposed to execute. As soon as the turn was executed, the radar beamed in on the guide destroyer and called up the range and bearing, and the skipper gave orders to correct or maintain direction or speed as the radar indicated. And all the while, Devereaux kept calling up the progress of the fighter planes, waiting for that moment of contact with the approaching B-24s, that moment when he would hear the fighter pilots shout “Tallyho! Tallyho!”

The moment came unexpectedly and somewhat confusedly.

The skipper turned to David, wanting the position of the guide destroyer, and started to say, “Regan, get me a range and bearing on Sugarfoot.”

All he got out was “Regan, get me a ra—” because at that moment the phone on David’s left ear burst into sound.

“Bridge, Combat,” Devereaux said. “Tallyho! Tallyho! Three bogeys, zero-four-two, range one-oh-five, angels two.”

David, assaulted by the sound from the radar shack in his left ear, catching the captain’s words in his uncovered right ear, did a very normal and natural thing, which was immediately misinterpreted by the captain. He held out his hand like a traffic cop and waved it at the captain, shushing him as he listened carefully to the urgent message coming over the phone. The captain clamped his mouth shut and stared at David. David turned to him, caught in the excitement of the imaginary battle.

“Wildcats report enemy contact, sir,” he said. “Three bogeys at zero-four-two, range one—”

“Get off the bridge, Regan,” the captain said.

David bunked. “Sir?”

“I said get off the bridge! Now!”

“Sir?” David repeated.

“Did you hear me talking to you a moment ago?”

“Yes, sir, but—”

“But what?”

“Sir, Mr. Devereaux—”

“Mr. Devereaux what?”

“Sir,” David said, “the Wildcats, sir. They spotted …” and he fell silent, recognizing at once that it was futile to argue with an officer, especially when he was a full commander who happened to be captain of the ship. He took off the earphones, unstrapped the mouthpiece, and looked at the captain. “Re … re … request permission to leave the bridge, sir,” he said.

“Permission granted,” the captain snapped.

“Who … who do you want to … to take the phones, sir?”

“You may give them to the executive officer, Regan.”

“Yes, sir,” David said. He handed the phones to Mr. Peterson. Peterson took them without a word. David turned to the captain again. “Sir? Sir, where should I go?”

“Cruiser flying Turn-One-Answer, sir,” one of the signalmen shouted.

The captain shoved David aside and turned toward the helmsman. “Right fifteen degrees rudder,” he said.

“Right fifteen degrees rudder, sir.”

The captain turned to the engine-order telegraph operator. “All engines ahead standard,” he said.

“All engines ahead standard, sir.”

“Coming around to zero-three-five, sir.”

“Meet her.”

“All engines answer ahead standard, sir.”

“Very well.”

“Steady on zero-three-five, sir.”

“Very well,” the captain said. “Mr. Peterson, range and bearing on Sugarfoot. Tell Combat to send up another talker.”

“Sir,” David said, “should I—?”

“Get the hell off the bridge!” the captain bellowed, and David nodded and went down the ladder quietly.

As soon as they got back to Pearl, the captain called Devereaux into his wardroom. He told Devereaux all about David’s misbehavior and explained that the Hanley had been anticipating a command from the cruiser and that a range and bearing on the guide ship had been essential at that moment, and that had the Hanley failed to execute the turn command promptly and properly and be in position on schedule, he, the captain of the Hanley, would have appeared singularly foolish and incompetent in the eyes of the admiral who was aboard the cruiser. In view of this, he was making mention of Devereaux’s behavior on his next fitness report, and would Devereaux please tell Regan the captain wanted to see him in the wardroom immediately?

David came into the wardroom and stood before the long mess-table. The captain sat at the far end, scowling. The captain informed David that his commands and his requests took precedence over any other commands, requests, or reports aboard this vessel and David had better understand this at once. In order to help his understanding, the captain was restricting David to the ship for a month and he was asking the senior communications officer to make certain that David stood only midwatches when the ship was under way. In port, in addition to standing his usual voice radio-watch, David would relieve whatever seaman was standing the gangway midwatch. He would resume the duties of his usual battle station under surveillance and would promptly be relieved of such responsible duties the next time any such laxity was evident. And, the captain told David, he was lucky his behavior hadn’t resulted in a captain’s mast, which, as David knew, would have gone into his service record. David thanked the captain for his kindness and left the wardroom.

And the very next day, a gunnery officer discovered the missing .45.

The gun locker was directly across the passageway from the pharmacy amidships. No one would have thought of taking an inventory of small arms if the ship had been out there fighting real battles. But fresh from dry dock as she was, time on everybody’s hands, the senior gunnery officer decided it was time to do a little premature spring cleaning. So he assigned an ensign and two gunner’s mates to put the gun locker in order, and that was when the ensign discovered the number of actual guns did not tally with the number of guns listed on his clip board. Actually, Arbuster, a gunner’s mate second class, discovered the discrepancy long before the ensign did, but he casually and patriotically decided not to mention it. The ensign, on the other hand, was somewhat eagerly bucking for his lieutenant’s bar, and he reported the missing gun to the senior gunnery officer, who in turn reported it to the executive officer, who in turn reported it to the captain.

The squawk box erupted at 1400, directly after the midday mess. “Now hear this!” it said. “All hands muster on the portside amidships! All hands muster on the portside amidships!”

The men of the Hanley, accustomed to peculiar requests and commands, nonetheless considered this one to be peculiar indeed. They dropped their paint buckets and their scraping tools and their steel wool and reported amidships, where they waited in an uneasy knot for whatever was coming. Most of them suspected they’d be pulling out for the islands again. None of them, with the possible exception of Arbuster the gunner’s mate, ever once suspected what actually came.

The captain appeared at 1405. Dramatically, he stood on the boat deck before the torpedo tubes and looked down at the men who clustered on the main deck. As was usual with the captain of the Hanley, he delivered a little preamble before he got down to what was really troubling him.

“As you know,” he said, and the men still didn’t know anything, “the effectiveness of a fighting ship depends on a great deal more than the skill of the men aboard her. It depends, too, on spirit and trust and respect. Each man aboard this ship is a vital member of a team, and we’ve got to respect each other and the job each of us does, or this ship will cease being an effective fighting machine. Respect is the key word. Respect for a seaman second class as well as respect for the captain of this vessel. Respect.”

The captain paused and leaned over the boat-deck rail in a confidential way. He was wearing suntans, the scrambled eggs of his rank gleaming on the peak of his hat, the silver maple leaf glistening on the collar of his shirt.

“A forty-five is missing from the gun locker,” he said abruptly.

He paused.

“I know why that forty-five was stolen,” he said in a whisper, and he paused again.

The men of the Hanley looked up at him and began to wonder what he meant. The captain kept nodding his head sagely on the boat deck, and the men, none of whom would have interpreted the theft in such a manner had the captain not planted the idea, suddenly got the gist of his whispered words. Someone had stolen the gun so he could put a bullet in the old bastard’s head. The idea, now that they thought of it, seemed like a good one, perfectly reasonable and sound. They began wishing that whoever had the gun would carry out his plan. They began visualizing the captain being carried ashore in a basket. The captain kept nodding, and now the men were nodding, too, fantasizing the entire crew in dress uniforms, the big guns going off in salute as they carried the captain into the waiting motor launch, dead. Captain and crew kept nodding at each other, fantasy in total empathy with delusion. The captain broke the stalemate.

“I have asked the officers in each division to conduct a search of every foot locker aboard this vessel. You will report to your sleeping compartments at once, and open your lockers, and stand by for inspection. That is all.”

The men dispersed silently. There wasn’t much to say. Many members of the crew began thinking of the various weapons stashed in their lockers, the Japanese pistols they had bought in Honolulu or from the Marines in the Santa Cruz Islands, the Lugers they had picked up, the Italian Barrettas. They began thinking of these and wondering how they could dump them over the side before that locker inspection, but the prospects looked pretty dim. The prospects looked especially dim for David Regan.

He had recognized instantly that the gun the captain was talking about was the gun that he had inadvertently taken with him to the mess hall after small-arms instruction that day so long ago. And that gun was now buried underneath his handkerchiefs in his foot locker in the forward sleeping compartment. He tried to get there before any of the officers arrived, but by the time he reached his locker, two officers from the communications division were already there. One of them was George Devereaux.

“Okay, men, let’s get this over with,” Devereaux said.

The men fell in grumblingly before their lockers and stooped down and pulled out their dog-tag chains from beneath their undershirts, the keys to their lockers dangling with their identification plates. They opened the locks and flipped up the tops of their lockers and then waited while Devereaux and an ensign named Phelps conducted the search. David opened his locker and shoved the automatic clear to the rear, heaping a pile of T shirts onto it. The officers seemed somewhat embarrassed by their task. David, standing by his locker, began wishing that Devereaux rather than Phelps would search through his gear.

“All right, Savarino, you want to move those cigarettes?” Phelps said.

“What’s under that mattress cover?” Devereaux asked.

The officers were moving down the line methodically, ill at ease, conducting the search in a studiously casual but nonetheless thorough manner, Phelps on one side, Devereaux on the other, alternating. David was suddenly sweating. He wiped his lip.

“Where’d you get this bayonet, Stein?” Phelps asked.

“On the Canal, sir.”

“Get rid of it right after inspection, you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, Regan, step aside,” Phelps said.

“I’ve got it, Phelps,” Devereaux put in.

“I thought—”

“I’ve got it,” Devereaux repeated.

He knelt before David’s locker and began moving the clothing around carefully, committing his invasion of privacy like a gentleman. His hands stopped on a cigar box. He opened it, saw a pile of photographs, and—even though he’d never seen her in his life—instantly recognized the top photo as the girl in Talmadge, Ardis Fletcher. He suddenly bit his lower lip, shoved the box to one side, and thrust his hands to the back of the locker. His hands met resistance and stopped. He glanced up at David. David wiped sweat from his lip again.

“All right, how’s it going down here?” a voice asked from the ladder.

The sailor closest to the ladder shouted, “Atten-shun!”

Devereaux got to his feet, his hands empty, and turned to face the captain as he came down the ladder.

“At ease, at ease,” the captain said. “Have you turned up that piece?”

“No, sir,” Phelps said.

“Mr. Devereaux? You giving these lockers a thorough check?”

“Yes, sir, we are.”

The captain walked to where Devereaux and David were standing side by side. He glanced into David’s open locker. “Where’d you learn to square your gear, Regan?” he asked.

“Great Lakes, sir.”

“That’s a pretty sloppy job, isn’t it? Irish pennants all over the place.”

“Sir, I’m afraid I made a mess of that locker,” Devereaux said.

“Nobody asked you, Mr. Devereaux.” The captain squinted his eyes, studying first Devereaux, and then David. “Step aside,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

The captain knelt before the locker. He picked up a pair of socks, threw them back into the locker, and then saw David’s cigar box. “What’s in there, Regan?”

“Some … some pictures, sir.”

“Open it.”

“Yes, sir.”

David knelt and opened the box. His hand was trembling.

“You nervous, Regan?” the captain asked.

“A little, sir.”

“Why?”

“I … I don’t know, sir.”

The captain glanced at the contents of the box, nodded, and said, “Very well, move those jumpers for me.” David picked up the jumpers and put them onto the pile of T shirts which were covering the .45.

“What’s behind those shoes, Regan?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“I saw something back there, Regan.”

“No, sir, I—”

“I saw something, Regan.”

“Oh. Oh, yes, sir. A pair of binoculars.”

“Give them to me.”

David moved his black shoes onto the pile of jumpers and reached to the back of the locker for the binoculars. He handed them to the captain.

“Are these government property, Regan?”

“No, sir. I bought them in Honolulu.”

The captain glanced at them and handed them back. “All right, move those jumpers.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the T shirts.”

“Yes, sir.”

With his back to the captain, David squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and then picked up the jumpers.

“Come on, Regan, on the double.”

“Sir …” Devereaux started, and then hesitated.

“Yes, Mr. Devereaux?”

“Sir, I’ve searched this locker and …”

Again Devereaux hesitated. David, his hands on the pile of T shirts that were shielding the .45, looked up at Devereaux. He’s going to tell, he thought. He’s going to say he found the gun.

“Yes, what is it, Mr. Devereaux?” the captain said.

“Sir, I think I should tell you—”

“Captain down here?” a voice from the top of the ladder asked.

“He’s here, sir,” one of the seamen answered. The captain turned as Levy, the senior gunnery officer, came down the steps.

“Oh, there you are, sir.”

“What is it, Mr. Levy?”

“I think we’ve found the piece, sir,” Levy said.

“Where?”

“Seaman first class has it, sir. Claims he bought it from a dogface. A soldier, sir.”

“Where is he?”

“Aft sleeping compartment, sir.”

“Let’s talk to him,” the captain said. “Carry on,” he called over his shoulder, and went up the ladder.

“Does he want us to continue the search?” Phelps asked.

“I guess not,” Devereaux answered. “They found the gun.”

“I’d better find out,” Phelps said, and he went up the ladder after the captain.

Devereaux turned to David. In a tight whisper, he said, “Take that gun topside and throw it overboard.”

“Now, sir?”

“Now. Move!”

“Yes, sir!” David grabbed the gun and tucked it under his shirt. In thirty seconds he had thrown it over the side, but he still wondered what Devereaux was about to say when he’d used the opening words, “Sir, I think I should tell you—”

Devereaux, on the other hand, knew exactly what he’d been about to say. He’d been about to say, “Sir, I think I should tell you I’ve found the gun. I was going to report to you privately, sir. I didn’t want to embarrass young Regan before his shipmates.”

That was what he was about to say. He had been spared the statement by the intrusion of Sol Levy, the gunnery officer, and the news that a seaman first class had the missing .45. As it turned out, the .45 really had been purchased from a soldier, but it was considered stolen government property nonetheless, and immediately confiscated. By the time the search was resumed, David had already disposed of the weapon. Devereaux, unfortunately, had not disposed of the nagging knowledge that he’d been about to inform on David to save his own skin.

The thought was a new one to him, and he examined it carefully, examined too the inborn American aversion to the informer. He did not enjoy casting himself in the role of the rat. And yet, undeniably, he had been about to tell on David, would have told on David in the next instant. Anyone would have done the same thing, he thought. It was a matter of Regan or me. What do I owe him anyway? Nothing. I only owe number one, George Devereaux. Still the idea of informing was not a palatable one.

I didn’t tell on him, he thought. But I was about to. Well, maybe I would have changed my mind in the last minute. Maybe I would have said, “Sir, I think I should tell you I’ve searched this locker thoroughly, and you’re only duplicating my effort.” Maybe I would have said that if Levy hadn’t come down the steps at that moment. Maybe I would have protected Regan after all.

But he knew he’d been about to inform, and he knew he would have informed if he hadn’t been interrupted. And he knew, too, that contact with David Regan somehow brought out all the worst elements of his personality, somehow reduced the private image of himself to a person he didn’t even know and, worse, a person he despised.

I have to destroy him, he thought.

At first, he thought he was referring to this image of himself, the image he hated, this person who did things George Devereaux would not have done, this childish man who thought longingly of young girls, this vindictive man who insisted on punishing, this timid man who would not face up to the captain, this intolerant man who mouthed democratic principles, this disgusting man who was an informer.

And then he realized he did not want to destroy this image at all. He only wanted to destroy the source of this image, the one person who caused him to see himself so unflatteringly, David Regan. Unconsciously, he began to plot against David, continuing with the revisions all the while, plotting, plotting. There seemed to be no way of eliminating him, of reducing him to nothingness, no way of ripping David out of his life.

Until that April night in Pearl.

David, carrying out the details of the captain’s punishment for his transgression on the bridge, was standing the gangway midwatch. He wore his dress whites and a guard belt carrying live cartridges, and he held a .22 rifle at parade rest, more or less. The officer of the deck was a man called Sammener, and he ran a loose watch, and he realized that no Japanese spies were going to blow up the Hanley while it lay in port, and so he didn’t much care whether David leaned on the rifle or held it on his shoulder or slouched in the most casual parade rest he had ever witnessed. Sammener simply didn’t care. Sammener was sleepy, and he detested midwatches, and the gunner’s mate standing watch with him was a deadly Midwestern bore who had nothing to say, so Sammener wrote a few letters to his wife, and watched David at the foot of the gangway stifling yawns and standing a very sloppy parade-rest watch. The captain was aboard and asleep, and so there was no fear he’d come back to the ship from liberty and raise a fuss.

“What time is it?” Sammener asked the gunner’s mate.

“Oh-two-hundred, sir,” the gunner’s mate replied.

“In English.”

“Two A.M., sir.”

“Thank you.” Sammener paused. “Listen, go get us some coffee, will you? I’ll be asleep here in a few minutes.”

“Yes, sir. Where should I get it, sir?”

“The radiomen should have a pot brewing.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get some for the gangway watch, too.” He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “You there! At the gangway! You want some coffee?”

“Yes, sir, I’d like some,” David answered.

“Fine. What’s your name again?”

“Regan, sir.”

“What are you, Regan? A radarman?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What are you doing on gangway watch?”

David grinned. “The captain’s idea, sir.”

“He’s full of them,” Sammener mumbled. “Go get the coffee, Mercer. Make it fast. I’m about to drop.”

The coffee came at 0215. Sammener sent the gunner’s mate down with a cup for David, and David shifted the rifle to his left hand and sipped at the hot cup of coffee. The coffee was good. He’d been very sleepy before the coffee came. It seemed as if he’d been standing mid-watches forever, and yet it had only been a few weeks, and still he never seemed to be wide awake any more. Night after night, he came to dread that hand on his shoulder waking him at a quarter to midnight, and then standing on the dock watching everyone returning from liberty, not getting back into the sack until 4 A.M., and then being awakened again at six to start the navy day. He never seemed to get enough sleep lately. He almost wished they were back in combat. The captain would never enforce such ridiculous punishment if the ship were in …

“Well, well, David, having a little cup of coffee?” the voice said.

David turned. “Oh, hello, George,” he whispered.

George Devereaux put his hands on his hips and studied David with his chipmunk grin, his eyebrows askew, his brown eyes glinting. David smiled back.

“Sir,” Devereaux said.

“Huh?”

“Sir,” Devereaux repeated, still grinning. “I believe I am an officer in the United States Navy, and as such I am entitled to the respect of an enlisted man, as exemplified by the use of the respectful title ‘sir.’” Devereaux paused, still grinning. “Respect, that’s what the captain said. Respect is the key word.”

“You’re absolutely right,” David answered, sipping at his coffee, and then smiling as he took the cup away from his mouth.

“I am absolutely right, sir,” Devereaux said.

“You are absolutely right, sir,” David affirmed, hitting the word hard, grinning.

“That’s better,” Devereaux said. He lost his balance for an instant and wobbled on the dock, catching at the handrail of the gangway for support and then straightening up to face David again. David suddenly smelled the whiskey fumes on his breath.

“Now get rid of that coffee cup,” Devereaux said.

“Sir?”

“Put down the coffee cup.”

“Yes, sir,” David said, grinning, wondering what kind of game Devereaux was playing, but grateful for anything that broke the monotony of the long watch. He put the cup down on the dock.

“Atten-shun!” Devereaux shouted.

David snapped to attention, smiling.

“What’s so funny, Regan?”

“Nothing, sir,” David said, still smiling.

“Take that smile off your face!”

“Yes, sir!” David answered, and immediately pulled a serious face, his mouth grim, his brows pulled down.

“That’s better,” Devereaux said, nodding. His hands reached out for David’s kerchief. “That’s a pretty sloppy knot, Regan.”

“Yes, sir!”

“And your shoes need shining.”

“Yes, sir!”

“And you need a haircut.”

“I haven’t been ashore, sir.”

“There’s a barber aboard, Regan.”

“I know, sir. But there didn’t seem any sense in getting a haircut when I’m restricted to the—”

“Are you questioning my judgment, Regan?”

David smiled again. “No, sir!”

“What’s so funny?” Devereaux said, and David suddenly realized he was smiling alone; Devereaux’s face was dead serious.

“Nothing, sir,” he said. The smile dropped from his mouth.

“I tell you your shoes are messy and you heed a haircut, and you think that’s funny, do you?”

“No, sir, I don’t,” David said.

“Very well,” Devereaux answered. “Get a haircut. Shine those shoes.”

“I will, sir.”

“Very well,” Devereaux said, and he started up the gangway. He saluted Sammener and said, “Well, well, look who’s standing the deck watch. Ole Jonah Sammener. What’s doing, Jonah? Got any girls aboard? Is there a wild party going on in the bosun’s locker?”

“You look as if you just came from one,” Sammener said dryly.

“What are you drinking, Jonah? Coffee? The whole watch is drinking coffee. A fine alert bunch of men we’ve got guarding our lives while we sleep the sleep of innocents.” He nodded, and seemed to remember David standing on the dock. He wheeled toward the gangway, went down it rapidly, and walked to where David was standing at its foot. David did not move.

“I believe it is customary to salute an officer when he approaches, Regan,” Devereaux said.

David snapped to attention, his left hand moving over to cross the muzzle of the rifle in salute. Devereaux touched the peak of his cap and snapped a salute in return. David remained at attention. Devereaux kept studying him. The chipmunk grin had vanished completely. There were only the hard brown eyes now, staring from beneath the crooked eyebrows.

“I thought I told you to get a haircut,” Devereaux said.

David, puzzled, did not answer.

“I’m talking to you, Regan! You still need a haircut.”

“Sir, I … I’m on watch, sir.”

“And a pretty sloppy watch, I might add.”

“Hey, George, come on aboard,” Sammener yelled from the quarterdeck. “You’re waking up the whole ship.”

“You just keep out of this, Jonah,” Devereaux said over his shoulder.

“Sir,” David whispered, “I think maybe—”

“Never mind what you think, Regan!” Devereaux snapped. “I’m not interested in what you think.”

“Sir, I only meant—”

“Yes, what did you mean, Regan? I wish you would say what you mean. We’ve been rewriting ‘Man Drowning’ until it’s coming out of my ears, and I still don’t know what you mean. Can’t you say what you mean? Just for once? Can’t you, for God’s sake, spit it out in clear intelligent English?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” David said. “I’ve been trying to, but—”

“Don’t be so sorry. I’m sorry enough for both of us. I’m sorry I ever read your letters and ever made the mistake of thinking you could possibly in a thousand years write even a single paragraph of interesting prose. Don’t go telling me you’re sorry, Regan.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but—”

“I said don’t tell me you’re sorry!”

David stared at Devereaux, wondering how this had suddenly got so serious. He’s drunk, yes, he thought, but still this had got so serious all at once. He glanced toward Sammener, who had washed his hands of the entire affair and was leisurely sipping his coffee on the quarterdeck.

“What made you think you were a writer, Regan?” Devereaux asked.

“I never thought that, sir. It was you who—”

“Don’t contradict me! What was it, Regan? A burning desire to get that magnificent event on paper?”

“No, sir, I—”

“Man Drowning, Man Drowning, Man Drowning, how many times has he drowned since we first started the story?”

“I don’t know, sir. There have been a lot of revis—”

“What makes you think anyone would be interested in reading about some fool who’s too stupid to avoid getting caught in an anchor line?”

David felt his right fist tightening on the barrel of the rifle.

“I … I don’t know, sir.”

“No one. That’s who would be interested. No one. A colorless little man goes out in a rowboat and—”

“Sir!”

“What is it?”

“Sir, I … I’d rather not discuss the story now, sir.”

“Ahh, he’s sensitive,” Devereaux said solicitously. “The sensitive artist. How literary. If you’re so literary and sensitive, Regan, why did you choose to write about such an insensitive clod? Why did you—?”

“Sir, that’s my father,” David said quietly. He could feel an uncontrollable anger boiling inside him. His fist was tight on the barrel of the rifle. He hoped he would not cry. His eyes blinked as he tried to stifle the anger.

“Oh, your father. Oh, forgive me, Regan.”

“That’s all right, sir.”

“Yes, your father. I didn’t realize your father was the idiot who—”

“Stop it, Mr. Devereaux!”

“—stepped into a rowboat and allowed his foot to—”

“Stop it!”

“—get caught in an anchor line. That takes brains. A damn fool is what that man was, a goddamn stupid …”

His first impulse was to raise the rifle and fire it.

He controlled the impulse somehow, bringing the rifle up, his right hand almost going to the trigger, and then he decided to swing the rifle, and he started to do that and simply threw the rifle away and smashed his right fist into Mr. Devereaux’s face. Devereaux reeled back against the gangway, and David went after him, his eyes brimming with tears, his heart pounding.

“That’s my father,” he said, and he struck Devereaux again as Sammener put down his coffee cup and came running down the gangway, his hand going for the .45 at his side.

“Regan!” he yelled. “Are you out of your mind? Regan, cut it out!” He seized David’s arms and pulled him away from Devereaux. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” David said, trembling now with the realization of what he had done.

“That’s a fool stunt, Regan,” Sammener said. “You … you better get below. Mercer, wake … wake the next man on the watch list. Come on, Regan, we’d just better …”

Devereaux straightened up from the gangway and wiped his hand across his nose. He looked at the blood on his fingers and then smiled his chipmunk grin and said, “Just a second, Jonah.”

“He lost his head, George,” Sammener said. “I’ll have him relieved and—”

“He lost his head indeed,” Devereaux answered. “I think we’d better wake the captain.”

On April seventh David Regan stood a captain’s mast, and it was recommended at that primary court that David’s case be presented before a Naval court-martial. On April sixteenth he stood before a board of officers on the Juneau and was found guilty of violation of Article 90 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which stated Any person subject to this code who strikes his superior officer or lifts up any weapon or offers any violence against him while he is in the execution of his office shall be punished, if the offense is committed in time of war, by death or such other punishment as a court-martial might direct.

The lawyer charged with David’s defense pointed out that George Devereaux had been returning to the ship from a liberty and was not actively engaged in “the execution of his office,” but the defense was reminded that an officer is in the execution of his office when engaged in any act or service required or authorized to be done by him by statute, regulation, the order of a superior, or military usage. In general, the court advised, any striking or use of violence against any superior officer by a person subject to military law, over whom it is the duty of that superior officer to maintain discipline at the time, would be striking or using violence against him in the execution of his office.

It was pointed out to the court that George Devereaux had provoked the attack upon himself, and that he was drunk at the time of the attack, but the prosecution maintained that Article 112 of the Code, the article relating to drunkenness on duty, did not relate to those periods when, no duty being required of them by orders or regulations, officers and men occupy the status of leisure known as “off duty” or “on liberty,” which status George Devereaux was occupying at the time of the attack.

They could have given David a dishonorable discharge in addition to whatever punishment they decided upon within the specified limits of the Code. Instead, and because of the mitigating circumstances—the attorney for the defense constantly harped on a duality that permitted Devereaux to be engaged in “the execution of his office” where it suited the prosecution’s case, but to be “off duty” or “on liberty” where it did not—David was sentenced to five years at hard labor without pay or allowances, but his punishment did not include a dishonorable discharge.

On May third he was put aboard a transport in irons, and shipped to the Naval Retraining Command at Camp Elliott in San Diego, where he began serving his term.

Aboard the Hanley, the captain called Devereaux into the wardroom and delivered a flowery speech, the true substance of which was contained in the four words “I told you so.”

The girls from Phi Sig had somewhere acquired an Army Air Corps parachute, painstakingly dyed it a shocking red, and hung it from the ceiling of the gymnasium in a billowing canopy of brilliance. The Omega Epsilon girls had hand-fashioned dozens and dozens of long-stemmed roses, threaded them on strings, and trailed them from the gym ceiling so that the room was bathed in a literal shower of flowers, the huge silk parachute serving as an umbrella to protect the dancers from the crepe-paper downpour as they circled the floor to the beat of the band at the front of the gym. The dance had been labeled, appropriately though perhaps unimaginatively, The Shower of Roses Ball. The beat of the band throbbed through the hall, pounded the dancers, fired the feet of Amanda Soames, who swirled about the gym in yellow taffeta, amazed that she was here going round and round in the arms of a stranger beneath the Army Air Corps parachute somewhere acquired by the girls from Phi Sig.

Her intentions, up to six o’clock, had certainly been honorable. She had worked in the rehearsal room on the second floor of Ardaecker Hall until almost five-thirty, immune to the bright May sunshine that lazily sifted through the open windows, sitting at the piano and striking chord after chord, translating each note to the manuscript paper that rested on the piano rack, clamping the pencil between her teeth as she struck yet another chord, fascinated by the task she’d set herself. She was working with a blue-moon tune, a typical I-VI-II-V front phrase arranged in the key of C, strings carrying the first four bars, with flutes picking up the countermelody on the second four. She struck a C-major seventh, and then an A-minor ninth, and a D-minor ninth, and a G-dominant with a flatted ninth thrown into the chord, a bit too dramatic, perhaps, but that was the influence of Gillian Burke. She worked hard, and her intentions, up to six o’clock, had certainly been honorable.

“Make it big!” Gillian had said. “Arrange it as if you were Scriabin!” waving her arms, aware of the mirror behind her. Her knowledge of classical music never failed to surprise Amanda. Gillian seemed to be a hopeless “Nutcracker Suite” addict, and yet she was able to identify obscure symphonies after hearing only the first few bars, a terrifying feat of memory, which even Amanda could not duplicate. Her musical sense, too, was uncanny. It had seemed outrageous to Amanda even to attempt so pretentious an arrangement for a popular ballad like “’Til Then,” and yet she began to recognize the showmanship inherent in such an approach, and eventually admitted that it would be effective, and never once forgot that it was Gillian who had said, “Make it big!”

At five-thirty she had gone back to the dorm, and immediately into the shower down the hall. She had just turned on the water when Gillian burst into the room, threw off her robe, and took the stall alongside hers. In a matter of three minutes, as the steam rose from each booth to provide a background for their conversation, they were both shouting at each other heatedly over the drumming noise of the water, and Amanda had begun to regret leaving Ardaecker, begun to wonder why on earth she had gone back to the dorm at five-thirty.

“I told Morton I was staying home to study tonight!” she shouted.

“Are you married to Morton?” Gillian shouted back.

“Of course not!”

“Are you engaged? Are you pinned?”

“No, but—”

“Do you even have an understanding?”

“No, Gillian, but—”

“Hurry up. It’s getting late.”

“I just wouldn’t want him to think I lied to him.”

“You didn’t lie. Call him up and tell him you’re going out, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

“Well, that isn’t what’s bothering me, exactly.”

“Then, what is, exactly?” Gillian turned off the water and came out of the stall. Her hair was soaking wet, plastered to her skull, her lashes hung with glistening drops of water. She picked up her towel from the washbasin and began rubbing herself briskly.

“I don’t even know this fellow,” Amanda said from the stall.

“So what difference does that make? Will you please get out of that shower?”

Amanda turned off the water, pulled off her shower cap, and said loftily, “It makes a difference to me.”

“Here’s your robe.”

“I haven’t dried myself yet.”

“Dry yourself in the room. They’ll be here at eight.”

“I don’t care what time they’ll be here because I’m not … Gilly, I’m wet! I can’t put a robe on when I’m …” but Gillian had thrown the robe over her shoulders and was pulling her toward the door. “Gilly!” she protested, but somehow they were in the corridor, Amanda clutching the robe around her, Gillian sweeping her along toward their room. Amanda walked directly to her own bed, sat heavily in the center of it, crossed her arms over the front of the robe, and said, “Now stop it, Gillian. I know what I want to do.”

“And what’s that? You’re getting your bed all wet.”

“I don’t care about the bed. I want to stay home tonight.”

“Why?”

“I have work to do.”

“What work?”

“On the arrangement. It’s already a week over—”

“It’ll wait another week. Besides, you can knock it off in ten minutes, and you know it.”

“I can’t! I haven’t even begun any of the intricate scoring, and I couldn’t hope to—”

“You can do it tomorrow. This is Saturday night, Amanda. Date night. All across America, in cities, in towns, in hamlets, in shanties, for God’s sake, it’s date night! Since time immemorial—”

“Don’t get dramatic, Gillian. I can’t stand it when you start emoting.”

Gillian threw a towel at her and said, “Dry yourself. We haven’t got much time.”

“I’m not going.”

“You have to go. I promised Brian you would.”

“Brian is an ape.”

“He’s very sweet-oh. Besides, you’re going with his friend, not him.”

“His friend is probably an ape, too.”

“His friend is a lawyer.”

“Good for him.”

“And besides, he isn’t even Brian’s friend. He’s his brother’s friend.”

“Whose brother?”

“Brian’s.”

“Then how does Brian know him?”

“He doesn’t. They’re in the army together, this fellow and Brian’s brother, and Brian’s brother asked this fellow to stop off in Talmadge to say hello on his way to New Haven, and this fellow was good enough to do that, and Brian thought he should try to get him a date for tonight. So the least you can do—”

“I don’t owe Brian anything. He’s your boy friend.”

“He’s not my boy friend. He’s just someone I see every now and then.”

“All the more reason why I shouldn’t—”

“My God, Amanda, you’d think we were leading you to the electric chair!”

“I just don’t like the idea of you and Brian making dates for me. Or … of fixing me up with … with soldiers. What does Brian think he is? A … a … a marriage broker?”

“Who’s asking you to marry this fellow, huh? Is anybody asking you to marry him?”

“No, but …”

“All I’m asking you to do is to help out your roommate when a soldier—a soldier, Amanda, a member of the armed forces—”

“Here we go again.”

“—fighting a war to preserve our freedom, took the trouble to come all the way from—”

“He was on his way to New Haven, anyway.”

“—from Arizona to deliver a message from Brian’s brother. The least we can do, Amanda—”

“What was the message?”

“How do I know what the message was? He’s very handsome, Brian said.”

“Who is?”

“This fellow. Matthew Anson Bridges. Isn’t that a marr-velous name?”

“No. I detest people with three names.”

“Get dressed, Amanda.”

“No. I’m staying here.”

“Here’s your underwear, Amanda.”

“I don’t even know him.”

“Amanda, there is such a thing as a blind date, which is a common American custom and not at all degrading or shameful. Will you please put on your bloomers and stop wasting time?”

“I loathe the word bloomers.”

“Amanda, it’s almost six-thirty.”

“I’m in no hurry, Gillian.” She paused. “What’s he like?”

“I haven’t met him. Would you like Brian’s description of him?”

“For whatever it’s worth, yes.”

Gillian immediately hunched over into the hulking pose of a gorilla, her arms trailing, her jaw protruding. She began shuffling around the room, alternately scratching her head and her chest. When she turned to face Amanda, her eyes carried the blank stare of a subspecies animal.

“Uh …” she said. “Uh … he’s about … uh … six feet two inches in his socks, Gillian … uh … and he has this black hair, yeah, and these brown eyes and … uh … oh yeah … a black mustache and—”

“A black mustache!” Amanda shrieked.

“I’m only quoting Brian,” Gillian said, straightening up and walking directly to Amanda’s closet. “He’s also a captain in the Judge Advocate’s office and doing work someplace in Arizona. He has a great suntan, Brian said.”

“How old is he?”

“Twenty-six,” Gillian said, opening the closet door.

“Twenty-six!”

“Well now, just what’s wrong with twenty-six?” Gillian asked, turning, her hands on her hips.

“Twenty-six!”

“Yes, twenty-six, twenty-six. What shall we do, bury him?”

“Twenty-six with a black mustache,” Amanda said, and she pulled a face, her eyes flaring with new determination. “No. Absolutely not.” She took her robe from the bed and pulled it on over her bra and panties. “No, Gillian. I’m sorry. No.”

“Which dress do you want to wear?” Gillian said from the closet.

“I’m not going.”

“Wear the yellow. It’s a good color for you.”

“I’m not going. You can call Brian and tell him …”

Gillian threw the yellow taffeta onto Amanda’s bed and went to her dresser. She opened the top drawer, rummaged about in it for a moment, and then said, “Haven’t you got a pair without a run?”

“Gillian, I have no intention of—”

“Amanda, put on your stockings and your dress and your shoes and stop behaving like a silly little—”

“Gilly, he is twenty-six years old, and—”

“Yes, and he has a black mustache, and he forecloses mortgages on widows’ homes, and you are going to that stupid Falling Roses Ball with him if I have to carry you there unconscious. Yes!”

The green eyes flashed for an instant, and then the impish grin claimed Gillian’s face.

“Come on, Amanda,” she said gently. “Have a heart. I promised Brian.”

Now, sweeping about the floor in the arms of Matthew Anson Bridges, Amanda was forced to admit that he didn’t seem terribly old after all. And he did have a marvelous suntan, and a very soft way of speaking, she supposed that was because he came from Virginia. She had never known a Southerner before, and somehow Matthew Anson Bridges—it was strange, she couldn’t think of him as just a first name, she had to link all three names together, the way she had first heard them—Matthew Anson Bridges reminded her of all the stories she’d read about the Old South. She could almost visualize him astride a horse, assuring a plantation widow that his troops were only in pursuit of the Yankees, Ma’am, and would not loot or pillage. And yet he didn’t have a real Southern accent, it was simply a soft way of speaking. Well, she supposed all educated Southerners spoke that way. He danced very well, with a firm guiding hand in the small of her back, and a very light grip on her free hand. It didn’t seem at all like dancing. Their feet seemed to be slightly above the floor of the gym, not touching anything really. There was almost a feeling of flying, weightless, in the arms of Matthew Anson Bridges, sweeping about the floor now.

“When I hear that serenade in blue,

“I’m somewhere in another—”

“Do you like Glenn Miller?” Amanda asked.

“—world alone with you

“Sharing all the joys …”

“Yes,” Matthew said.

“He’s in the army, too, isn’t he?”

“Yes. The air corps.”

“Do you like our parachute?”

“It’s beautiful.”

“He’s a captain, too, isn’t he? Glenn Miller?”

“Yes.”

“And as we dance the night away

“I hear you say …”

“Is something wrong?”

“No.”

“You seem angry.”

“I don’t like to talk when I’m dancing,” Matthew said.

“Oh. Well, excuse me.”

“You’re excused.”

Around and around, barely touching the gym floor, he doesn’t like to talk when he dances, well, well, well, the strong silent type, Mr. Matthew Anson Bridges, but he does dance well. He’s probably counting the steps. Talking probably confuses him, throws him off count. And she burst out laughing.

“Something?” he said.

“No. No.”

“I don’t like secret laughter,” he told her.

“What do you like, Mr. Bridges?”

“Call me Matthew. Everyone else does.”

“What do you like, Matthew?”

“I like honey blondes who look as if they just fell off a peach tree.”

She stared up at him suddenly.

“The song’s over,” he said. “I do like Glenn Miller, and I think your freshman band and your teen-age vocalist just slaughtered one of the prettiest songs he ever recorded.”

“Me?” Amanda said.

“Huh?”

“The … the peach tree?”

“Oh. Yes. Would you like a drink?”

“I don’t know if I’m flattered.”

“Why not?”

Amanda laughed. “Peaches are yellow and red and fuzzy.”

“They are also ripe and soft,” Matthew said. “Come on.”

“Where are you going? The punch bowl’s—”

“I think Brian has a pint in the car.”

“Well …”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’d like to dance some more,” Amanda said.

“The band’s taking an intermission.”

“Yes, I know. When they come back, I mean. Oh, there’s Gillian! Gilly! Over here!”

Gillian, wearing a vibrantly electric blue silk, took Brian’s hand and walked to where Matthew and Amanda were standing.

“Hi,” she said. “How are you two getting along?”

“We’re discussing fruit,” Matthew said, and he smiled at Amanda.

“I think we ought to get out of here,” Brian said.

“Why?” Gillian asked.

“I don’t like gymnasiums. They always smell sweaty.”

“I want to dance some more,” Amanda said.

“Isn’t there someplace else we can go to dance?” Matthew asked Brian.

“Sure. There’re a hundred places in Talmadge alone. If we—”

“I want to stay here,” Amanda said. “I think it’s lovely.”

“I thought we might find a place where we could sit at a table.”

“No, I like it here.”

“Defense rests,” Matthew said, shrugging.

“You’re a lawyer, Brian tells me,” Gillian said. She smiled slightly, her green eyes catching Matthew’s, holding them in an intense gaze.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“It must be fascinating. The law.”

“It is. I only wish I were practicing it.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I’m something slightly higher than a clerk,” Matthew said, smiling.

“Isn’t that Virginia?”

“Isn’t what Virginia?”

“The accent.”

“I didn’t think it was that obvious.”

“I’m an expert,” Gillian said. “I’ll bet I can pinpoint the town.”

“Go ahead.”

“Say something else. Say ‘I think we should take the ferry to Newport News.’”

“I think we should take the ferry to Newport News.”

“I think we should take the car to New Haven,” Brian said.

“Richmond,” Gillian said.

“Not quite,” Matthew answered, “but pretty close. That’s remarkable. Brian told you, didn’t he?”

“I didn’t say a word,” Brian swore. “She’s uncanny, that’s all. Gilly, do the Russian story, will you?”

“No, not now, Brian. If you live in Virginia, why were you heading for New Haven?”

“Army business,” Matthew said.

“Will you go to the theater there?”

“I hadn’t thought so. Should I?”

“Yes, you should. They’re trying out a wonderful show at the Biltmore. At least, I think it’s still there. It may have already moved to New York. It’s called Sons and Soldiers.”

“A musical?”

“No, no, a straight drama.”

“Who’s in it?”

“Geraldine Fitzgerald plays the woman,” Gillian said. “And there’s a new actor called …” She paused. “Gregory something. I can’t remember. He’s very tall, with dark hair and brooding eyes, and a strong profile.”

“I’ll try to see it,” Matthew said.

“The band’s starting,” Brian said. “Are we getting out of here?”

“Shhh,” Gillian said, “they’re playing our song.” She winked at Amanda and led Brian onto the floor.

“How old is your friend?” Matthew asked.

“Eighteen.” Amanda paused. “Does that make her old enough?”

“Legally, do you mean?”

“However you prefer.”

“I prefer honey blondes who fall out of peach trees. I thought I told you that. I’m going for that drink. Will you come with me?”

“I’m not thirsty,” Amanda said. She hesitated. “But I’ll go with you.”

“Shall we tell them we’re leaving?”

“Why? We’ll be back.”

“Yes, of course,” Matthew said.

He took her arm and led her out of the gym. It was a dark night, almost moonless. They walked slowly toward the car.

“Why’d you ask how old Gillian was?”

“I was curious. She seems older somehow. And yet I knew she was just a kid.”

“How old do you think I am?”

“I don’t know.”

“Guess.”

“Two things I’ll never guess at are a woman’s age or her weight.”

“I’ll give you a hint. I’m finishing my sophomore year.”

“That isn’t a hint at all. You can be a very bright sophomore, and therefore quite young, or else—”

“I am very bright,” Amanda said.

“Yes, and quite young.”

“And how young is quite young?”

“Younger than Gillian,” he said.

“Really? You don’t believe that.”

“No. I know it isn’t true. But you seem much younger than she does.”

“Why is that?”

“Search me. Here’s the car.”

He opened the door on her side. She hesitated.

“Go on,” he said. “Get in.”

“I told you. I don’t want a drink.”

“Get in, anyway. I hate to drink alone.”

“All right,” she said. She got into the car, and he slammed the door behind her. She immediately tucked her skirts around her, but they wouldn’t stay put because of the crinoline petticoats. The door on his side of the car opened, and he slid onto the seat, leaned over, and thumbed open the glove compartment.

“There we are,” he said, reaching for the pint. He unscrewed the cap and held the bottle out to her. “Sure you won’t change your mind?”

“I don’t drink,” she said.

“See what I mean?”

“No. See what you mean about what?”

“Your youth. How old are you anyway, Miranda?”

“Amanda,” she said. “I was twenty just this month.”

“Amanda, of course.” He tilted the bottle to his mouth. “Happy birthday, Amanda.” He took a quick swallow, screwed the cap back on, and put the bottle into the glove compartment, slamming it shut. “There.”

“Is that all you’re going to have?” she asked.

“Isn’t that enough? Did you think I was an alcoholic?”

“Well no, but …”

“Somehow all this undergraduate nonsense gives me the willies. I needed that drink. But I feel perfectly fine now.”

“I’m terribly glad to hear that. I’m sorry our dance seems childish to you,” she said, slightly miffed.

“It does,” Matthew admitted.

“But of course we aren’t experienced citizens of the world who—”

He kissed her suddenly. One arm moved swiftly across the back of the seat, his right hand capturing her right shoulder. His left arm swung over simultaneously, his head was suddenly moving toward hers, his lips found hers, held them, pressed tightly against them. She pushed him away and caught her breath.

“Hey!”

“Hey,” he mimicked.

“I … cut it out.”

“Why?”

“I …” She shrugged. “Just cut it out. Let’s go back.”

“Don’t you like the way I kiss?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t. I’m going back. Are you coming?”

She was in his arms again suddenly, swiftly his mouth descended, she could feel the bristles of his mustache, again she pulled away, and again she had to catch her breath.

“Now … now stop it,” she said.

“Why?”

“I don’t like it, I don’t know you, your mustache, I don’t like it, stop it.”

“No,” he said, and he pulled her to him, and she found herself succumbing to the warmth of his mouth, gentle now, not at all harsh, the warm enclosing embrace of his arms, she felt a sigh murmur through her body, and she turned her face from his and buried it in his shoulder. Weakly, she said, “I don’t think …”

“Neither do I,” he answered, and he kissed her again.

She did not mind the mustache at all, she hardly noticed it any more. He touched her face with his hands, and she murmured gently, his hands were on her throat, his fingers touched the hollow of her throat, his mouth was on her ear, and suddenly his hand dropped, touched the neck of her gown briefly, and then pressed into her flesh beneath the gown, under her bra, she felt her breast caught in his hand, and she tried to sit erect, she felt suddenly violated, felt suddenly as if her body were not her own, felt his mouth on her cheek, felt his lips again, his tongue exploring, his hand tightening on her breast, shocked, she sat shocked, trembling with outrage, his hands on her body, and finally she pushed him away violently and moved to the other side of the car, and said nothing, and opened the door, and got out and then turned, her breast suddenly cold now that his hand was no longer there, she was sure she looked naked, she was certain her breast was exposed so that everyone could see it. She turned, and very coldly said, “Good night, Captain Bridges,” and as she stalked away from the car she heard him say behind her, “Good night, Miranda,” and she was sure there was a smile on his face.

Gillian did not get back to the dormitory room until two o’clock that morning. Amanda was waiting up for her, sitting with the pillows propped behind her, wearing blue cotton pajamas, her blond hair caught with a blue ribbon at the back of her head.

“Hi,” Gillian said.

“Hi.”

Gillian went to her bed and flopped onto it. “I’m pooped.”

She lay silently for close to five minutes until Amanda thought she was asleep. Then she stirred and sat up and took off her high-heeled pumps without touching them with her hands, and then she walked to Amanda’s bed and said, “Unzip me, will you?” She hung limply in the dress while Amanda pulled down the zipper. She threw the blue silk onto the foot of her bed, took off the rest of her clothes, turned out the light, got into bed naked, and pulled the covers to her throat.

“Gillian?” Amanda said.

“Mmmmm?”

“Aren’t you going to ask me anything?”

“About Matthew’s pass, do you mean?”

“Matthew’s …” Amanda’s brow knotted. “How …?” She leaned forward slightly. “Did he … did he tell you?”

“No, I figured it out for myself. Why else would you leave the dance so suddenly?”

“Well, he didn’t really do anything,” Amanda said.

“All right. I’m sleepy, Amanda. We’ll talk about it tomorrow, all right?”

“All right.”

The room was uncommonly dark. The night was almost moonless and the shade was drawn and Amanda sat up in bed and stared into the darkness and saw nothing and felt only a need to discuss this with Gillian, and yet she waited, waited until she was sure Gillian was asleep, and then tentatively she whispered, “Gillian?”

“Mmmm?”

“He said you seemed older.”

“Mmmm.”

“It was really a mistake to go to the dance with him.”

“Mmmm.”

“A soldier, I mean. And twenty-six.”

“Mmmm.”

“Gillian, he kissed me.”

“That’s nice. Amanda, go to sleep.”

“Do you kiss a lot of boys?”

“Yes. Mmm-huh.”

“Do you let them …?” Amanda paused. The room was silent. “Gillian?”

“Mmmm?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

Across the room, lying naked in her bed with the covers pulled to her throat, Gillian suddenly felt all sleepiness leaving her. She listened to her roommate breathing in the darkness, and the room was suddenly very small, and she felt a tenderness wash over her, and at the same time she thought, Oh God, why me, why must I be the one? and she lay in the darkness for several moments longer, breathing evenly and half tempted to pretend she was already asleep, and yet feeling this tense uncertain need coming from across the room and threading its way cautiously through the darkness, and feeling very very old all at once.

“Amanda?” she said.

“Yes?”

“What did he do, honey?”

“He touched me, Gilly. My breast.”

“Were you frightened?”

“Yes.”

“Did you like it?”

“No. I got out of the car.” The room was silent. “Gilly?”

She knew what was coming. She lay in bed staring up at the darkness and she thought, I must be careful, she is so young, I must be very gentle, oh, she is so goddamn young.

“Gilly, do you … Gilly, do you let them? Boys? Touch you?”

Gillian took a deep breath. “Yes, Amanda.”

“All of them?”

“No,” she said. “Not all.”

“But … but you don’t like it, do you?”

Now here we are, she thought, here we are, and how can I tell Amanda that yes, I do like it, how can I tell that to Amanda and hope she will understand it, and not, not, oh God, why did it have to be me, why isn’t her mother here, why aren’t mothers around when you need them most?

“Gilly? Do you like it?”

“Yes, I do.”

“But Gilly, it’s so … so private. I mean, it’s so personal. Gilly, you don’t really like it, do you?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Gilly, Gilly, I feel like crying.”

“No.”

Amanda was suddenly silent. The room was pitch-black.

“I never have, Amanda,” Gillian said.

“I didn’t ask.”

“But I never have.”

“All right.”

“But I will,” Gillian said. “When I want to.”

Again the room was silent. There was something in the silence. Something of youth and of innocence, gone and about to go, something of girls and of women, and a touch of familiar friendship, and a touch of strangeness, and an intimacy bred of this familiar strangeness, so that the two girls in the Connecticut night felt a kinship they would not have known were they truly blood relatives, a kinship bred of the lonely dark hours of the night and the silence of the room and the tiny sound of evenly spaced breathing. For those moments in the silent room, they were closer than sisters, closer than mother and daughter, and they heard each other without speaking.

After a long while, Gillian sighed and said, “I think I’m going to leave Talmadge, Amanda.”

“What? What did you say?”

“Talmadge. I don’t think I’ll be back in the fall. I’m not getting enough here. I’m too far ahead of them.”

“It’s a wonderful school. You can’t mean—”

“It’s only a school, Amanda. It’s only make-believe. There’s too much to do in the real world.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’m not sure I know what I mean myself. I just have a feeling that I’ve learned everything I can learn here, that this is no closer to the theater, the real theater, than … than … Siberia is, I guess. And I haven’t got much time. I really haven’t. I can’t afford to waste any of it here with a bunch of silly kids who are only doing make-believe stuff. Don’t you feel that way, Amanda?”

“No, I … I never thought of it that way.”

“Because there’s so much out there, Amanda, do you know what I mean? Don’t you ever get the feeling that there’s so much out there to do and to see and to know? Amanda, don’t you ever pass an apartment building and look at all the lighted windows and wonder who lives up there, and sometimes feel so sad that you don’t know them, that you’ll never know them? Amanda, I could cry when I think of all the people there are in this world that I’ll never get to know. In Talmadge alone, for God’s sake, in New York millions of people rushing along the streets, busy, busy, with their own worlds, and I’ll never even know them well enough to say hello, or even to smile as I pass them. And then I think of China, and I wonder how it is to be Chinese, and I wish I could speak Chinese and Italian and Russian, and I wish I could read all the books there are, and listen to all the music, and know all the people, walk down the street and say hello to everybody, just hug everybody as if they were part of my family and I’m very glad to see them, we haven’t seen each other in a very long time, and we have all sorts of things to tell to each other, and we’re not strangers the way everybody is—don’t you feel that, Amanda? Don’t you want to know people?”

“No. No, I’ve never—”

“Never, Amanda? Never?”

“But, Gillian, you can’t know everyone. You can’t expect to.”

“No, I know, I know. I can’t do that. But that’s why … don’t you see, Amanda? I just … I think of somebody out there who is like me and who I will never meet. And it makes me sad. He’s out there, and I don’t know who he is, and I’ll never get to know him, and I just feel that if we knew each other, if we got to know each other, we could be so rich, don’t you ever feel that way? I know it’s silly, but I know he’s there, maybe he’s a Frenchman or something, and maybe I’ll pass him on the street and we won’t even say hello or smile, we just won’t know each other, and he’ll be the person, he’ll be the one, Amanda, the one person I really should know. I get scared when I think of it. I get absolutely terrified. Suppose I should live out my life, and I die, and I never get to know this other person who is also living out his life, and he’ll die, too, and we’ll never have known each other, never.”

“But why do you have to leave school, Gillian?” Amanda said. “I don’t understand that. I don’t see how leaving—”

“I’ve just got to get out of this fake place and stop pretending to be an actress. Don’t you see how that can fool you, Amanda? Don’t you see how all those dopes on the college newspaper think they’re big-shot reporters or columnists when all they’re doing is writing drivel that’s fake and not anything that has any worth by the standards of the real world? Amanda, nobody cares what’s happening in college. It isn’t real. It just isn’t real.”

“What makes you think the world is?” Amanda asked.

“I know it is.”

“How do you know?”

“I know. Nobody’s kidding out there. Out there you work, and you eat, and you live. I want to live. Amanda, I think I … Amanda, don’t you feel very important?”

“What do you mean?”

“Important. Just important being alive and being a girl … a woman? I … Amanda, I think that’s very important, being a woman. I mean, I know you got offended when Matthew touched you tonight. Well, I don’t feel that way, I feel quite flattered, I feel so good when I’m desired. I like being the way I am, and I like to think that someone wants to touch me, that it’s exciting for a man to touch me because I’m a woman. I enjoy everything about being a woman, Amanda. And I think it’s important. That’s why I have to get away from this trivial little-girl stuff, to get out there and see what’s happening and know what’s happening and to … to live because that’s what being a woman is. Because … Amanda, I want to have babies. I want to have dozens of babies. I want to meet that person I don’t know yet, oh I wish I meet him, I wish he doesn’t pass me by and not know me, I want to have dozens of his babies. And when I meet him, I really want to be a woman, I want to have reached the point when I come to him where I really am a woman, where everything he ever thought of as womanly is me, and, Amanda, I’ll bring all this to him and we’ll be so rich because he’ll be bringing to me everything that’s a man.”

Gillian paused.

“I have to leave Talmadge,” she said very softly.

“I see.”

“There’s so much to do.”

“Yes.”

“This is May,” she said. “And then there’ll be June, and the semester will be over.” She paused. “I won’t be coming back.”

“Yes.”

“Amanda, don’t … don’t be so afraid. Don’t be so afraid of life.”

“Yes, Gillian.”

The room was silent.

“Good night, dear,” Gillian said. “I’m very sleepy.”

“Good night, Gillian.” Amanda paused. Almost inaudibly, she said, “I’ll miss you.”

The town of Talmadge, Connecticut, became a different sort of town during the summer months, and Julia Regan—who hated the town anyway—hated it more during that loathsome hiatus. The change never really occurred until after final examinations were over at the university and the students began leaving for their homes. It was then that the town settled into its colonial stupor and became a lazy sort of fly-buzzing town, with giant maples spreading dappled sunshine on the wide walks of the main street, the twin steeples of the First Congregational Church dominating the hill and the town, white against blue, and far in the distance the walled and dormant university. The townspeople were really quite proud of the university, and yet they sighed a deep sigh of relief whenever June rolled around and they could reclaim the town for themselves and watch the slow lethargic change that came over it. Actually, the change began with Memorial Day, or at least the beginnings of the change began then. For it was then that the town began reminding itself of its history and its rural character, then that it began tentatively shrugging off the label of “university town,” a label that, unfortunately, put the emphasis on the first word. And since Memorial Day each year became the unofficial day of the beginning of the metamorphosis, it was Memorial Day that Julia Regan came to loathe as a symbol of all that was decadent and stultifying in Talmadge.

On that Memorial Day in 1943, she stood in the school courtyard with her friends and neighbors and watched the preparations for the annual parade to the town hall. There were three fire engines lined up in the schoolyard, side by side. The hood of each complicated-looking machine carried the gold lettering TALMADGE, CONN., FIRE DEPARTMENT, and the brilliant engines only made the sun seem more intense. They had been polished especially for the parade, and all that gleaming brass and red-hot enamel glowed in the noonday sun, reflecting dizzying bursts of brilliance, which were giving Julia a headache.

The Talmadge Volunteer Fire Department, a group composed of ninety-per-cent hick townie and ten-per-cent Madison Avenue commuter, a fraternal group who never attended the same Talmadge parties together but who were expected nonetheless to extinguish fires with great communal camaraderie, stood about in the schoolyard in their dress blue uniforms looking ill-fitted and ill at ease, and possibly hoping that a sudden fire alarm would put an end to their discomfort. Julia Regan, leaning against the wall with her secrets churning inside her head, watched a totally inept pack of cub scouts marching back and forth before the red-and-gold engines in blue-and-yellow slovenliness. The scout leader had graying temples, and his uniform was too tight, and he shouted orders like a martinet, and Julia wished he would hush, and she wondered for perhaps the fiftieth time why she bothered to attend these false town functions in this false-front town. She leaned against the shaded brick of the school building, a woman of thirty-nine, her long brown hair braided into a bun at the back of her neck, her eyes closed as she listened to the “Hup-tup-tripp-fuh” of the troop leader and heard the chaotic cadence of the eager cub scouts and thought, He is dead.

“Hello, Mrs. Regan,” the voice beside her said, and she opened her eyes, smiling automatically even before she knew who was speaking.

“Looks like it’s going to be a good parade,” Ardis Fletcher said.

“Yes,” Julia answered. “It does indeed.” She smiled limply. It was a smile reserved for women, a smile that tried to convey a fragility in direct contradiction to her physical structure. She was a tall, slender woman with a strong and beautiful profile, and the smile she turned on her female friends was one that better suited her sister, Millie. And yet the attempt was not unsuccessful. Despite the big-boned evidence of her body, Julia was thought of by the women of Talmadge as delicate and gentle, if a bit spirited. The men of Talmadge looked at Julia somewhat differently. She had learned very early in life that it was not necessary for a woman to be readily accessible to all men so long as she gave an impression of accessibility. The smile she flashed to men held the possibility of intimacy, promised an arduous and passionate woman if only one could reach her, a mysterious lingering smile with more than a touch of sensuality in it, and yet the smile of a lady. And so, to her credit, the men of Talmadge looked upon her as a good-looking widow—spirited, to be sure—who could possibly, just possibly, and only with the most infinite delicacy and patience, be had. The smile she turned on Ardis Fletcher was her woman-smile, but it was wasted on Ardis, who at nineteen was concerned with nothing more subtle than the shape of her own body, which was about as subtle as a tornado. If anything, Ardis with her bright-red hair and sparkling blue eyes, her short skirt and contour-hugging sweater, supplemented the dazzling splendor of the fire engines and the cub scouts and the school band, which had lined up beside the fire engines in a glittering display of tuba and cornet and trombone.

“Have you heard from Davey?” Ardis asked, and Julia flinched at her use of the diminutive in referring to her son, and noticed too that Ardis did not look at any woman she spoke to; her eyes instead wandered over the eligible male members of the holiday crowd, and one of Julia’s secrets caught in her throat, the fact that her only son David was not in the Pacific any longer but was instead in the Naval prison at San Diego, California. A convict. Her David was a convict.

“Yes,” she answered in her low, steady voice. “I got a letter only yesterday. He’s doing fine.”

“I haven’t heard from him lately,” Ardis said. She pulled down on her sweater, apparently feeling it wasn’t quite revealing enough the way it was. “Don’t you think that’s kind of funny?”

“Does he usually write to you often?” Julia asked.

“Mrs. Regan, all the boys write to me often,” Ardis answered, and she smiled suddenly, taking Julia into her confidence with that single gleaming burst of enamel, allowing her to join the sorority of worldly women, an honor Julia didn’t particularly desire on that hot day at the end of May.

“Well, David’s been busy,” Julia lied. “His ship is on a secret mission.” A secret mission, she thought. My entire life has been a secret mission.

“Oh, how exciting!” Ardis said. “Doing what? Is it the invasion? Are they going to invade Japan?”

“Dear, he wouldn’t even tell me,” Julia said gently. “His own mother.”

“But you have been getting mail from him?”

“Oh, yes. I told you. I got a letter only yesterday.” And another letter the day before that, but not from David, another letter, he is dead, egli é morto. Memorial Day. A day for memories, a golden day, and my son’s harlot stands here in the hot sun and wiggles like a chorus queen, what secrets does she hold in that empty head of hers? How many men and boys have known the loveless white thighs of Ardis Fletcher, were you the first for him, Ardis?

“Tell him to write to me, will you? He’s kind of cute.”

“I will. And thank you, Ardis.”

“Sure,” Ardis said, and she swiveled off in an elaborate synchronization of hip and thigh and leg, and Julia could not resist shaking her head in slight displeasure. Still, she supposed they had to learn somewhere. She supposed there was an Ardis Fletcher in every town in America, on every city street, a vast auxiliary army of willing young ladies who performed initiation rites on the back seats of automobiles, in vestibules, on living-room couches, on grass as green as green as her skirt she stained her skirt that day the white skirt with the pleats the sun was so hot and her skirt became wrinkled and stained with grass his hand under her skirt one thick brown hand rubbing at the stain and the other hand beneath her skirt the knuckles pressing hard against her thigh she had stained her skirt and she twitched with new desire he could smell in the golden hot sunshine he kissed her again.

The festivities were about to start, she saw. The fire engines had revved their motors impressively, and the fraternal smoke-eaters had lined up behind the engines, ready to eat carbon monoxide if nothing else. The cub scouts stood at the ready, waiting for the signal to “Fuhhut motch!” The brownies stood by, two by two, little girls, she thought, daughters, she thought, ready to walk down the town’s back road to the town hall where a retired navy commander would give a speech, after which the local American Legion troop would fire a twelve-gun salute, and Taps would be played by the town’s best bugler, the town’s second-best bugler playing the echo from behind the school building.

“Come on,” someone shouted, and she turned her head and looked across the road to where an old Ford was parked, a boy in a hooded Mackinaw sitting behind the wheel, a girl leaning out the window, her blond hair hanging over one eye, waving her hand. “Gillian, come on! They’re about to start! We’ll miss it, Gillian!”

She turned as the girl called Gillian moved away from the fire engines and broke into a girlish run across the schoolyard, a slender girl in sweater and skirt, her russet hair bobbing at the back of her neck, a curiously satisfied grin on her mouth. “I’m coming, Amanda,” she shouted to the parked Ford, running past the ranked town band, and then onto the macadam road where summer sat suddenly still and golden.

A butterfly touched Julia’s wrist.

She glanced at it, and then she heard the girl named Gillian say to the other college youngsters in the Ford, “I’d never seen a fire engine up close before,” and she turned again to look at the girl as she got into the car, and she thought, She moves with such grace, she is so lovely, and then the band began playing “Be Kind to Your Web-footed Friends.” Julia hastily found a seat on the grassy bank lining the road, and the parade started with the fire engines creeping at a snail’s pace up the sticky road, followed by the stiff-backed and proud volunteers, and then the martinet leaning into an imaginary head wind and the cubs marching behind him with the vigor of ignorant stragglers. The brownies, buttressed by three firm-busted matrons, nodded at Julia as they filed past proudly, and then the town band wearing blue and white, trousers and shirts, blouses and skirts, blowing their horns and pounding their drums, and the townspeople crowding and shouting and cheering, and the girl Gillian leaning out of the back window of the Ford across the road, her eyes bright, her face aglow with a secret delight, secrets, Julia thought, secrets, I shall have to do something, of course, now I shall have to do something, I will see someone tomorrow, of course I will have to do something. The parade had passed, the parade was over. The Ford coughed itself into life and began driving toward the town hall, and the people of Talmadge, Connecticut, got off the banks and brushed their trousers and their skirts and began trudging up the hill behind the distant music of the school band, like a band of guerrillas carting a cannon across Spain.

The retired navy commander was in the middle of his speech by the time Julia reached the town hall. She wondered briefly if her son had struck a commander, I think we should wait a while, Mother, before telling anyone I’m back in the States, his letter had read, and then simply say I’ve been assigned to the shore patrol here at Camp Elliott. I think that would be best, don’t you? Why did trouble always come in batches, she wondered, and of course she would have to do something now, she couldn’t simply, no she had to do something, tomorrow, she would take care of it tomorrow. She joined the Talmadge townsfolk and the Talmadge commuters who stood around in slacks and sunglasses and made faces indicating they were above all this patriotic and sentimental corn, and at the same time made complimentary and contradictory faces that indicated they relished all this corn and sentimentality, the nation being in the grip of a war for democracy, or whatever they were calling it this time, egli é morto. Julia bent her head and sat on the rock near the giant oak, the rock carrying a plaque that explained that Hessian forces had been driven from Talmadge, Connecticut, in 1779 by the Continental Army, and that the parish house had been burned by the retreating British. She heard the buzz of something in the new green grass and saw her first bee of summer and was then aware of the girl Gillian leaning against the tree and listening intently to the words of the retired navy commander, her arms folded across her white sweater.

The American Legion rifles went off, and then the town’s best bugler played Taps while the smoke from the rifles drifted across the town hall lawn, and then the echoing chorus came from behind the school building and someone jokingly whispered that next year they were going to have an echo of the echo with the third bugler stashed away in the hills of the next town, and Julia saw the girl Gillian frown momentarily and turn to shush the jokester. She kept her eyes on the girl. The distant notes of the second bugle hung like the rifle smoke on the sticky noonday air, faltering, unclear, magnified somehow by the heat, and magnifying it in turn, reminding everyone that summer was truly about to start. She looked at the girl Gillian and saw a thin sheen of perspiration on her upper lip. The girl was listening to the notes coming from the second bugle hidden behind the old school-house, listening with her head bent in silent thought, and then she lifted her right hand quite casually and brushed it gently across her lip, and suddenly Julia Regan wanted to weep.

And she knew this moment would be captured for her forever, encased in a permanent indestructible bubble of time, the sound of the bugle echoing on the still and silent air, the thin sheen of perspiration on the young girl’s lip, her head bent in rapt silence as she listened, and her slender hand coming up casually, unconsciously, in a gesture that seemed so very familiar to Julia, a gesture that somehow recalled for her in a sweet rush of painful memory her youth, her youth, and she watched the girl Gillian until the moment was gone and there remained on the rock with its historic plaque only the thirty-nine-year-old woman named Julia Regan whose life had been secret after secret after secret in the golden sunshine, and then the echo died.

Oh, the summer went by somehow. Somehow the summer went by as all summers do, in fat and lazy reticence. Although they were dying on the beaches in the Pacific and there was sugar and gasoline rationing and it was difficult to get new tires for old cars, the summer of 1943 went by. Summer storms came and went with sudden fury, and people read the newspapers anxiously to see how our boys were doing, and there was a change in the physical face of America, uniforms everywhere. In Norfolk, Virginia, it was difficult to see anything but white hats bobbing down the main street on any afternoon after three-thirty, and the Army Air Corps took over a great many Miami Beach hotels, and 4-F became an expression that could cause fist fights in bars. But somehow the summer went by, and somehow there were still relics of peace, and somehow the war seemed very distant.

On the beaches of America, the record players spun all the popular songs, “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me,” and “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old,” and “Mairzy Doats,” and kids lay on the sand in sun-tanned splendor, clean young bodies and clean white teeth and straight legs, and hummed to the whirl of the records and twisted straws in empty Coca-Cola bottles and listened to the distant rush of water against sand, and the war was very far away. Somehow the amusement parks managed to keep their Ferris wheels spinning, and there was black-market gas to be had, and butchers got richer and fatter selling black-market meat to favored customers. Every now and then, someone was startled to see a gold star in the window of a neighbor, or shocked to learn that an American transport had gone down with all hands and the son of a neighbor or relative was aboard. But the church socials went on, and the dancing continued, and girls and boys alike wore their hair in pompadours, and the Windsor knot came into popularity, and skirts were shorter, and perhaps morals were too, some of the war wives were whooping it up in a fling at second childhood with the teen-agers whose attitude was Kiss Me My Sweet, and a burlesque revue assembled by Mike Todd and called Star and Garter was still knocking them dead on Broadway. Somehow the summer went. War wasn’t all that much hell after all. War to Americans, in fact, war to the Americans at home—who waited for letters scrawled from muddy Sicilian ditches by men who crawled with lice, by men who huddled together while Stuka bombers screeched out of the sky and tanks loomed on the horizon—was kind of exciting.

There were motion pictures like The Watch on the Rhine, which made everybody hate those dirty Nazi bastards, and This Is the Army, which made everybody love our patriotic boys, and Casablanca, which made everybody love a song called “As Time Goes By,” and people were watching time go by, laughing it up and drinking it up and loving it up, strange girls in strange towns met strange soldiers, and generally everything was a little looser and a little more frantic. War in fact, well war, to get right down to rock bottom, to get right down to the core of human reaction, to get right down under all that patriotic folderol and all that war-is-indecent and inglorious and disgusting, and nobody wants all this senseless maiming and killing, war when all was said and done was downright fun.

And somehow the summer went by.

“She’s screaming again,” Penny said. “I can’t stand her when she screams.”

The baby’s cries came from the open second-story window of the frame house in Otter Falls. Penny, sitting with her mother and her sister, put her hands over her ears and said, “Mother, make her stop.”

“It won’t hurt her to cry a bit,” Priscilla Soames said. “She has to learn sooner or later that she won’t be picked up every time she—”

“Mother, make her stop!” Penny said sharply, and Amanda, sitting on the porch steps, turned to look up at her sister.

“I’ll go,” she said.

“No!” Priscilla said. “Stay where you are, Amanda.”

“Why does she have to cry?” Penny asked, and Amanda continued to stare at her, and she suddenly wondered when Penny had stopped being her sister, when she had become only a somewhat thin and gaunt stranger who complained about her baby constantly, who never confided in Amanda at all any more, who seemed to roam the old wooden house in a silent angry world of her own. “What right does she have to cry? I’m the one who should be crying. I’m the one!”

“Penny …”

“Make her stop, Mother.”

“Penny, if you’d just—”

“I’m leaving. I’m going to town. I can’t sit here and listen to her scream all day long.”

“Penny, I’ll pick her up,” Amanda said gently, and she rose from where she was sitting, and again Priscilla said sharply, “Stay where you are, Amanda!”

Amanda sat and looked up toward the second-story window. Penny rose swiftly and slapped her own thigh, a curious gesture that seemed to start as a simple flattening of her skirt, but which became exaggerated in the execution, ending as a vicious slap that sounded flat and hard on the summer air. In the church, Amanda’s father began playing the organ, and Amanda became aware of the clicking of her mother’s knitting needles, like a meticulous metronome beating out a steady rhythm for the organ notes that floated fat and round across the lawn and the high shrill cries of the baby upstairs.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” Penny said, and she bounded down the steps, and Amanda watched her walk purposefully across the lawn and into the garage. She heard the old Chevy starting and then saw Penny back the car out of the garage and down the driveway, her long blond hair streaming over her shoulders. The car pulled away from the house. The sound of its engine faded, leaving only the sounds of Kate, and the organ, and the knitting needles clicking. And then the baby fell silent, whimpering herself into stillness. The organ notes rolled from the church. The knitting needles continued their steady subdued clatter. Priscilla Soames rocked herself back and forth in the rocker, and Amanda sat on the porch steps, her hands clasped around one knee.

Priscilla did not look at the needles or the brown sweater she was knitting for the Red Cross. She looked out over the lawn instead, and at the blue jays that darted in the branches of the old maple. When Amanda recalled the scene later, she would remember that her mother’s face had remained expressionless throughout the entire discussion, and then she tried to remember when she had ever seen any expression on her mother’s face, and she could not remember a single time. The face was always placid, always in strong repose. She wondered once—many years later when she was already married—whether her mother’s face remained calm and expressionless even in orgasm, and then of course she wondered whether her mother had ever experienced orgasm, and then she realized this was all part of the unconscious resentment she had nurtured that day on the porch in Otter Falls, the knitting needles clicking, the organ notes trembling over the grass.

Her mother’s hair was blond, touched with strands of white. Her face was long and thin, her eyes blue. They followed the darting motion of the jays unflickeringly, emotionlessly.

“You’ll be going back to school soon, Amanda,” she said. Her voice was flat, as flat as the Midwest plains that had bred her.

“Yes,” Amanda answered. She heard her father’s fingers falter on a difficult passage, and she smiled and thought, No, Dad, that’s a B-flat, and she tilted her face to the sun, happy that Kate had stopped crying, wondering where Penny had gone and how soon she would return.

“This is your junior year, isn’t it, Amanda?”

“Yes,” Amanda said.

“What do you expect to do, daughter?”

“What?”

“What do you expect to do?”

“I don’t understand.”

“With your life.”

“Oh, I …” Amanda paused. She had never once thought of what she expected to do with her life. She had always considered it a foregone conclusion that she would write music. Somewhat inspired by Gillian’s enthusiasm, she rather imagined she would eventually end up writing musical comedy for Broadway. But she had never given it any definite thought, had never sat down to ask herself what she would do when she was graduated from Talmadge. In her mind’s eye, she imagined things would simply happen to her without any conscious direction or will. She would leave Talmadge eventually, and things would simply happen. She turned to look at her mother, but Priscilla’s eyes were still on the frolicking jays.

“I guess I’ll write music,” she said.

“I see,” Priscilla answered.

“I thought you knew that.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well …” Again Amanda paused. “That’s what I’m studying, you know. Composition.”

“Oh, yes, I know that,” Priscilla said.

“Well …” Amanda frowned. “Well, that’s why I’m studying it. So I can write music.” She hesitated because she didn’t wish to seem solicitous, and yet she suddenly felt that perhaps she’d overestimated her mother’s intelligence. Perhaps her mother truly did not understand what she meant; perhaps it needed translation. “Composition is writing music, you know,” she said hesitantly.

“Yes, I know,” Priscilla said. She dropped a stitch, and her eyes moved momentarily from the jays as her hands recovered the stitch, and then shifted back to the maple again.

“Well,” Amanda said, and she shrugged, but the frown remained on her forehead. She listened to the annoying click of the knitting needles, and she suddenly wished that Gillian were there with her to explain to her mother, to tell her about seeing things and doing things, the way she had done that night several months ago. And yet she knew Gillian could not help her now, Gillian was out of her life, they had said their goodbyes at the end of June, she probably would never see Gillian again as long as she lived. She sat in silence and she thought, Well, what did you think I was going to do with my life? I’m going to write music, what did you think? Why do you suppose I’m going to school?

“What kind of music did you plan to write?” Priscilla asked, as if she had read her mind.

“You know.” Amanda shrugged.

“Serious music? Like Bach? Or Beethoven? Like that?”

“Well, nothing that ambitious, I guess,” Amanda said and she shrugged again.

“Then what sort, Amanda?”

“I thought … maybe musical comedy.”

“I see. For the stage, do you mean?”

“Yes. That’s right. For the stage.”

“I see.”

Again the knitting needles clicked, filling the silence of summer.

“Amanda,” her mother said simply, “what makes you think you have any talent?”

She wasn’t quite sure she had heard her mother correctly; it sounded as if her mother had said …

“What?” she asked.

“What makes you think you have any talent?” her mother repeated.

“I … I don’t know.” She paused. “I got into Talmadge, didn’t I? And I …”

“Yes, of course you did, darling. You play piano beautifully.”

“Well, then …”

“Do you have the talent, Amanda?”

“Mother, I don’t think I understand you,” Amanda said, hearing the infuriating words reverberating inside her head, and wondering why they infuriated her so, but sitting tightly controlled on the front porch as her mother’s chair rocked back and forth and the jays chattered in the maple and the knitting needles clacked like subdued machine-gun fire.

“You play piano beautifully,” Priscilla said, “and it’s wonderful for a young girl to get an education at a fine school like Talmadge, but if you don’t mind my saying so, Amanda, I’m being perfectly frank with you, dear, the way only a mother can be frank with her daughter, I really don’t think you’re a genius or anything, do you?”

“Well, no, I … I guess I don’t. But …”

“And it does seem a little presumptuous to me … not impossible, mind you, but a little presumptuous for a young girl to consider … I just wonder, Amanda, if you have the talent necessary for something like that, that’s all, dear. I simply wonder about it. And naturally, I’m concerned, because I wouldn’t want to see you wasting your life in pursuit of something elusive. Or, more than elusive, impossible. Though I’m not saying it is impossible. I’m just concerned, that’s all, Amanda. I was hoping you’d meet a nice boy and—”

“Yes, but I’m studying composition,” Amanda said, somewhat dazed.

“Yes, I know, dear.”

“Don’t you see? That’s so I can—”

“Yes, I know, dear, and you’ll find your education wasn’t wasted. I can assure you of that. Any husband would be delighted to have a wife who can—”

“But, Mother, I’m studying so I can—”

“I think you should ask yourself, Amanda, if you have the talent.”

“I …”

“You’re old enough now to be frank with yourself, daughter.”

Amanda nodded and said nothing.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Priscilla asked.

“Yes,” Amanda answered. There was an edge of sharpness to her voice. Priscilla’s eyes suddenly moved from the jays and rested on her daughter.

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad you understand.”

“Yes,” Amanda said. “I understand.”

They stared at each other and Amanda thought, I’m going to hit her, and then instantly thought, God forgive me, and lowered her eyes. Inside the house, the baby began crying again.

“It’s Katherine,” Priscilla said. “She’s awake again.”

“I’ll pick her up,” Amanda said, and she rose from the steps and smoothed her skirt and started for the front door.

“No,” Priscilla said. “Leave her be.”

“I’ll pick her up,” Amanda said without looking back at her mother. The screen door clattered shut behind her. She went through the cool dim house and upstairs to Penny’s bedroom. Kate was sitting in the middle of her crib, bawling loudly, her face red, her cheeks stained with tears.

“Oh, what’s the matter, snookums?” Amanda said, and she held out her arms and picked up the child and put her over her shoulder. “Do you have a little gas, honey? Is that what’s the matter? Here, baby. That’s a good baby. That’s a sweet honey-child. See? All gone now. No more crying, all right? That’s a good honey.” She rubbed the palm of her hand gently on the baby’s back, holding her blond head cradled against her own and thinking, Do I have the talent? and hating her mother for making her wonder about it, and then shrugging the hatred aside and thinking, Mother only means well. “There, that’s a good baby. Come on now, smile for your Aunt Mandy, give your Aunt Mandy a great big smile, there you are, that’s my baby, oh that’s my sweet baby.” And she suddenly hugged Kate to her fiercely, wondering again, Do I have the talent?

She wondered about it for the remainder of the summer. And at last she decided her mother was right. She played piano beautifully, yes, and she had done a few compositions of which she was very proud, but that didn’t necessarily indicate she had any of the real requisites for a career in music. Wasn’t that what Gillian had meant that night? About the falseness of college and the standards of the real world? Wasn’t her mother simply repeating what Gillian had said? And yet, if Gillian had been there, if she could have discussed this with Gillian, she was sure … but of course they both meant the same thing. And of course, she did not have the talent, she simply did not have the real talent.

She faced the knowledge, and somehow the summer went by. She supposed she was relieved. It was good not to have to wonder about something like that. And yet, oh and yet if her mother had only said something other than what she’d said, that was the part that hurt, oh if only her mother had said, Amanda darling go write your music, go write your beautiful music, oh if only her mother had said that, and yet it was good to know, good to have the uncertainty gone if only the other thing wasn’t gone, too. She did not know what the other thing was. It had something to do with her mother’s not wanting anyone to pick up Kate when she was crying, and it had something to do with that deadly awful clicking of the knitting needles, and the way her mother had said, “What do you expect to do, daughter?”—not using her name, not saying “Amanda,” but saying “daughter” instead, and by using that word somehow denying the relationship.

She faced her life. She looked ahead and she faced her life, knowing that something was gone now, something was missing, but facing it nonetheless with a weary sort of sad hurt inside her, looking forward to her return to Talmadge, but not the way she usually anticipated the beginning of school, not with that same rush of excitement she had known even when she was a little girl buying a pencil box and a stiff-backed composition book in the local store, not with that same excitement that seemed to vibrate in the very air of autumn. Something was gone, and she could not escape the knowledge that her own mother had taken it from her, had stolen it from her.

Somehow, the summer went by.