III

FOR THE next few nights I stayed away from Cassandra’s house. If Revington had won his bottle of Scotch, I didn’t want to know about it. Instead I went to the Yacht Club on the Island. There was not a yacht to be seen, only a motley collection of noisy Ohio River speedboats, but that was OK with me; I’d always loved the place ever since my father had taken me there once to celebrate something or other, God knows what. He’d never needed much of an excuse to celebrate.

I’d been a year or two below the drinking age, but because I was with him, nobody asked me for my draft card. He ordered two beers at a time and gave one to me, and the bartender saw it and didn’t give a shit, so I got pleasantly soused drinking what the old man drank: Miller’s High Life. I’ll always remember that night. It was crowded, a Saturday probably, but there didn’t seem to be a soul my father didn’t know (a lot of the guys called him by his old nickname, “Jiggs”), and I followed him from table to table as he shouted out greetings, slapped his pals on the back, pumped their hands, and shoved me forward into their grinning faces: “This is my boy, Johnny the Fourth.” It was the first time I’d ever got drunk with him out in public, and I was proud that he was proud enough of me to want to show me off to fifty other drunks, and it was the first bar I’d ever seen that spilled outdoors along the riverbank. I’d thought it wonderful, bordering on miraculous, that you could get loaded by the river, and I still thought so—but now, unlike my father, I knew hardly anyone and had no inclination to get to know anyone. I sat alone at the farthest table and drank boilermakers. It was a perfect place for me (dirty and dimly lighted, I thought wryly), a place where nobody would bother me, where I could drink in peace. The lights of town were, as always, reflected and blurred in the black water. The moist, rank, muddy river smell, as always, told me I was home. Not much ever changed in Raysburg from one year to the next. I could imagine myself growing old in this town, sitting in exactly the same spot year after year, drinking exactly the same illegal bar whiskey and weak West Virginia beer, staring at the same river and wondering what the fuck it all meant. That is, of course, unless I got my ass shot off in Vietnam. ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY, ETC.

What I’d learned in Morgantown was that hell was getting stuck inside your own mind; since then, I’d been trying to follow the advice of that great American sage, James Thurber: Let your mind alone! But coming back to Raysburg was not letting my mind alone, and now I was being revisited by an old familiar sorrow that was like a lame mangy dog who follows you home and flops down quietly in the corner, expecting nothing. I should never have come back, I told myself for the millionth time. I had every reason to be depressed, I told myself—the heat wave, my poor sad mother going bravely off every morning to her pissy job (not to mention Household Finance), my wreck of a father drooling in the living room, and, of course, Cassandra. She and I might very well be linked; she might remember what had happened at the top of North High Street and believe in it just as much as I did, but that didn’t make us lovers any more than it ever had. I certainly didn’t have a claim on her—at any rate, not in the ordinary way a boy makes a claim on a girl—and whether or not she slept with William Revington should have absolutely nothing to do with me, but, unfortunately, it did. Dumb asshole that I was, I’d even egged him on. “To everything there is a season,” I kept hearing on the radio (Ecclesiastes, via Pete Seeger, via the Byrds), and the season for Cassandra and me was obviously long over: “Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben . . .” and with that, I was back in my ratty apartment in Morgantown, remembering, far too vividly, the pictures I’d taped to my walls. Oh, dear God, all the hours I’d spent staring at those pictures, trying to put myself inside them, melt into them. What on earth had I been doing photographing Zoë? Letting your mind alone requires a certain amount of distance, but it was impossible to maintain much of a distance through a portrait lens.

I was taking my drinking slow but steady. I knew myself well enough by now to be able to time it practically down to the last possible minute when I would order the last possible double that would nail it all home so I could wobble back up Front Street in a spinny summer night’s blur to collapse, with nothing seriously left of me, into muddy sleep. Out in the river, carried along on the deep fast channel out in the middle of the river, a speedboat was drifting by with its engine cut. It was strangely lit with a string of pink and green and golden lights that looked for all the world like Japanese lanterns. I heard laughter drift across the water, and a strain of music, a British band, I thought (Zoë would surely know the group), and what seemed to be the voices of children calling to each other. I felt an inner shiver, then, in memory, heard a little girl’s voice—“Ally, ally, out’s in free!”—one of my playmates from when I’d been six or seven, maybe Cindy Douglas, in the pressing summer’s twilight just minutes before I’d be called home to bed. Walking home later, I would pass the house where I grew up (now occupied by strangers) and Cindy’s house where we’d played dolls and dress-up. I could turn at the bridge and, within minutes, walk over to Nancy Clark’s house on Maryland Street, and it was all just too damned much. These fragments. Wearing Cindy’s patent leather shoes, dreaming of wearing Zoë’s dress, photographing Zoë, being photographed, not imitating a little girl but being one, looking up to see Nancy Clark as a princess (gold crown, blue dress, and petticoats), bright red lipstick, her face entirely unnatural and eerily beautiful, at the end of the Purkinje Shift her lips burning darkly as roses: “Come on, Alice, sit by me.”

Maybe I should have been a girl. It was an annoying thought, an unproductive thought—a thought as utterly useless as wishing I looked like Gregory Peck—but it was not a new thought. If I were a girl, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting drafted, but that seemed entirely beside the point. What kind of girl would I have been? A normal happy well-adjusted girl? Somehow I didn’t think so. I imagined that I would have been just as much of an outsider as Cassandra, trying out one role after another, choosing from what was possible and never feeling authentically at home anywhere—in short, that I would have been much the way I was at the moment. Then, with a sensation like falling down an inner mineshaft, I saw that the fragments in my mind had made a pattern: if I could have been a girl, Zoë was the girl I would have wanted to be. The instant I arrived at that formulation, I went skittering away from it like a wobbling top.

But be that as it may, I told myself, in the meantime, while you are laying around Raysburg playing the fat drunken buffoon—longing for Cassandra as you have ever since you’ve met her, obscurely tantalizing yourself by taking pictures of her beautiful little sister, brooding about the past and musing upon it all in your usual poetic but utterly ineffectual way—your draft board could lower the boom on you at any moment. OK, GET UP TOMORROW BRIGHT AND EARLY AND DRIVE DOWN TO MORGANTOWN AND REGISTER FOR THE FALL SEMESTER. Yeah, I could do that, but somehow going back to Morgantown seemed almost as bad as getting drafted. WRITE A LETTER TO YOUR DRAFT BOARD, A CONFESION SO MAD THEY’LL KNOW JUST WHAT A RAVING LUNATIC THEY’RE DEALING WITH. TELL THEM YOU LIED AT YOUR PHYSICAL, THAT YOU REALLY DO HAVE YELLOW FEVER, JAUNDICE, AND ACUTE ANEMIA. WHILE YOU’RE AT IT, TELL THEM THAT YOU SUFFER FROM NIGHTMARES, WALK IN YOUR SLEEP, WET THE BED, AND SLEEP WITH BOYS EVERY CHANCE YOU GET. Hey, that’s a good suggestion. I’ll certainly keep that in mind. GET UP TOMORROW MORNING AND WORK ON YOUR NOVEL. THAT’S THE ONLY THING THAT COUNTS.

• • •

I GOT up the next morning and didn’t work on my novel, and I didn’t work on it the morning after that and the morning after that. I began to dread the mornings. I always drank too much at the Yacht Club, and I always woke up feeling like hell, and I’d fallen into the routine of pulling myself back together by having a cup of coffee and a smoke with my father. I was pretty sure he’d come to expect it, maybe even look forward to it, and every day, if I sat there long enough, he’d try to talk to me. He’d fix me with his good eye (the other one, although it worked, seemed as lifeless as a marble) and say, “John! Ahjuswanna t-t-t-talia.”

“Yeah, Dad,” I’d say and lean closer to him.

Whatever it was he wanted to tell me, I just couldn’t get it. Spitty mysterious bursts of syllables would come splattering out of him, and I could usually understand a word or two, but as to deciphering it, reading French Symbolist poetry would have been easier. His attempts to communicate seemed to be getting more urgent, but what on earth did he have to say that was so damned important? After half an hour of that painful nonsense, I’d end it with some fatuously cheerful line like, “Well, Dad, time for more coffee?” and he’d give up, turn away from me, and stare at the silent TV.

Then I would shut myself into the back bedroom (where it was always over ninety degrees by then), sit at my mother’s sewing table, and stare at my neatly stacked four hundred pages. Had I been enough of a writer to have writer’s block? Maybe it was impossible for me to do any serious work at home in Raysburg; maybe I could only write in distant cities, dreaming of home. And it was not lost upon me that if it hadn’t been for my father with his wild and wooly tales of the first John Henry Dupre riding with Morgan the raider, I never would have started writing that goddamned novel in the first place. Maybe it was my father who was too close. I found that wreck in the next room inordinately depressing.

Dear old Dad, of course, had been the original fat drunken buffoon. He’d never allowed himself to get as fat as I was, but he’d always been a big, jolly, red-faced, sweating, plump man who’d never minded tucking into a good plate of roast beef or fried chicken—and drunk certainly, every damned day, and a buffoon often. We’d loathed each other when he’d first come home from the war, but we’d learned to make allowances for each other, and there’d been times over the years when we’d genuinely liked each other—or, at any rate, I had liked him and hoped that he’d liked me. He’d never hit me, drunk or sober, but the rages that sometimes drove him until I was sure he was getting close to hitting me had always happened when he’d been sober as a stone, and I found myself—with a twinge of embarrassment—remembering one of those times. He’d come home early from work, and he’d caught me wearing that tartan skirt I’d insisted was a kilt. He’d chased me all over the house, yelling his head off, until my mother had rescued me with her usual, “He’ll outgrow it.”

If he had been drunk, he might have found it funny. I’d never minded him drunk. When he’d been drunk, he’d always liked me. In fact, I was often the only one who could deal with him then, and more than once I’d been the one who’d talked my silly-ass father into going to bed. My mother always said that I was better at it than she was.

The night my father heard that his father had died, he came home monumentally loaded at damned near five in the morning. I knew something was up because I heard an enormous crash as loud as if somebody had knocked over a dresser. I jumped out of bed and ran straight downstairs, found my father flat on his back on the kitchen floor. He’d managed to fall over without, apparently, spilling a drop of the whiskey in the glass that was resting squarely in the center of his chest. He was staring bleakly at the ceiling, smoking a cigarette, and using the cat’s dish for an ashtray. “Do you want to go to bed, Dad?” I said.

“Yeah.” But he didn’t move a muscle.

I sat down on the floor. “Shouldn’t walk around. Bare feet,” he said. “Catch cold.” He sounded as though he was trying to talk with a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

He was right: it was cold on the kitchen floor. I remembered crossing my legs and tucking my feet under them. I could sit that way for a long time and liked to do it because I knew it was something grownups couldn’t do. My father was trying to look at me. Even though I was only a few feet away, it took him a while to locate my face. The whites of his eyes were red; the lids were swollen. He sipped some of the whiskey. “Hey, Johnny,” he said, “how the hell old are you now?”

“Ten.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Forty-two you were born. That’s right . . . Do you remember your grandpa Dupre?”

“Sure.”

“Did you like him?”

“Sure.”

“Well, he’s dead.”

“I know. Mom told me.”

“Yeah. Shit. My dad. Good man. Wish I was half the man he was. Shit. What a way to go. Shit. Well, let’s drink to him.”

He handed me the glass. I knew that if my mother was there to see it, she’d drop as dead as my grandfather. I took a tiny sip, fought to get it down. It felt like swallowing a lit match. I felt it burn down my throat, burn through my stomach, and stop at the bottom in a little pool of fire. But I didn’t cough. I was proud of myself, gave him the glass back.

My father downed the rest of the whiskey, and that seemed to focus him. He looked me straight in the eyes. “You can be any damn thing you please in this sorry life,” he said. “Just one thing I ask of you. Always remember who you are.”

I tried to make sense out of that. “Who am I?”

His eyes shot fire at me. “You’re John Henry Dupre the Fourth, that’s who the hell you are.”

• • •

AT TWENTY-THREE I still didn’t have any better idea who John Henry Dupre the Fourth was than I’d had at ten, and whatever thoughts my father had on the subject, I certainly wasn’t going to be hearing them. One evening after dinner, I decided to ask my mother about the Dupres. “I don’t know much about them,” she said. “You should talk to your grandmother.”

“But she’s not a Dupre. What happened to those old people who used to come visit? There was O. E. and Aunt Myrtle and Uncle Will . . .”

“Oh, honey, they’re all dead and gone now. O. E. died just last year. He was never right in the head, poor old soul. Gassed in the First War . . .”

“Was he? Why didn’t I know that?”

“You weren’t much interested in family when you were little.”

That was true; I hadn’t been. “But my grandfather,” I said, “the professional gambler . . .?”

She laughed. “Is that what your father told you? His dad wasn’t a professional gambler. He was just a gambler period. He worked his whole life at Elwig’s Tobacco. He was a cigar maker. He’d get paid on a Friday, and if your grandmother didn’t get to him first, he’d lose every cent of it in a poker game. That’s why she left him.”

I was feeling a familiar frustration; had my father ever told me the simple unvarnished truth about anything? “OK,” I said, “but how did Grandpa Dupre end up in Lexington, Kentucky?” The home of John Hunt Morgan.

“His health was failing him, and he moved there to be close to his daughter . . . You remember your Aunt Matty, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said, although I wasn’t sure I did. “Why was she in Lexington?”

“I don’t have any idea. You really should talk to your grandmother.”

I would have liked to talk to my grandmother, but she wasn’t living on the Island any longer. She’d come undone while I’d been in L.A. It had started out with her phoning in the same order to the grocery store four or five or even ten times a day. Then somebody had called the fire department about the thick black smoke pouring out of her apartment, and the firemen had found her calmly watching television while the stew she’d left on the stove burned to cinders. Eventually her phone and electricity had been cut off because she’d forgotten to pay the bills. All the time I’d been growing up, when I hadn’t given a damn whether I talked to her or not, she’d been two blocks away from us; now that I did want to talk to her, she was twenty miles down the river in Carreysburg, living with my Aunt Evie and Uncle George. “Does she still make any sense?” I said.

“Oh, she makes perfect sense so long as you’ve got her back in the old days. Just don’t ask her what she’s had for breakfast.”

“Maybe I will go see her, but . . . Mom? You know all those stories Dad used to tell about the first John Henry Dupre? How he was from New Orleans, killed somebody in a fight . . . rode with Morgan in the Civil War? Do you suppose any of that’s true?”

“I don’t have any idea if it’s true or not. He told me the same wild yarn . . . I wouldn’t put too much stock in it. Your father never could tell a story without improving on it.”

Yes, he had been a great spinner of yarns, a great improver of stories, but it was odd, I thought, what he chose to turn into legend and what he didn’t. I’d heard a million times about the first John Henry, but I couldn’t remember my father ever saying a word about what he’d done in his war. “Did he ever talk about being in the navy?” I asked my mother. “Did he see any action?”

“Action? You mean fighting? I don’t think so . . . They took his age into account, trained him as a radio operator. That’s what he did all through the war. To this day, he can still understand Morse code. Didn’t he ever tell you that? He was on one of those boats that moved cargo around, don’t think he ever got within a hundred miles of a Jap. He said he’d never been so bored in his life. He and some of the other sailors made a little still and ran off their own liquor.” She shook her head with that sadly complex look I’d come to know over the years—both proud of my father and his arcane abilities and utterly disgusted with him. Then, probably worried that she’d sounded disloyal, she added, “Oh, but your father was always so much fun. That’s why I married him.”

“So how’d he get in the navy? Was he drafted?”

“Oh, good heavens, no. A few days after Pearl Harbor, he and Bernie Andrews got themselves three sheets to the wind and enlisted.”

I laughed. She smiled back at me. “It wasn’t all that funny at the time. Bernie failed the medical, but your dad didn’t . . . and I didn’t appreciate it at all. He was thirty-four years old, for crying out loud. And I was seven months pregnant with you. He didn’t need to do that.”

That’s just great, I thought. He was an even bigger asshole than I was.

• • •

LYNDON JOHNSON was having a televised news conference that week, and I wanted to watch it, God knows why. I even got out of bed early for it—that is, before noon—and made sure that my father and I were planted in front of the tube in plenty of time, our coffee cups filled and our cigarettes lit, but then the damn thing started late. “What do you think of all this stuff, Dad?” I said.

He made that harsh coughing sound he used for a laugh. “Ssslowa crap,” he said. That had come through clearly enough, and I laughed along with him. Then, after an interminable wait, the President of the United States appeared on the screen, staring straight at us, beginning, as he always did: “Mah fellow Americans . . .” All I had to do was hear that cretinous voice—I RIDE FROM TEXAS ON A BIG WHITE HORSE—to be sickened, once again, with a noxious hatred for the lying son of a bitch. “Not long ago,” he told us, “I received a letter from a woman in the Midwest. She wrote, ‘Dear Mr. President, in my humble way I am writing to you about the crisis in Vietnam. My husband served in World War II. Our country was at war. But now, this time, it’s just something that I don’t understand. Why?’”

He then proceeded to explain it all to us. It was, just as my father had predicted, a load of crap. I put up with it as long as I could, and then I started yelling back at the TV set. “This really is war,” LBJ said.

“Yeah,” I yelled, “so why wasn’t it declared in Congress?”

“It is spurred by Communist China.”

“No, it’s not. Jesus. Why don’t you try reading a history book?”

“Its goal is to conquer the South, to defeat American power, and to extend the Asiatic dominion of Communism.”

“Bullshit. They were fighting the French and now they’re fighting us. All they want is to run their own goddamn country.” My father must have thought I was funny. I kept hearing that coughing noise out of him. I was glad I could make him laugh.

“Because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression.”

“Jesus Christ, Lyndon,” I yelled, “Vietnam is not Nazi Germany.”

I sat there and fumed. Now LBJ was telling us that he was raising the number of men in Vietnam from seventy-five thousand to a hundred and twenty-five thousand. “This will make it necessary to increase our active fighting forces by raising the monthly draft call,” he said, “from seventeen thousand . . . to thirty-five thousand.” I felt the deadly impact of that just as though he’d whipped out a hidden six-gun and blasted me with it.

I survived to the end of the speech. I even sat through the question period with the press. But I wasn’t doing any more yelling at the TV. The number was staggering—thirty-five thousand per month. What were the chances of some month’s thirty-five thousand not having me in it? “Do you want me to leave the TV on?” I asked my father.

“Nuh . . . John?”

Oh, God, I thought, not today. Please, not today. “I’ll talk to you later, Dad. I got to go.”

He gave me a reproachful look and an explosive gesture that looked like “fuck off.” I ran downstairs and began walking (waddling) up Front Street toward town. Thirty-five thousand, thirty-five thousand. WALK DOWN TO THE LIBRARY, PICK UP YOUR MOTHER’S CAR (AND SOME MONEY), AND DRIVE TO MORGANTOWN. No, that’s stupid. I wouldn’t get there before the Registrar’s office closed. OK, THEN CALL THEM FIRST THING IN THE MORNING. Yeah, I’ll do that. Of course that means I’m definitely sending my poor mother back to Household Finance, which is the last thing in the world she needs at the moment. How did I get myself into this fucking mess? Oh, this is intolerable, intolerable.

I’d taken off just like the guy I used to be—the guy who would walk anywhere, walk off his sorrows, walk all night long, walk for pleasure, for Christ’s sake, but, panting and dizzy, I was gradually slowing to a shuffle, and I hadn’t even made it to the bridge yet. I hauled out my handkerchief and mopped my face. Every sweat gland in my body was in excellent working order, and I was stopped just where I didn’t want to be, in front of our old house; as I always did when I passed by it, I looked up to see again the little balcony where I used to stand for hours, imagining that the shitty feelings I was having were making me more poetic. And then, of course, I had to walk by Cindy’s house. In memory, we’re sitting on the floor and she’s wearing what she wore to school, a blouse and a pleated jumper, and I’m wearing the same thing— although that’s certainly not what I’d worn to school. Or, if we’re acting out some more exotic fantasy, she’s in an old dress of her mom’s and I’m in a old dress of hers, and she’s playing a grown-up version of herself—that is, the ruler of this magical kingdom— and I’m playing Princess Somebody-or-other or, as I often did, simply “little sister.”

Ah, but these obsessively detailed, embarrassing, and even somewhat queasy memories would lead me, as I knew full well by now, nowhere but straight back into my old labyrinth—come on, son, LET YOUR MIND ALONE—and I was halfway across the Suspension Bridge by then. Once again, I’d been slammed to a stop. The sun was a blacksmith’s hammer, and I was the anvil. Below me, just as sad and fat as I was, the old brown Ohio reflected back a hideous dazzle; my sunglasses were at home on my dresser, and the light screwed me squinty-eyed. Where was I going? Did it matter? ASK NOT, ETC. I watched a barge push a load of coal up the river. I was halfway to town so I might as well keep on going. I plodded on across the bridge and down Market Street to the five-and-dime where I appeased the hollow inside me with a hot turkey sandwich, an extra side of stuffing, and a strawberry milkshake.

Gorged into torpor, I stepped out into the disgusting sunlight, flinched back instantly to the tiny patch of shade in front of Kresge’s, lit a cigarette, and watched the parade of afternoon shoppers, mostly female—schoolgirls happily out of school, teenagers, moms and kids—and, by God, it really was just as weird as I’d thought: the middle of a West Virginia heat wave and half the girls on the street were strutting around in go-go boots—not wearing them with short skirts like the girls in L.A., but with shorts, just the way in any other summer they’d be wearing sneakers. For the grade-school crowd, they appeared to be as essential as coonskin caps had been in the mid-fifties. Moms had put them on five-year-olds—and on themselves. Zoë had told me that when she’d first worn those little white boots, people had turned to stare at her on the street, but now Lyndon’s majorettes were everywhere.

Thinking of Zoë, I dragged myself on up to Middleton’s on Chaplin Street, stepped gratefully into the raw shadows of the place, into the familiar stench of darkroom chemicals. A stand-up fan that looked like something from the forties wheezed at the end of the counter. The owner himself was in today: “Hi, son, hot enough for you? What can I do you for?” I didn’t know why people called him “Doc,” but they did, and it fit him—a dapper old gent in a bow tie, probably in his eighties, bald-pated as porcelain but sporting a trim white goatee. He was a famous photographer (or, at any rate, as famous as you could get in Raysburg), had photographed a president once (I didn’t remember which one, Harding maybe), and he always did the graduation pictures for the boys at the Academy. Mine was still hanging in our living room; if you bent close, you could see that the great man himself had signed it in pencil: “S. Middleton, 1960.”

“Hi, Doc,” I said, “D & C for Dupre.”

“Dupre? Didn’t you graduate from the Academy a few years back? Yeah? I thought I knew you. Put on a little weight since then, haven’t you?”

“A pound or two,” I said, annoyed.

“Happens to the best of us,” he said, although he looked as though he hadn’t gained an ounce in sixty years. He passed me an envelope. I took out my contact sheets, spread them on the light table, and bent to study them through the loop. Zoë, in black and white, leapt up into my right eye. Damn, she looked fine. But the late afternoon sun had been burning through that hole in the hedge like a flamethrower, and half the image was lost in a hazy white flare. Why hadn’t I seen that? “Shit,” I said under my breath.

I did a quick pass over the contact sheets, and it was obvious that I had not distinguished myself. That flare I should have noticed ruined many of the outdoor shots. I’d been afraid to move in close to define the image; my framing was as safe and haphazard as if it had been done by somebody’s mom with a Brownie. I should have crouched down to emphasize Zoë’s fabulous long legs (especially in her Courrèges copy dress), but my fat stomach must have discouraged me from attempting anything that arduous. In the fading light of the dining room, I’d been fully aware that my depth of field had been reduced to nothing, but even so, I’d been out of focus half the time, or had focused on the wrong thing, got the crochet stocking on one of Zoë’s legs as sharp as an etching but allowed her eyes to blur out to pointless pools of fuzz. There were half a dozen shots that were better than anything she had in her book so far, but that wasn’t saying much. Zoë always looked great. It seemed impossible to take a bad picture of her. But she could have used a far better photographer than the idiot who’d shot those seven rolls of film.

“Excuse me, son,” Doc Middleton said, “could you use some advice?”

“Sure,” I said.

I stepped back and let him look through the loop. “Pretty girl,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, “she wants to be a model.”

He looked again. “You know, she might be able to do it . . . just not here in this town. She ought to go to New York, or at least Pittsburgh.”

He didn’t seem to have much to do, and I didn’t either, so I let him explain to me the humiliating details of every dumb mistake I’d made. Then he showed me one of his studios at the back of the store. It was exactly like Mr. Feinstein’s (although a hell of a lot cleaner)—a roll of seamless on the wall, two lights on stands with umbrellas, and a minuscule change room. “Tell you what,” he said, “this is the slowest time of the year for me. Picks up in September, but it’ll be dead as a morgue right on through August, so I’d be happy to rent it to you. How about five bucks an hour? If you wanted it a whole afternoon, I could give you a better rate than that. You’d never have to worry about your exposure. You’d be shooting at f 22, so you’d never have to worry about your depth of field. All you’d have to worry about is the girl.”

• • •

I’D BEEN dropping in at the Markapolous household for five years. I was, as I’d been told often enough, a member of the family and therefore not someone who was expected to knock, but now, confused by an arcane dread, I paused on the porch, uncertain of myself, wishing that I could knock—so someone would come to the door and be glad to see me, would greet me warmly and invite me in. I heard voices, laughter, the TV, the humming of fans, and a faint strain of Zoë’s rock ’n roll drifting up from the basement. Usually I would have called out, “Hey, anybody home?” but I didn’t do that. I opened the screen door slowly so the spring wouldn’t squeak, slipped on through, eased the door shut behind me, and slunk into the house as quietly as a horse thief. Not sure why I was playing that childish game, I tip-toed on down the hallway to the living room and stopped just inside the archway.

Revington and Cassandra were sitting close together on the couch. One of his hands was resting innocently, almost absentmindedly, on one of hers. The good doctor was holding court from his usual position on his recliner; all he had to do was raise his eyes from Revington’s face and he’d see me, but, for the moment, nobody knew I was there. Pretty good, I thought, for a fat man.

Revington was in full flight: “Astute . . . very astute. I was impressed. The bombing will keep the Republican hawks off his ass. Going to the UN will keep his own left flank off his ass. And then there was the direct appeal to the American people . . . couched in plain language that anyone could understand . . .”

“Here’s where we differ,” the good doctor said, interrupting. “What you admire is exactly what I don’t admire . . . I know damned well he’s a good politician, but the last thing in the world we need right now is a good politician. We need a statesman . . . Hey, there, John, grab yourself a beer and get in here.”

I was pleased to see Revington jump as if a spider had bitten him. “Ace,” he said, turning toward me. He’d been struck, for once in his garrulous life, utterly speechless.

I saw Cassandra get the whole picture in a flash. She grinned at me, dropped her eyes significantly to Revington’s hand on hers, then looked up again, looked me straight in the eyes and winked. I didn’t have a clue what she’d meant by that, but I grinned idiotically back. “Thanks,” I said to the doctor. “I brought Zoë her contact sheets,” waving the envelope in the air as though it gave me diplomatic immunity, “but I’ll take the beer though,” and in LBJ’s peckerwood accent: “Y’all know what I think anyway.”

“That’s never stopped you before,” Revington said. It was, I thought, a fairly lame line for him. He jerked his head in the direction of an empty chair, sending me the message: “Just get your ass in here and sit down, for Christ’s sake.”

“There’s only one thing that troubles my mind,” I said slowly, deliberately. “It’s my old Waterbury, and she won’t keep time.” Leaving them with that one to ponder, I drifted into the kitchen. Damn, I was going to have to figure out how to get Cassy alone for a minute so I could find out what was going on.

Zoë didn’t hear me coming either; she had her radio turned up full-blast and was talking on the phone. I waved her contact sheets at her. She squealed—a sound like YOW!—and said, “I’ll call you back later. John’s here with my pictures,” and to me, “Show me, show me, show me. Are they any good?”

She might, I suddenly realized, have trouble looking at them; like an idiot, I’d forgotten to buy her a loop. “It’s OK,” she said, “I’ll get Dad’s magnifying glass,” ran upstairs and was back with it before I’d even decided where to sit.

She turned her radio down to a bearable level, cleared a space in front of her sewing machine—pushing away scraps of plaid fabric—flicked on a lamp, and motioned for me to join her in the pool of yellow light. Reluctantly, I pulled up a chair. “Wow,” she said, “some of these are kind of . . . What is that?”

“Flare,” I said. “I was trying to use the sun as a back light. Sorry.”

“Oh, but here’s a good one. Hey, it’s really good.” She offered me the glass. I brought the image up into strong magnification. It was one I’d passed over because her face looked so blandly and unremarkably pretty, but, taking a moment to look again, I could see why she liked it. THE LOOK came through clearly—exactly what she’d wanted when she’d said “prissy”—scrubbed, polished, every hair in place, every detail perfect from gloves to purse, and it dawned on me (somewhat late in the game, I thought, for someone who’d been hooked on girls’ magazines since he was fourteen) that fashion photography isn’t about the girl; it’s about the clothes.

“Can I get eight-by-tens?” she said.

“Oh, sure. Just mark the ones you want.”

We spent an hour going over her contact sheets. Half a dozen times I was tempted to tell her about Doc Middleton’s studio, but I didn’t. I was beginning to suspect that I shouldn’t be taking any more pictures of Zoë. She was wearing, as she usually didn’t, a fairly strong perfume—if I’d been writing ad copy for it, I might have called it “sassy”—and I didn’t think of myself as someone who was susceptible to scent, but that perfume was really getting to me. But wait a minute—on second thought, who was I kidding? Of course I was susceptible to scent, and her perfume was very much like Natalie’s; in fact, it might even have been the same damned thing—and by now, a lot more was troubling my mind than my old Waterbury. She was such a goddamn lovely girl, and I liked her, could even say that I admired her, and here we were, crammed together, cheek to jowl, peering through a magnifying glass, and I was acutely aware that she was the very same girl I’d kissed under the mistletoe a couple years before, the very same girl who’d recently starred in one of the most unsettling of my frequently unsettling dreams. But Zoë was not quite sixteen, and I was twenty-three, forty pounds overweight, and very definitely not in the right place at the right time. “I’m going to get another beer,” I said. “You want anything?”

“Oh, if you’re going upstairs . . . a Coke.”

I went looking for Cassandra, found her on the front porch glider with Revington. Ordinarily I would have been stepping into the middle of a conversation, or perhaps one of his political monologues, but when they’d heard me coming, they’d stopped talking—instantly, BANG, curtain going down. He had one of his arms wrapped around her, and she was leaning back against his shoulder. “Having fun with little sister?” she said.

“We play very nicely together,” I said and got a laugh from her.

Behind Cassandra’s line of sight, Revington gave me a heavily weighted look and the thumbs-up sign. I nodded back to him— bobbing my head like an end-man in a minstrel—and wandered away, into the house, considered joining the good doctor and his wife in the living room, thought better of it, got a beer and a Coke, and headed back to the basement. What kind of tom-foolery was playing here tonight? Should I set it to music? That thumbs-up had meant exactly what? Had Revington already won his bottle of Scotch or did he think he was right on the edge of winning it? “I got the new Seventeen,” Zoë said. “You want to look at it?”

I’d thought she was offering it to me so I could look at it by myself, safely isolated in my own chair, but no, I gathered that I was supposed to sit next to her on the couch so we could look at it together. That was something I needed like a bullet in the brain. The cover of Seventeen proclaimed that it was THE BIGGEST FASHION ISSUE EVER!

“We were right,” she said smugly, “all the skirts are short. Every single one. A lot of them are up to here.” With a pink frosted fingernail she drew a line on her leg a good four inches above her kneecap. “Look, even the girls in the ads,” and began flipping through the pages.

“Hey, do you see this?” she said. “That’s THE LOOK I want . . . I don’t mean for a picture, I mean for real.” The girl in the magazine was wearing a costume that said most emphatically, I AM A TEENAGER—blazer, sweater, ribbed tights, little-girl flats with straps, and a short pleated dotted skirt that ended exactly where Zoë had just drawn the line on her leg. The girl, like Zoë, wore her hair in a pageboy; like Zoë, she had bangs, but hers were so long they were almost in her eyes. She was wearing more makeup than Zoë usually did and was staring directly at us with an expression that was disturbingly self-possessed, faintly menacing, and eerily engaging. I understood perfectly; if I were a teenage girl, that’s exactly how I would want to look too. “You could do that,” I said. “You’re practically there already.”

“Yeah. I could. I can see it in my mind. It’s just getting everything right. I love it when everything’s right and it all comes together . . . Oh, I sound so superficial, don’t I? That’s what Dad’s always saying to me, ‘Don’t be so superficial, Zoë.’ Well, we can’t all be brains . . . He’s kind of spoiled, you know, with Cassy. She really is smart. He thinks everybody should be like that, but most ordinary kids aren’t like that . . . Hey, do you think I’d look better as a blonde? I don’t mean Marilyn Monroe blond, I mean a dark honey blonde. I’m so close, I’d just have to go one shade lighter. Dad would kill me. Do you think I’m superficial?”

“No,” I said, laughing.

“Yes, you do,” she said, giggling. “I can tell. You’re thinking, oh, my God, what a little pin-brain.”

“No, I’m not, Zoë. I’m really not.”

“Do you think I’m silly . . . trying to be a model?”

I thought that she had a one-in-a-thousand chance, but I didn’t think she was being silly. She had a better chance than most girls. “No,” I said, “if there’s something you really want, then go after it.”

“That’s what I think too.”

“Why do you want to be a model?” I really wanted to hear what she would say.

She looked up from the magazine and into my eyes. “I don’t know . . . I can’t . . . I guess it’s just something you feel. Haven’t you ever wanted something just because you feel it?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said with conviction.

She flipped through a few more pages. “Oh, John, look at this skirt! My God, isn’t it just fabulous? It just kills me.” The skirt was black patent vinyl. “God, if I wore that in Raysburg, people would drop dead on the street. But I’m going to make it, I swear I am . . . if I can find the fabric. You see how simple it is. It wouldn’t be hard to make . . . Oh!” She was off the couch in a leap, turning up the radio. “It’s my favorite song.” It was the Dave Clark Five belting out “Over and Over.”

“Come on,” she said, “dance with me.”

“I’m a fifties guy. I never learned the new dances.”

I watched her dancing. She looked heartbreakingly young. I had told her the truth; the way the kids were dancing now seemed impossibly alien to me, made me feel as though I was not merely a few years older but from an entirely different generation. When the song was over, she turned the radio down and fell back onto the couch. “Don’t worry so much about your weight,” she said. “When you decide to lose it, you will. Are you really going back to WVU?”

I was so astonished I couldn’t speak for a moment. Anyone who thought that Zoë was a pin-brain was making a serious mistake. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Dad says you’re in limbo. He says you haven’t found yourself yet.”

I laughed reflexively. “Well, it’s not because I haven’t been looking.”

“Oh, I know. But you’re smart. You’ll figure things out.” She picked up the Seventeen again. “Look, do you see how all the lips are really defined now? Cassy’s so out of it. Those chalk-white lips look really dumb.”

“She’s got her own style. She’s the cat who walks by herself.”

“Yeah, that’s what she thinks, but after a while you can look really dumb. That beatnik look is out now. If she let me, I could make her look like a dream. Don’t worry about her either. I don’t know what she’s doing with him, but I know she’s not serious. Does it bother you?”

Impolitic or not, I could not possibly deflect a direct question like that. “Yeah, it bothers me.”

“I thought it did. It’d bother me too . . . I guess you just have to pretend you don’t care. Sometimes she’s just . . . I don’t know. Just out of it. Do you like the Scotch plaids? Some of them are really really short. Look at that one. Wow.”

“What’s the perfume you’re wearing?” I heard myself stupidly saying.

“Oh? Do you like it? I really like it. It’s called F Sharp. You’re the first person who’s noticed.”

“I really like it,” I said.

She looked at me, and I looked at her, and for one excruciating moment we just sat there with our eyes locked. Oh, God help me, when I’d been barking like a dog and chasing her up the street, what exactly had I been yelling? It would have been nice if those particular words had been blurred away into the Lethe of minty bourbon, but I, unfortunately, remembered every preposterous one of them. Zoë could have been deeply offended. She wasn’t acting like someone who had been deeply offended. She’d thought I was funny. (“Oh, but your father was always so much fun.”) What else might she have thought? What was she thinking right now?

Suddenly, with no preamble whatsoever, she jumped up and began demonstrating poses for me. “See, the catalogue girls are just standing around. That’s all you have to do. But the editorial girls really have to show the clothes . . . bring them to life. Miss Fairfax says you can tell the amateurs by their hands.” She made her hands into awkward fists to illustrate her point. “It has to look simple and easy even if it’s not.” She skipped across the room and back, her arms floating gracefully outward, sending me a dazzling smile.

“I should have a camera,” I said.

“Oh, God,” she said, “sometimes I want to grow up so bad I can taste it.”

• • •

AND WITH that—I thought somewhat later, sitting with a six-pack on the river bank—Zoë had most emphatically put an abrupt end to my somewhat limited social life. The next night I wandered around my parents’ apartment after dinner feeling increasingly restless and bitter. I did not want to watch a rerun of Johnny Yuma with my father or try to have yet another desultory and unfocused conversation with my mother while she sat in bed and read a Readers’ Digest Condensed Novel. I did not want to look up my pals from high school. I did not want to get drunk alone at the Yacht Club. I withdrew into the back bedroom and, as usual, saw it stacked neatly there, waiting just as patiently for me as it had been doing for weeks—the four hundred pages of my unfinished and very definitely not condensed novel. Ever since I’d seen the rotten peckerwood on television, I’d been hearing at my back the sound of Lyndon Johnson hurrying near (thirty-five thousand, thirty-five thousand), and what did I think? That I had all the time in the world? Then I was struck by one of those deceptive flashes of insight that can convince you, at least momentarily, that you’re as brilliant as Einstein: it had been crazy to consider working in the hideous afternoon heat, but there was nothing stopping me from working in the cool of the evening.

OK, I told myself, it’s now or never. I got out my old battered briefcase left over from my days at WVU, packed my manuscript and four freshly sharpened pencils into it, and walked down Front Street to the Yacht Club. I knocked back a shot of bar whiskey, bought a quart of Stroh’s, and settled down at my distant table overlooking the river. There was a good hour or more of daylight left. I was sick with apprehension. After putting it off so long, I couldn’t believe I was finally going to read the damned thing. I admired my title page: THE REST IS SILENCE. I’d always loved that title page. It looked so real. But I couldn’t simply sit there getting drunk and staring at my title page. I had to read all those goddamned words I’d written.

I felt a growing sense of dismay. God, this shit was terrible. I remembered how hard it had been to get the book going, and it certainly showed in the writing. My style kept changing. The opening was like an awkward attempt to sound like Zane Grey, but then I’d abruptly shifted into a peculiar tough-guy voice. I’d thought of it as a Confederate Hemingway, but now I saw it as more like a hillbilly Raymond Chandler. Finally, after fifty or so pages, I’d settled down to imitating what I’d taken to be the grandly mellifluous prose of the mid-nineteenth century. But style had been the least of my problems. I’d started half a dozen scenes and then abandoned them with the note: FILL IN LATER . After many scenes I’d written an even more maddening note: DO WE REALLY NEED THIS? (In most cases, the answer to that was a resounding NO.) The facts of Henri Leblanc’s life kept changing; I didn’t seem to be able to remember, from one scene to the next, even how old I’d decided he was. I’d interrupted the story periodically to give the reader long lectures on the history of broadside ballads in the hills of Western Virginia. (I’d written these in a tone of pompous authority, but I’d made most of it up.) Worst of all, my mountain folk were absurd cardboard cutouts with not a spark of real life to them. Ah, the pigs, the incest, the flintlock rifles, the moonshine stills, the mindless violence, the ancient feuds, the utterly ridiculous way the people talked: all of it was as phony as a thirty-cent coin. The denizens of Dogpatch had more reality to them than any of the grotesques I’d created.

Was this, I asked myself, what I’d spent a year and a half of my life doing? Was this what was going to justify my existence, excuse me for being a horny and perpetually frustrated peripatetic fuck-up, an unemployed leech on my overburdened mother, a draft-eligible university dropout, a Buddhist Confederate and a fat drunken buffoon? OK, I thought, now wait a minute. Would I lose anything if I threw away the first hundred pages? No, not a goddamn thing. The book really started at Chapter Four.

I would never forget the weekend when I’d begun writing Chapter Four. For months my shabby little room had been crammed with library books: Civil War histories, Civil War dictionaries, social histories, memoirs and letters, even histories of fashion. I’d been writing slowly, painfully, a tortured paragraph at a time, but I’d been spending much of my free time reading. Then, suddenly, my writing achieved critical mass. The strange style I’d adopted began to come easily to me, almost naturally, and the writing poured out in a fiery torrent. I stopped reading because I was too busy writing. I was no longer floating on the surface of my story; I was the story. I wasn’t lonely anymore. I didn’t need anybody. I had my crappy job and my crappy room, and that was enough because I had a whole other world—a vivid, compelling, absolutely real world with real people in it. I could hardly wait to get off work so I could plunge back into my beloved other world; I longed for the weekends so I could spend two whole days there. And I’d continued to write in that compulsive frenzy right up to the moment when Mr. Feinstein had told me with genuine regret that he wasn’t making enough money to keep on paying my salary. To hell with all this preliminary crap, I thought, and flipped through the pages until I found what really mattered.

CHAPTER FOUR: RUMORS OF WAR

For weeks, Leblanc had been suffering in this northern spring; at home the days would already be thick and full of the promise of summer, swelling with the rank fertility engendered by the great Mississippi, the sun above the levee leaping daily into a renewed sky like the most brilliant of banners, unfurled, promising victory if one were only to follow, but here in Kentucky nothing was familiar. Here in this alien land where Leblanc had found himself, as always, an exile, the afternoon sun was thin as a watery lemon punch, throwing a false warmth that vanished by twilight. Here clouds unrolled in high sinister patterns above the strange bluegrass and cast a bitter viridian light as Leblanc busied himself with his daily affairs. He had endured the cold driving rain that had awakened in his breast that ancient melancholy which appeared to be his eternal lot. His sinews were tensed for a perilous adventure that was woefully slow in arriving, and his heart was filled with foreboding. “Ah, the ladies,” proclaimed Captain MacGillivray with a wink. “We, sir, have been too long deprived of the society of ladies. Let us ride.”

And ride they did, Leblanc on his trusty mare, MacGillivray on his spirited stallion, at a full rattling gallop down unknown roads. Leblanc felt his spirits, too long constrained, lift and soar. The pale afternoon light of rainy Kentucky, the old familiar feeling of the leathers in his hands, the dark thunder of the hooves beneath him, his own youthful flesh moving in sympathy with the powerful beast between his thighs, the very blood coursing in his veins: all of this tumbled together to lead him to a moment of realization that life was again, and indeed would be, again and again, a thing of glory. Ahead of him, MacGillivray slowed his steed to a walk. As Leblanc drew abreast, MacGillivray extended one languid arm, offering a silver flask. Leblanc took it and tasted the finest of Kentucky sour mash whiskey. He laughed.

“Tenting tonight, boys, tenting tonight,” sang MacGillivray and then laughed also. “Ah, sir, do you see it there . . .”

As they rounded a bend in the road at the crest of a hill, distant signs of human habitation emerged below them in the gathering twilight: what appeared to be a small town.

MacGillivray withdrew his watch from his coat and consulted it. “A splendid ride we’ve had of it,” he said dryly. He stretched out his long arms, settled back in the saddle with the easy air of a man who has spent most of his life on horseback, glanced at Leblanc with a sardonic smile. “I know your heart, sir,” said he; “The destination is entirely a matter of indifference to you . . . just so long as you are riding.”

Leblanc returned the smile. “As to that matter, you, sir, do indeed know my heart.”

“But all roads must have some destination, and this is ours.”

As they walked their horses down that final hill in the blue evening, Leblanc saw that what was emerging from the gloaming was not, after all, a town, but a manor commanding the curve of a quiet river. The pattern of the grounds was perfectly circular; paths led outward from the hub of the great house with its Doric columns to many smaller buildings, some of which, Leblanc thought, must be the servants’ quarters. Swallows darted low to the grass before them, and, high above their heads, a nighthawk cried out in its melancholy raucous voice. The encroaching night had colored the mysterious scene with evanescent shades of grey and dun; the slow curve of the river shone like nacre. Leblanc could hear the faint strains of music, see yellow flames of candles flickering in the windows. There appeared to be a hundred carriages drawn up on the grounds.

“And what is this destination?” asked Leblanc.

“You, sir, surely have heard of Charles Tuberville?”

“Indeed. Who has not?” Charles Tuberville was one of the wealthiest men in the state; the Tubervilles were entwined with the Morgans and the Hunts and all of the most ancient fortunes of old Kentucky.

“Well, yonder lies his modest manse,” said MacGillivray, “and tonight is the grand ball.” Then, seeing consternation written plainly on his companion’s face, he added:

“The ladies, my dear fellow. You said that you had been far too long denied the society of the ladies.”

“But sir . . . I have also been denied an invitation.”

“An invitation? Who says that I have received an invitation? They cannot forbid us access. The Tubervilles have always known the MacGillivrays.”

As Leblanc sat in his saddle, sorrowing and uncertain, MacGillivray shrugged, then shouted out: “Fear nothing, Leblanc!” With a harsh laugh, he was gone, kicking his stallion into full gallop. “Damn his eyes,” Leblanc thought, but he was left, as always, with no recourse but to follow.

• • •

IT WASN’T quite as good as I’d remembered it, but I had caught something—I could feel it: an intensely powerful charge of emotion—but would anyone else feel it? What if the emotions I’d experienced while I’d been writing hadn’t made it onto the page? And if they hadn’t, how would I ever know? And then, of course, there were all the details I hadn’t bothered to check. Did Kentucky really look like that? Who knows? I’d never set foot in the state. There must surely have been swallows in nineteenth-century Kentucky, but nighthawks? I’d put them in because I’d always loved those damn birds with their distinctive rasping voices; they flew around in the twilight skies of Raysburg, and they’d been in my mind as long as I could remember—like the river—but was there a river in Lexington or anywhere near it? There might be, but I didn’t know; I hadn’t even bothered to look on a map.

And the horses had given me the fits. I’d never been on a horse in my life . . . well, unless a pony counted. When I’d been six or seven, my parents had taken me to a county fair where they’d had a pony ride for children. The ponies were so old they could barely place one hoof in front of the other; the kids were plunked on them and led around by a friendly old farmer, and my father decided it was something I should like because that’s the sort of thing boys were supposed to like. He wanted to take my picture on the pony, but I was terrified of the pony. My mother was off with some women friends, so it was just me and the old man locked in a battle of wills. Looking back, I could feel a certain sympathy for him. Here was his son: a tiny, underweight, horribly shy little boy who spoke in a girlish whisper and used impossibly big words (nebulous is the one I remember stopping him in his tracks)—his son who played with girls, preferred reading in his room to running around in the sunshine, and who did things like cutting roses from patterned fabric and sewing them neatly onto black velvet. Goddamn it, that rotten little sissy was going to ride the pony! He picked me up under the arms and set me down in the saddle. Weeping, I sat on the pony throughout one interminable circuit of the field. My father took a picture of me weeping on the pony and then set me back down on the blessedly firm earth. I started to sneeze, and I sneezed nonstop for ten minutes. My eyes swelled shut and my hands and neck broke out in hives. As I would find out years later when I would be subjected to a battery of tests, I am violently allergic to horses.

Did my absolute ignorance of horses show in my writing? “A full rattling gallop” had been the best I could do, but if you were writing about the Civil War, you couldn’t really avoid horses. Maybe I could read some books on riding or talk to people who rode—or maybe it wasn’t important. The emotions were what counted, and when Eleanor Tuberville entered the book, the emotions soared straight up into the stratosphere—well, at any rate, my emotions had soared that high. Now I skipped the long description of the ball at the Tubervilles’ and turned directly to what I was sure must be one of the most powerful and significant scenes I’d yet written—that nearly mystical moment when Leblanc first meets Eleanor.

Leblanc cast his eyes about, located a span of wall that was occupied by no one, withdrew into it, removing himself from the gay assembly. He wished to be excused, for the nonce, from the demands of social intercourse. How many more times, he wondered, was he destined to stand at the back of some grand crowded room, having already, in spite of any of his past resolves, imbibed far too deeply of strong spirits, his thoughts rearing and stamping like a hot blooded thoroughbred eternally restrained in the starting gate? The musicians struck up the next tune, and the laughing dancers flowed into the graceful pattern of a Virginia reel. “Mon Dieu,” Leblanc thought, “those men play well!” The two venerable Negroes, one sawing splendidly on a fiddle, the other beating a banjo with ecstatic abandon, were the best musicians of their kind he had ever heard. Men who played like that deserved to be free, he thought -- and Leblanc looked up and saw that a young lady on the far side of the room was watching him. It was not the first time that he had noticed her, seen her somber grey eyes searching him out. He would have expected any young lady of breeding to look away when his eyes met hers, but she did not look away; neither did she smile. In contrast to the animated figures whirling before her, she was standing stock still as though she had composed herself for the making of a tintype.

Leblanc allowed his eyes to continue to rove about the room as though they had paused on hers purely by accident; then, as he turned his head, he found Captain MacGillivray regarding him with a glittering smile of wicked amusement. “You are not dancing, sir.”

“I lack the grace,” Leblanc said, although he had cut a splendid figure in many a ballroom in New Orleans. “That lady yonder,” Leblanc said. “Standing alone off to one side . . . the one who is, at this very moment, regarding us . . . Who is that young lady?”

MacGillivray took Leblanc by the arm and led him along the margins of the room in the direction of the lady in question; laughing, he said sotto voce, “Scarcely a lady yet, hardly more than a child, wearing, I daresay, hoops for the first time in her life . . . Our ladies marry young in Kentucky, but for this one, my dear sir, you will have to wait as long as Jacob for Rachel,” and then, pitching his voice to the rhetorical heights of a stump orator, he said: “Mistress Tuberville, would you allow me to present to you my friend, the redoubtable Captain Henry Leblanc, late of New Orleans. He is, I assure you, a splendid fellow, and he has . . . if you will forgive my saying so . . . expressed a fervent desire for the pleasure of your acquaintance.”

Leblanc did not know whether to be most distressed by MacGillivray’s florid speech, by the discovery that this slender feminine creature was the youngest daughter of Charles Tuberville, or by having heard himself so unexpectedly promoted to a mythical captaincy. “I am most pleased to make your acquaintance, Captain Leblanc,” she said, her low voice as somber as her eyes.

Discomfited, Leblanc relied upon deeply ingrained habits of courtesy, brought his heels sharply together, bowed, took the hand of this exquisite young girl -- for, indeed, that is what she was -- and raised it partway to his lips. “Mademoiselle Tuberville,” he said. “I am enchanted.”

“Ah,” she said. “Parlez-vous Francais?”

“Oui,” he said, surprised, “bien sur.”

“How do you find the society in our fair state?” she asked him, speaking in French.

He answered her in French: “I like the society in Kentucky very much . . . now.”

He had hoped to elicit a smile from her, but his hopes were dashed. Regarding him with her splendid eyes, she reverted to her native tongue: “Would you care, sir, to stroll in the gardens? Here it is still and close, and I feel myself oppressed.”

She took the arm he offered her, and, as they made their way toward the great doors that had been thrown open to the cool evening air, he availed himself of the opportunity to examine the young beauty. Her lustrous chestnut hair had been curled into tight ringlets and bound back with a blue ribbon; her gown was also blue, the color of the sea at the coming of nightfall. She might be, he thought as he regarded the clarity of her small ovular face, little more than a child, but she was already no stranger to whalebone: he could have spanned her easily. Her skin was pale, nearly as white as velum, but scattered over with a faint spray of freckles, betraying, perhaps, an active girl who had eschewed the parasol. She possessed, he believed, the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen, enormous and shining; they, however, revealed nothing of her inner thoughts, but her cheeks were flushed prettily as though under the pressure of some strong emotion, and he saw, in the firm set of her little jaw, what he took to be apprehension. He continued to wait upon her smile, and he continued to wait in vain.

To the tune of her rustling petticoats, she led him down the paths of the formal gardens where the light was fading, and he fancied that soon the heavens above them would assume the fairy color of her dress. She carried a fan but did not open it; perhaps she was not yet schooled in such coquetry. “Have you come here to join in preparations for the great contumely?” she asked him.

He wondered if she were making a jest at his expense, but her eyes were grave. “Yes,” he said. “I have come to ride with Morgan.”

She regarded him with a steady gaze; still she did not smile. “I fear,” she said, “a great effusion of blood.”

OBVIOUSLY THE scene still needed some work. As compelling as I’d found it, the Kentucky I’d created didn’t seem to be subject to the same laws of nature that constrained other less magical locations. It had been twilight when Leblanc and MacGillivray arrived at the Tuberville’s, and it was still twilight an hour or so later when Leblanc goes for a stroll with Eleanor. What? The sun never sets in Kentucky? And formal gardens? Where the fuck were we, Versailles? And then there was Eleanor’s tiny waist. Leblanc could span her—easily? I made a circle of my fingers. Jesus, that was small. Nobody could possibly have a waist that small. And hoopskirts had given me as much trouble as horses. I’d studied the illustrations in the fashion books, so I knew exactly what a set of hoops looked like and how it worked, but I didn’t know what it was like to wear a hoopskirt. How on earth did you sit down? When you did sit down, what happened to your skirt? How close could you stand to a gentleman, or, for that matter, to another lady in a hoopskirt? How could you dance? What happened to your hoopskirt if you were walking outdoors in a strong breeze? Did anyone ever get a chance to see your shoes?

But it wasn’t merely a matter of this detail or that detail, horses or hoopskirts; I was afraid that the whole thing was a load of crap. I sat there by the river reading until the sun set in nonmagical West Virginia. Then I moved inside to the light of the bar and read the rest of it. The whole thing was a load of crap.

I was so disappointed that it took at least an hour, and a lot more beer, before I could even begin to think about what had gone wrong. I considered that famous, iconic, touchstone story about Hemingway; he’s at an outdoor café in Paris (at least that’s how I remembered it), and he’s trying to write one true sentence. Well, at least I could console myself with the thought that I had written one true sentence: “I fear a great effusion of blood.”

What in God’s name had I been doing? When I’d made my Confederate stump speech to Revington and the good doctor, I’d predicted that Texas Lyndon would divide the country as it hadn’t been divided since 1861, and I’d been right. I’d begun writing my novel out of admiration for the cantankerous, rebellious, independent spirit of the Confederates—their willingness to stand up to the Yankee war machine—but, much more to the point of my life and times, it was the Vietnamese who were now, at this very moment, standing up to the Yankee war machine. The great effusion of blood had already begun, and my country was sinking into waste and damnation, and what had I been doing? I had just spent a year and a half in a Romantic haze glorifying men on horseback. Oh, shit: I RIDE FROM WEST VIRGINIA ON A BIG WHITE HORSE .

• • •

HOW MUCH had Vietnam colored my strange writing? How much had Vietnam influenced the way I thought about the Civil War? Much more, I suspected, than I had known at the time. I had never felt as strongly about any public issue as I did about Vietnam. There were no shades of grey for me, no complexities. Whether viewed through the lens of simple morality or that of realpolitik, the war was stupid and wrong; it ran counter to every American ideal I’d been taught in grade school; the longer it went on, the more deeply I felt about it until it came to represent for me everything that was wrong with America—a tragedy, an obscenity, a national disgrace from which we might never recover. A number of different forces had brought me to that conviction. I’d read histories of Vietnam, knew about the traditional Vietnamese mistrust of China, knew about French colonialism. I’d read accounts of American foreign policy, knew about our Cold War fondness for backing repressive right-wing dictatorships. I’d been gratified to see my high-school hero, Allen Ginsberg, protesting against the war. I’d followed the public debate; as much as I’d detested him, I’d voted for Lyndon Johnson, the peace candidate. It had seemed right to me, even inevitable, that Martin Luther King should come out against the war. But the emotional core of my feelings, that rock-solid certainty, centered on an image I had seen on television for only a few seconds, would see later in a famous still photograph.

Cohen and I were in the small room that we’d shared in his uncle’s hotel in the spring of 1963, watching the eleven o’clock news to see again what we had already seen on the six o’clock news—the image of a Buddhist monk burning himself up in Saigon, a man sitting in a perfect lotus position, unmoving, as flames consumed him. I felt again the same visceral horror I’d felt the last time I’d seen it. That image changed me in a fundamental way, as the photographs from the Nazi death camps had changed me when I’d been a boy. The reporters who covered the story did not dignify that burning monk with a name, and it would not be until years later that I would learn that his name was Thich Quang Duc, that he did not move a muscle or utter a sound as he burned to death, that the Buddhist monks and nuns had been distributing leaflets calling for the government to show charity and compassion to all religions. American reporters at the time covered the event as though it were merely a protest against the anti-Buddhist policies of the Diem government—a regime that I knew was vile, repressive, corrupt, and supported by the United States. But Cohen and I saw in that image of the burning monk something far more significant.

On some level (as Cohen would have said), we were both Buddhists. Looking back now, I can see how half-baked and silly we were—as Cassandra once called us, “a pair of Buddhist Boy Scouts”—but we were trying at least to practice Right Action. Vietnam was a largely Buddhist country. That burning monk was not some impossibly distant alien figure to us; he was our brother. When I saw that burning monk, I knew that the United States of America had no business in Vietnam in any capacity whatsoever.

Although we had to be up early the next day for the morning shift, Cohen and I walked on the beach behind the hotel until long after midnight. The sea curled in with that swoosh and roar I could admire but never quite love because the Ohio River didn’t do that; the moon was reflected in the sea. Miami Beach was too beautiful, too peaceful, too perfect, too far from Vietnam. Cohen and I walked up and down on the smooth sand for an hour, neither of us saying anything. Then, suddenly, I knew what to say; I was amazed that I hadn’t thought of it before: “All is burning. And what is all that is burning? The eye is burning, visible forms are burning . . .”

I couldn’t remember much more of the Sutra than that, but Cohen, smiling, completed the opening: “Visual consciousness is burning, visual impression is burning, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful, or neither painful nor pleasant, arises on account of the visual impression, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of craving, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion . . . burning with birth, aging, and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.”

We walked farther without speaking. We were both of us, I’m sure, still thinking of the Sutra; as many of them do, it continues on as formally as a theorem in mathematics, telling us that sound, smell, taste, touch, and even consciousness itself is burning. A monk who understands that everything is burning loses attachment to these manifestations—and we were both still thinking of the burning monk in Saigon.

“Being dispassionate, he becomes detached,” Cohen said in his oddly singing voice. “Through detachment, he is liberated. When liberated, he knows that he is liberated. Birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived, what was needed to be done was done, and there is nothing left in the world.”