FIRST, LET ME tell you about Austin, then Prudence. (I got an answer, from Italy! She accepted.) But Austin, poor Austin. He’s decided to commit himself, informally, to a nuthouse. In a nuthouse he will be safe. If a patient detects and reports him, the patient won’t be believed. Also in a nuthouse Austin can indulge in some much-needed—you should pardon the expression—social intercourse. Besides staff quarters there are three main buildings at the nuthouse, Administration, Men’s, and Women’s. Which will Austin pick? Is it a question? Which would you pick, old man, if you suffered from—or, let’s say, were graced by—Austin’s condition. Exactly. And the accommodations there were decorous, considering the function they performed. Each patient had her own room. As he ascended the five floors, Austin noticed that the inmates became more bizarre and their appointments more prison-like. The bottom floor looked like the YWCA, whereas on the top floor the windows were barred and the walls padded. There were about one hundred and fifty patients in all, and it was on the third floor—in the middle of the madness, so to speak—that Austin found a friend. She was Greek, he decided, because of her large dark eyes and olive skin and black hair and, O yes, because on the door of her room was a name card reading Electra Papas. What an evocative combination of the classic and the modern! Electra Papas, a name to conjure incest as well as fried clams and apple pie. The instant he saw her he knew that she was special, because, although her back was toward him and she was combing her long black hair in front of a mirror, she was naked. On the first floor you would not see such innocent abandon. Nor on the fifth, where ladies given to disrobing were encased in buttonless smocks sewed securely twixt the nether limbs. Only on the third, the mediocritas aurea, might one find an Electra Papas languidly combing her dark locks naked. Needless to say, Austin stood in the doorway entranced. Shortly, however, a nurse passing by looked in and tsked her tongue at Electra. Like any good obedient third-floor patient Electra scurried to the bed, where her clothes were neatly folded. On they went, while the indulgent nurse stood smiling, shaking her head in amusement. When the last button was buttoned, the nurse nodded approvingly and went her way. Immediately Electra removed her clothes and returned to comb and mirror. She seemed to be humming some strange exotic tune as she stroked her hair. Austin listened. Ah, it was an off-key rendition of I’m in the Mood for Love. He was ravished. Stealthily he crept up behind her. She feels his body heat on her bare back. Without turning, but peering into the mirror, she says, Henry, is that you? Henry, Henry, where have you been? Henry, are you going to stand there like a fool, or are you going to bend over like a nice man and bite me on the shoulder? She pointed with her right hand to a spot on her left shoulder. Austin bent over, bit, was suffused with pleasure, and came. I don’t know if I should make him come here or not. What do you think? It’s just that it’s such a yummy situation, and it would be unreasonable to expect him to perform at length and with assurance first crack in the sack. I mean, isn’t it better for him to throw one away and start with a clean slate? All right, he comes. Now I was thinking of a comic bit here where after coming on her bare back he scurries around for a towel as if he had spilt tea on the couch. It would screw the mood, though, wouldn’t it? Yeah, so just in time he swivels to one side and ejaculates out the open window. An image of thousands of his selves falling three stories to the grounds of an insane asylum flashes through his head. He is oddly pleased. She turns around and rises, puts her arms about his neck. Henry, Henry, she says. He eases her over to the bed and lays her down. Instantly she is ready, she is precooked. Once he lays her, twice, thrice, fource. Henry, she says, Henry, ooo, ah-h-h, oh-h-h, Henry-y-y-y-y. Comes? She comes and comes. Wildly. Her appreciation is so vocal that the nurse returns. Electra, the nurse shouts, seeing the patient spread-eagle on the bed, which, by the way, is wet with enthusiasm. Austin tumbles off, moves out of harm’s way. Electra clutches hungrily at the air. Doctor, doctor, the nurse calls. Running footsteps, and a young white-frocked male, stethoscope hanging limply from his jacket pocket, appears in the doorway. Anxiously he looks from nurse to patient, while Austin views the scene dispassionately. Although the young doctor means business, the nurse can see in the subtle involuntary movement of his eyes that the business is only ninety-nine per cent medicine, because here on the bed is Electra Papas moaning for her fled lover. O, she is saying, O Henry, Henry, Henry. Austin observes a rare reversal of roles. The nurse takes charge, she is one hundred per cent medicine. She needs the doctor’s help to bring Miss Papas out of sexual hysteria, she also must guard Miss Papas, and the doctor too, from the forces of nature. Luckily Electra is squirming so that the nurse has no difficulty extracting a sheet from beneath her and covering her with it. Frantically Electra undulates beneath the sheet. Well, finally the doctor pulls himself together—isn’t that a great phrase, it means releasing the superego to extinguish the id—and says Restrain her, nurse, I’ll get a syringe. The doctor disappears. Running footsteps down the hall. Soon he is back, ejaculates a cc or two of colorless liquid into the air to guard against air bubbles and plunges the easing tool into the lady’s, of all places, arm. Electra’s writhings lessen, there is a final jerk, a final sighing moan, and peace overcomes her. Once again the doctor pulls himself together. You’ll take care of her, nurse, the doctor says authoritatively. Of course, doctor. I’ll be in my office, if you need me, nurse. Yes, doctor. And Austin watches as the nurse uncovers Electra, corpse-like now, wets a cloth and wipes the sweat or whatever from Electra’s thighs. The nurse shakes her head in wonderment at the ingenuity of the female body, which in the intensity of its delusion apparently can generate a sperm-like substance. She even rubs a bit between her fingers, marveling. Hey, man, how about that? We gonna sell that to the Reader’s Digest Book Club? And I’ve got an idea for the next chapter even wilder. In the Men’s Building. Watch out. The letter from Prudence said: I am in Italy answering some questions for myself, not the ones I was brought here to answer, but some. Mother apparently thought that here I could make a better decision about having the baby. I didn’t tell her, but I want you to know that I made up my mind before your letter arrived. In fact I made it up before I left the States. I made up my mind the moment I found out. I will have the baby, of course. I don’t think it really cares about the circumstances of its conception, and since I’ve always tried to honor the feelings of others in the small details of living I will continue to honor them in the fact of living. That’s the Catholic viewpoint humanly reduced, isn’t it? Well, as I told you, Rome has large wisdoms for a Protestant like me. I don’t really know why Mother brought me to Italy to make up my mind. She hasn’t shown me her own feelings about having the baby. Maybe she doesn’t have any. I suspect she doesn’t and that she merely wants me to be in a place where human beings are most themselves, so that I won’t be pushed to a decision by the influences that operate in one’s own territory. France or Spain or England would have done as well, I think. But maybe Italy is special. First of all, there’s the sun, which rules everything. Since we’ve been here it has rained only once, and then torrentially on an afternoon at four o’clock. After half an hour it stopped, as if God, knowing that the land needed water, provided it as quickly as possibly so as not to disturb anyone’s vacation. By evening the streets were dry and we went to the Baths of Caracalla to hear an off-season production of Tosca. I giggled through the whole first act and embarrassed Mother and my sister Billy, who took the thing so seriously. I love Rome. I’ve been to Milan and Venice and Florence, and south as far as Naples, but nothing compares to Rome. Mother found a wonderful hotel this time. I’ve met only one American here, an intense and anti-American young American who keeps telling me about the important work he is doing back in the States on Heidegger and how the Thomists in the college where he teaches are trying to get him fired because of it. He’s a former divinity student with the most attractive scar on his cheek, which he keeps rubbing, and I think he’s sweet on me. Little does he know what evil lurks in the thommies of women. About your letter. I hope you called my house and learned from my aunt—who is the lady you spoke to, if you spoke to anyone—that I had left the country. I wouldn’t want you to think I had received and not answered your letter. It was such a short letter. Here, where people talk about the least important things at great length, it sounded compulsive. Will I marry you? Yes, I will. Perhaps. But I’m like the Italians, I must talk. So you must listen to my long answer to your short question. Yes, I will marry you, my dear. But I am going to have this baby, and if you marry me you will have to be its father. It will be a human being who will need a father, just as I am a woman and need a husband. I know that you are a loving person and that you credit life, otherwise I could not think of marrying you. But I know, too, that you have special needs that sometimes work against your lovingness. I don’t know how demanding these needs are for you, and you don’t either, I suspect. So if you marry me we will both be taking a chance on them. I am willing to take that chance, but I want you to consider it before you take it. If we marry I want to have another child as soon as possible, so that even by mechanical standards you will know that I belong to you as much as to anyone else. One wife and two children make quite a different purchase from me alone on Sunday afternoon by the river. Do you understand me, my dear? If you marry me you will be doing a very grownup thing. I know you are hard-working, sincere and able, but much of the play will be gone from your life. You used to tell me about your long summers at the beach, how your mother would bring you orange juice in bed and you would get up and eat a soft-boiled egg and go to the store for her, and that would be your only duty of the day. Then you would call for your friends and swim. If the east wind blew, the water would be calm and cool. If the west wind blew, it would be warm and rough. And you would swim until you shivered, then run to your house and change your bathing suit, call again for your friends, walk along the beach, play word games, take one more dip before lunch. You told me how your mother warmed your milk and put a teaspoon of sugar into it. In the afternoon you’d play ball on the beach, swimming when you wanted, not bothering to change now because all your suits were wet. Then after dinner you would gather again, boys and girls, to play hide-and-seek until it was dark, resisting the last call of the day when your mother or father would come to get you. Then, in pajamas you would ask for a piece of bread to take to bed. Suddenly it was another day, the sun blazing again, your father already off to the city, and the whole game began over. Because you told me about those days with such feeling I’ve remembered them, and I wonder if you’ve had your fill. They’re still yours, you know, for a few years anyway, if you want and need them badly. But if you marry me they will be over. The child I have in me and the child you may get in me will be the ones to play on the beach, not you. That’s the letter, man. Like a slob I cried when I read about myself as a boy. Jesus, I’m crying now. I don’t know what to say to her, I don’t know what I want.