1

A windy, wintry tunnel of a crosstown street in the West Forties. A small hand in a tautly drawn white kid glove on my sleeve. I turned. A veiled face that was laughing. Snow blew desultorily between this face and mine. “Grant Norman?”

It was Milly Moore.

“I saw you from my cab, and I knew at once—I couldn’t have been wrong! Darling, get in there with me out of this wind.”

The driver had double-parked and the door of his cab stood open. “Milly. Good God.”

“Darling, get in!”

“I can’t. I’m late for an appointment. Right here. But look—”

“Grant?”

“When can I see you?”

Horns were blasting impatiently. The cab driver tapped out a quick summons to Milly.

“Do you live in New York?”

“Yes.”

“Are you in the book?”

“Yes.”

“Darling, I’ll call you.”

One more long glance through the spotted veil, with the filthy city wind blowing gray snow down at us, and, “Darling Grant! This is wonderful!” Then she ran.

“Milly! Wait!” I called, but she had gone. I watched her slim ankles above the steep black calfskin heels, and then I watched the cab pull away and saw the gloved hand lifted at the smirched window. It was over.

Had it happened at all, I wondered as I bought the newspaper that I had stopped for, and was pushed and shoved by less visionary comrades. I knew quite well what day it was, and what year, and yet my eye settled, as if for confirmation, not on the headline of the paper that I held, but on January 10, 1938. Snowflakes fell on the paper and left marks like those of tears.

Milly did not telephone me. She wrote, instead, a note that came next day to my Tenth Street walk-up. If she had telephoned, she might have prepared me for those developments of which I was still ignorant, but her note told me nothing that was new and too much of what was old. If you honestly want to see us, Grant, come for dinner on Friday, it said. It’s against the law to hunt birds’ eggs in the Park, and it’s winter besides, but there are other ways in which we can recall for an evening at least that time which only you, apparently, have been willing to forget. Come at seven-thirty. The note was signed simply Milly, and there was an engraved address at the top of the sheet—a Fifth Avenue number in the Eighties. The business of the birds’ eggs I found rather chilling, and it was that about which I wondered rather than about identities—to whom the plural might refer, for example; I simply assumed, foolishly, that Gregory Moore and his wife were now in New York and that Milly lived with them. My keeping her thus enclosed in the situation of her youth may have shown as much about my relationship to the past as her note showed about hers.

Friday was the next day. The address was for one of those monstrously solid granite apartment buildings with a gilded grilled entrance meant to suggest a palace of marble. I asked the doorman for the Moores’ apartment, and was told that there were no Moores. I pulled out Milly’s note to ascertain the address and I showed it to him.

“There is Mrs. Ford, whose name was Moore. Do you want Mrs. Daniel Ford?”

He had everything all mixed up, I thought impatiently, before the jolt of the fact struck me, and then, “Of course,” I said, and managed through my shock weakly to add, “I forgot.”

He gave an order, and the elevator boy stiffened for me and pulled back the door.

Should I have known? Why? I had nearly forgotten them in my own concerns. As we had moved apart, so had our worlds, and now, as the elevator lifted me up to them with velvet swiftness, that gap of worlds seemed to stretch almost frighteningly wider. Who were they now? And who, for that matter, was I? I had no desire to account for myself to them, to tell them how, after my mother’s death, I had, for example, spent my nights in fifty-cent hotels, or how, after my father’s death, which came first, I followed my mother west and became the hovering, incompetent, and unwilling protector of her poverty.

At Christmas, in 1929, my father’s gift to my mother was a bottle of bootlegged Scotch which she discovered only after the janitor in his office building had called the police who in turn had called on her to say that my father had gone down there that morning to blow out his brains. Everything was lost, and the house on Waverly Place, like the house in Silverton, and the contents of both, were not even ours to sell. I had been enrolled in a New England university and I managed to finish out the term, but by the end of it, my mother, as if searching for her home, had already gone to California with little more than a trunk of clothes and an inadequate annuity. In February, I followed in a day coach.

She had no relatives to speak of there, only a distant cousin or two by that time, and no real friends any longer, but San Francisco seemed to promise her some refuge after the savage reversals of New York. Yet when I arrived, I found her already disappointed, lonely and querulous in a small apartment on Russian Hill where she sat staring out of her large window at the usual items—the bay, the Embarcadero, a piece of bridge, Alcatraz. There was no room for me and she had of course hardly enough money for herself.

I enrolled at the University and lived in Berkeley, hashing in a sorority house and sleeping and studying in a basement room in a tennis club where, in exchange for the room, I acted as night watchman and where, too, when I was lucky, I picked up a child or two on the courts as a pupil. They were difficult, threadbare years, and I was glad when they were over, even though the best that I could manage then was a job as copy boy on a San Francisco newspaper. Everyone on the paper was expected to learn to write in a cozy tone of heavily domestic irony that I never quite managed in the small assignments that began to come to me, and the political views of the owners and the editor, maintained with a Parnassian detachment from the realities of 1933 and 1934, constantly irritated me. After eighteen months, I was let go, and at almost exactly that moment, my mother let go. Night after night, sitting in her small and by now rather shabby prison, a ruined old woman not yet fifty, she stared out at the lights of that other, larger prison, until one night when fog blurred the city and no lights seemed to belong to objects or even to represent them, she emptied a bottle of whisky and took enough nembutal to put an end to her pointless vigil. I found her the next afternoon in her chair, with her hands open, the palms cupped a little, as though she were begging for something.

Now came the fierce time for me, when I did beg, until, after six months of nothing, I found a job on a union paper that I suited and that suited me. My life slipped another notch as it was drawn closely into the tough intrigues of the water front, but out of this experience I was able to write occasional reports on west coast labor that found their way into liberal periodicals in New York, and these reports brought me, finally, an offer from one of these periodicals, The New World, to come to New York as a staff writer. I had been there a little less than a year, and now, as I stepped from that elevator into the foyer at which it stopped, I felt as much a stranger to myself as whatever life lay beyond it had become a stranger—alien, as when a child, staring into a mirror, suddenly sees himself there as someone else, an imperturbable interloper, a stranger in his place. It had been a long time since I had felt such a deep, detached sense of my life’s not being in the least my own. I looked at my gloved hand as it hovered over the button that would ring a bell inside and admit me, and my hand was like some totally unfamiliar object. Then of itself it plunged, and almost at once the door flew open and I was engulfed in arms.

Milly’s arms, around my neck, were bare and perfumed, and I was looking down into her blue eyes, dazzled with tears. The heavy, man’s arm that was around my shoulder and the hand that was thumping me were Freddie Grabhorn’s, and to look at him, I had to lift my eyes. He was half a head taller than I, as Milly was half a head shorter. They were both talking and laughing, and I was laughing, and for a moment everything was confusion as we stood there enclosed in that senselessly babbling embrace. Then all arms abruptly dropped and we stood separate, smiling, before closed doors, and I knew that I had, through this welcome, been returned to myself.

Milly’s smile faded as she put her hand on a great, ornamental knob. “Before we go in, Grant—I have to tell you this. Be careful of what you say when Dan is with us.”

“Of what I say?” I was still smiling.

“It’s important, Grant, that you—” Freddie began with an expression of utmost solemnity, but Milly broke into his speech.

“Let’s not stand out here any longer. Come in. We’ll explain.” She opened the door and we entered the generous vestibule of the apartment. There, among tapestries and large mirrors with heavy, rococo frames, Freddie took my hat and coat.

“What’s wrong with Dan?” I asked then.

Milly’s voice was hushed now. “He’s so easily upset. Ever since his parents—ever since that terrible accident—it’s been very difficult.…”

“You know, Milly, I’m absolutely ignorant. I’ve been three thousand miles away from all of you, and for almost ten years. I didn’t know you were married. You’ll have to start at the beginning.” I had answered in a whisper, too.

Then Freddie whispered, “Unpleasant things upset him. He’s likely to go to pieces when he’s reminded.… Any kind of violence.… You’ve got to remember that anything unpleasant at all may remind him.”

Milly was looking at me intently, Freddie was looking at me severely, and I did not yet understand at all why both of them spoke with that portentous quality in their secretive voices, or why, indeed, I should suddenly have found myself the center of that hushed conspiracy in the vestibule. But their lives, I was to learn soon enough, were lived in an atmosphere of intrigue, and not only the intrigue that attaches to Dan’s business, oh no, not only that. Had it been only that, there would be no story for me to tell.

“The beginning …” Milly was murmuring vaguely. “You didn’t know we were married, Grant? Yes, we must start at the beginning, if we can.” She seemed unable to be more definite, and looked at me with a helpless lifting of the eyes and a kind of plea in the sudden sharp elevation of her hands. Then, smiling brilliantly, “Oh, but it’s good to see you!” she cried in her friendly voice, and seized my arm. “Darling, come in!”

And then, after all that, Dan was not there.

It came to me that I had never seen Milly outside a country setting, that she had always been that free and striving creature of the summer, and that as I had known her, there was almost nothing that would have promised this. She stood before me in a long black gown of perfect severity except that the deep neckline transformed itself into a tall rolled satin collar that suggested the corolla of a calla lily if one could imagine a black calla, and from this rose her throat and lovely head, with the fair hair pulled severely up and back and fastened in the simplest twist, a housewife’s bun, where she wore a blue flower. Her beauty had grown, somehow, to exist in its calm, when she was calm, a development that one would no more have predicted than one would have predicted that she should have chosen such an establishment as we were now in as proper to her.

This drawing room was huge without being spacious, two floors in height but with great, heavy beams on its ceiling that oppressively reduced that height; walls covered in walnut paneling on which hung, with a cold and somehow cluttered air, eighteenth-century British portraits of bland dignitaries and dim, damask beauties; the whole full of walnut furniture, especially, it seemed, sidepieces, and doorways full of heavy draperies, and a towering fireplace that was all carving, and floors covered with oriental ostentation, and here and there, great stuffed ottomans squatting like the plump potentates that they must once have been made for. Then immediately it occurred to me: of course, the elder Fords. The little pharaoh and his sister-consort. I stood in the ambience not of Milly Moore but of Bianca Ford, and it was not only easy but really inevitable to imagine this room peopled with those small, important, comically regal beings—Bianca in her robes and large jewels holding court from one of those ottomans, he, in a maroon shirt under a navy blue jacket, leaning against one of those sidepieces and lecturing cryptically on a Raeburn opposite, his Edwardian beard moving precisely with his mouth. It truly was the past in which we stood.

We? There stood Freddie. There stood Freddie looking at me with fond suspicion in his flicking, hazel eyes. He was both heavier and taller than I should have expected him to be. His broad-boned face had filled out, and its skin gleamed with a kind of polish. He wore a dark blue suit with considerably padded shoulders, expensively tailored but rather theatrical, a little ineptly vain, I could not help thinking, in the attention that had gone to its lines and what they were to imply about the body that it clothed. His brown hair was lighter than I remembered and wavier, but perhaps that latter effect arose from its meticulous grooming. There was nothing gentle about his face, yet it was soft, almost pampered, certainly sleek; and as, in that moment, I looked at him, certain kinds of work leapt to my mind: he might have been the manager of a fashionable small hotel, or he might have been a man who sold boats behind a great plate glass window on Park Avenue.

“The beginning,” he was saying. “How far back is that?”

“Grant, sit down,” Milly urged, and took my arm again. We sat side by side on an enormous sofa.

“Christmas, 1929,” I said.

“Most of the fill-in can wait for Dan,” Freddie said with crisp authority, “but we have to tell you about him before he comes.”

“Where is Dan?”

“He’ll be down soon,” Freddie went on. “He came in late. He had a fracas at the gallery today—someone questioning his judgment on the authenticity of a certain picture. He was all torn up. Milly made him lie down.”

All the time I had felt Milly’s eyes upon me, and I was aware of the gentle rise and fall of her breasts with her breathing. I turned to her and was startled by the happiness in her face, so that I laughed. “Gallery, Milly?” I asked. “Do you mean The Ford Gallery?”

“It’s his now,” she said. “After his parents’ death, it went to him.”

“They’re dead?”

“The accident I spoke of. It happened almost four years ago. On the day of Dan’s graduation. It nearly killed him, too.”

Freddie said, “Milly saved him.”

“How?” I asked stupidly.

Milly spoke again. “Remember what Dan was like as a boy, Grant. You do remember, don’t you? How sensitive? Different from the rest of us? Don’t you remember?”

“Ye-es,” I allowed her, but thinking that there seemed now to be two Millies, this one who had just spoken, the urgent, distraught, intense Milly whose hands were clasped tight, and the calm, easy one who had embraced me five minutes before and carelessly called me darling half the time.

“You remember—he couldn’t ever bear to see anything hurt. How he shot. Only at targets. I used to have to bait his hook for him when we used live bait. Minnows. Really, he didn’t ever like to fish. Just as he hated it when everything between us was not at peace?”

“Yes,” I allowed again, and as I glanced up at Freddie I had a sense of him as the custodian of an experimental process.

“Sensitive beyond the norm, perhaps, to cruelty and pain. No curiosity in that direction—”

It was a portrait not without its truth, yet surely the truth was partial. I remembered that both Milly and Freddie had had an almost coldly scientific interest in cruelty and pain in which Dan did not share. When birds were struck with stones, he did wince and sigh while they moved closer; there was that butterfly and beetle collection, for which he did only the printing; there were certain messy experiments in vivisection on frogs, conducted when he was not present, and that business of blowing a frog up with a straw stuck into him that every country boy enjoys. The strong wish for peace and the naïve maneuvers toward it—yes certainly; but minnows, and the whole implied excess of tenderness?

“And then, to him! That dreadful accident. Well. Don’t you see? Darling?” It was as if she had been struggling for her point, and then, having made it, allowed herself to relax in that last word. Everything softened in it and she was looking at me with kind, candid eyes.

“You haven’t told me,” I said. “Except that, I gather, his parents were killed? I don’t mean to be stupid.”

She laughed. It was again the clear, welcoming laugh, absolutely open, and she said, “You’re not stupid!” with the bluntness of a child. It might have been the girl, Milly, who had spoken, and I said something like that, and she laughed again with her peculiar note of happiness, careless laughter.

But Freddie was solemn as he still stood there, above us, outside our sudden pleasure. He wished to take us out of it, it seemed, for he said, “Yes, Grant, you have to think of it as happening to him. To Dan, mind you. Not to you, not to me. We’d have taken it differently. But to him.” The whispered pronoun lingered on the air.

Milly was looking up at him and permitted herself to say, “Yes,” as though this were indeed a permission, and with that, Freddie went on. “Let me tell you quickly now. He’ll be down.”

“Yes. Please do.”

“You see, his mother and father had driven up to New Haven early that morning for the ceremonies, and then they were going to drive on to Silverton with Dan for the summer. Mr. Ford knew some short cuts. Country roads. He was driving an open car. Too fast. In the twilight he missed a turn. Dan was thrown clear of the car and, by some miracle, wasn’t even scratched. Stunned, but not hurt. He picked himself up and heard moans—and then, screams. The motor was still running. He reached in there, over their trapped bodies, and turned off the ignition. They were pinned in, mangled and pinned in and completely conscious. It was a lonely road. No cars. In his frenzy, he tried to lift the car. Hopeless, of course. Then he started to run for help. In one direction, then back and in the other direction, then back again. This went on—for twenty minutes, thirty minutes. Finally, by the time someone came, they had died. But only after these most awful agonies—vocal, you understand. Conscious. And something died in Dan. To have to watch that, to have to listen to that—if you were Dan!”

“Do you see, Grant?” Milly asked softly.

“Oh, I do see,” I said, and I did, in the fullest horror, but not only because Dan was that particularly sensitive person they had drawn for me—even more because of the particular relation, that accepted equality, that he enjoyed with those people, his parents. It was the shock of his grief, his lonely sense of loss, that I could most easily grasp rather than that other shock that seemed most to concern them, and of which, I felt, they were determined to persuade me. That persuasion I resisted, perhaps, in determining that now I would be cool, and so I asked only, “When did that happen? You said—?”

“June, 1934.”

“And then you were married?”

“Oh, not then!” Milly said quickly. “After the accident, Dan was in a sanitarium for a long time, you know, Grant, and—”

“A sanitarium?”

Freddie broke in. “But of course. He was a ruin, I tell you, Grant, a ruin.”

“Ah, yes.”

“A complete breakdown,” said Milly.

“And then?”

“Then the sanitarium released him to me only on condition—”

“To you? But why?”

She looked at me for a long sad moment. “Who else did he have but Freddie and me?”

I looked back at her and said, “You see, I am stupid,” and she shook her head impatiently and said, “No, no. Of course, you couldn’t understand, having been away from it all. You see, he had the bodies brought to Silverton and they were buried there, but my father persuaded him not to live in his parents’ house, to come to ours instead. He did. But it was only for a few weeks. He was—”

“He was ruined,” Freddie said, “he was just ruined.”

But Milly took up again, that second, urgent Milly. “My father persuaded him that he should go to the sanitarium. He was there for—”

I wanted them to go more slowly, and I said, “What sanitarium?”

“An excellent place called Windhaven.” From firm Freddie.

“Near Silverton?”

“No, no. Long Island.”

“Oh, yes. And then?”

“Milly started to tell you, Grant.”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“His doctor released him with the understanding that he be sheltered from shock. Especially from any needless experience of suffering. Or violence. That was to be expected. Of course. That is what we have been trying to say, Grant. From the moment you came in. So, darling, do mind what you say, won’t you?” In that single speech, she had changed again, from the coldly intense to the calm and warm. Her skin was very white, with an almost ivory pallor and glow, and her gray-blue eyes looked at me with a perfectly friendly plea.

Again I stiffened to reject that persuasion, which one would have found it so easy to accede to. I said, “And then you were married?”

“Quite soon. He came back here. Reopened this apartment. His parents’, of course—”

I interrupted her again. “But doesn’t this remind him all the time?” and I indicated the crowded, heavily archaic room we were in.

“He needs some mooring,” Freddie said.

“It’s the apartment he’s always known,” said Milly. “And we didn’t really think much of this, when he was—out, again.”

“Perhaps this place is bad for him,” Freddie said.

“He seemed so well by then, and Freddie did need him—”

“Freddie?”

“At the gallery,” Freddie said.

“The gallery,” said I.

“But, of course, he doesn’t know that either, Freddie. How could he? Dan’s father sent Freddie to college, Grant, and Freddie studied the fine arts, too—like Dan. Then, when he finished, which was a year before Dan, Mr. Ford took him into the gallery as an assistant, a runner; and as it worked out, you see, when the Fords were dead, and Dan was ill, there was, naturally, only Freddie to manage.”

“Oh, yes. Naturally. And now?”

“Now Freddie works with Dan.”

I laughed. “How really nice for you, Freddie!”

He harrumphed a bit and said, “It works out well,” and I smiled at him.

Milly cried, “And for Dan! Freddie’s marvelous at it!”

“I’m sure he is.”

“Here’s Dan, here he is now, and now we’ll talk about you, Grant.”

A door was closing on the claustral balcony that stretched across one end of that huge room, and Dan came quickly down the shadowy flight of stairs that brought him to our level, and then, with his arms out, quickly down the length of the room, saying, “Grant.” He seized my shoulders and we looked at one another. Whatever I had felt until now, even for Milly, had been tentative, but in Dan’s presence, all my earliest affections spilled warmly through me, and, holding his arms as he held my shoulders, I said, “Ah, Dan!” in a shaken voice.

“Grant, how good, how good!” he exclaimed.

Then again there was a kind of babble, as there had been in the foyer, and the four of us stood close together, and then Dan stepped back a little and Freddie laid his arm over Dan’s shoulders in a brotherly fashion, and Milly, too, had moved with them, and stood on Dan’s other side, so that what had been our momentary, exclaiming intermixture had suddenly become an arrangement, even a formation, the three of them standing together, I before them and apart, and Milly saying. “How do we look to you, Grant?”

In such apparent accidents lie our premonitions, were we but sensible enough to read them, as, certainly, there I was not. I simply said, surveying them, “Freddie’s put on weight, but it gives him a prosperous air.”

“Don’t remind me,” he said.

“Milly’s the most beautiful woman I’ve seen in this town.”

“Darling!”

“And Dan”—I let my eyes rest affectionately on his beautiful face—“Dan—”

“Yes?”

“Why, you look fine, simply fine!”

“I’ll light the fire,” Freddie said. “It’s not really warm in here, is it?” He turned away and struck a match to the logs that lay on the enormous hearth.

“And a drink,” Milly said. “Many drinks. Because we’re all together again.” She stepped to a recess beside the chimney and pulled at a bell rope, and in a moment a servant appeared with a cocktail tray. This was deposited on a table that, oddly enough, was moved before Freddie’s chair, and my surprise must have shown itself, for Dan, who stood looking on, said, “Freddie’s our bartender, Grant—when we can get him.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Martinis?” Freddie asked, and then, with an air of executive authority that was proper, I should have thought, to the master of the household alone, he began mixing them.

“You people see a good deal of each other,” I said.

“Of course!” Milly cried. “After all, darling, only you were unfaithful.”

I started. “That’s a strong word.”

“Is there any other that’s better?”

“Well—”

“Darling, what did become of that girl?”

“Girl?”

“That Margaret.”

“Margaret.”

“Your cousin!”

“Oh. Why—Good heavens, Milly, do you remember her? That ended in the summer that it began.”

“Did it?” Milly asked without laughter, and there was no word from the others.

I found myself stumbling through an explanation. “It was the next summer, I think, that she married. She married a middle-aged Swede. She’s lived in Stockholm ever since.”

“Has she?” Milly had gone miles away from me.

“Can’t we sit down?” Dan asked.

Of the three of them, Dan had changed least. He looked exactly as he should have looked: like a young and successful dealer in fine things. I watched him as he crossed to that sofa where Milly had seated herself again, and now the two of them sat as, a little while before, Milly and I had sat. If the accident in which his parents had been killed had had any terrible effects, they were not visible in his walk, his carriage, or his face. He still looked like the youngest of us, with dark, bright, expectant eyes, and an air, generally, that suggested anticipation. His hair was cut as it had been for as far back as I could remember—short, like a thick cap of clipped fur, the hairline rounded over his forehead, dipping in a little at his temples. His complexion was dark and he had that deep color in his cheekbones, and the mole was still beside his nose. He was a man now, of course, not a boy, but I could hardly have believed it if, in the lamplight that shone on his head, I had not seen a fragmentary glint of silver here and there among the dark bristle on the side of his head. Later, too, I was to notice the difference in his voice, but now I could only say again, “Dan, you look fine, really fine.”

“We want to hear about you now, Grant,” Freddie said, as he began to serve us his Martinis. And he said this abruptly, as though he suspected some intention in my remark that he was determined to deflect.

“Me?” I asked. “It’s the most common story. I am Depression’s Child.” Although I said that flippantly, I felt an inward shudder. They had been brutalizing years, I knew, in which more had been lost than gained, but I could not count the toll, only register it in such a shock as this, for example, with which I felt my difference now from these other three. In the overstuffed and overpaneled and overheated room in which we sat, with firelight dancing on their expensive and expectant faces, I let myself imagine that what they held were not cocktails but great orbs of palest topaz cut for crystal chalices, some fantasy of treasure and of fortune that had the effect, in turn, of making me feel slightly seedy, even of reminding me that I was well overdue for a haircut. I drank quickly from what, in my hands, was indubitably a Martini, the finest.

“We knew that your mother went west, and that you were there, in college,” Milly said. “But tell about it.”

I started to tell about my mother’s death, but Freddie, with some sharp intuition of the disaster that I was about to recount, perhaps simply from the tenses of my verbs, deflected me again. It was about the newspaper job that he wished to know, and I allowed the deflection, but when I came to my union work, and began to tell them an anecdote about police violence in a water-front lockout, he steered me away again and asked abruptly how long I had been in New York. It was all very expertly done, and although it was made moderately easy for him by the fact that he was constantly moving among us, in and out of the conversation with his Martini pitcher, his new cocktails and his pourings that would seem to draw him out of the talk for a moment and allow him to enter it abruptly at a tangent when he came back in, I could not help admiring his skill and I was never deceived into thinking that he had, at any point, withdrawn. But what a nerve-wracking task he had taken upon himself! I could feel his presence, its sharp, collected awareness, ready to spring at any point whenever I was talking, and I could feel him relax when I turned the questioning back to Milly or to Dan.

I asked her, for example, about Gregory and Miriam Moore, and for the few moments that she answered, Freddie even left the room. “They’re still there,” she said, “in Albany. Engrossed. It really was truest love. How I hated it!” And her brothers? One, it seemed, was in her father’s office, the other in a Wall Street brokerage firm. She seldom saw them. Then it seemed positively crude not to murmur something, if only the most cursory expression of sympathy, to Dan, about his tragedy, and so I tried. Milly took his hand in a spontaneous gesture of communion and protection and he asked wanly, “You knew?”

And then Freddie, who had come quietly back into the room, said briskly, “But tell us, Grant, what are you doing here?”

The question startled me. For a moment, with my sense of being a stranger, I thought that he must mean there in that room, with them, and I said, “Here? Why—”

“Here in New York.”

“Oh, yes. But haven’t I told you that?”

“No, you haven’t. Not a word.”

Milly said, “Another cocktail, Freddie dear, please,” and Freddie busied himself again with his bottles, his ice, his pitcher. Now I saw that Dan had fallen into a funk of grief, a reverie remote from us, his eyes glazed over as he remembered them, and I said, “It’s not very interesting work. Not half as interesting as yours must be.”

“But, Grant, interesting or not, we want to know,” Milly said, and glanced sidewise, apprehensively, at Dan.

Freddie, starting up with his pitcher, said, “Of course, we do.” He began to fill Milly’s glass, which was nearly full.

“Not for me, Freddie,” she said. “For Dan, for Grant, and you.”

He filled Dan’s glass and Milly took it and put it in Dan’s hand. He sipped at it, and that film lifted from his eyes.

“Not for me, thanks,” I said, and Freddie filled his glass again, and they were all looking at me.

“Well, you don’t read The New World, I gather.”

“No, why?” Milly asked.

“I’m on the staff there.”

“Oh. Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it?”

“For me, yes. But I’d guess it’s pretty far away from what interests you.”

Dan had said very little. Now he spoke. “That’s the magazine for which Drucquer does the art.”

“No,” I said. “He’s on World Progress. They’re much alike, I suppose.” They were not alike, of course, except in their appearance, and it seemed astonishing that Dan should be so distant from both that he would not know which critic of painting was associated with each. But he seemed hardly to notice my correction.

“Drucquer,” he was saying with a quaver. “An ignorant man.”

“Is he? I wouldn’t know. I’m not up on painting. I read him occasionally, that’s all.”

“Drucquer.”

“Drucquer,” Freddie broke in. “He’s typical. There’s only about one civilized art critic in this town. Just about one who writes out of real knowledge and feeling and a wide view of art as a whole. But the place is full of the Drucquers! The little dogmatic impressionists. Sometimes I think that I could do better.”

“Why don’t you try, Freddie?” I asked.

“I’ve been tempted.”

“Drucquer,” Dan said again, doggedly, as if speaking out of a stupor. “Drucquer.”

And Milly cried, half in agitation, half in gaiety, it was hard to know which, “Oh, darling, Dan, dear, forget him, he doesn’t matter!”

I watched Milly. It was fascinating to watch her. She was holding both his hands, those beautiful hands that had already made me think that he ought to make things, not to sell them. She held them, stubby brown hands with short fingers and broad, impeccable nails, in her white hands, plied them and pressed them, and urged him, with such sisterly solicitation, to please forget all that, that again I had the notion that here there was an excess, I did not quite know of what, but surely an excess. Now she was all the first Milly, the calm, possessed Milly who used endearments without thinking of them as endearments, the dear, darling, how-lovely Milly, all easy, all understanding, all—as I then began to see—all loving, and all untouched.

“Drucquer,” Dan said again. “I can’t be asked to meet that kind of opinion. The thing is, Grant, you see—”

It was now that I knew that there had been a change in him. I did not know how deep that change was, and certainly I did not know the sources of it (I was unwilling to believe entirely in their explanations), but there had been a change, that I did know. He spoke with an odd querulousness, in an almost petulant voice like that of a spoiled child—he who had never been spoiled, only always beatified. I groaned for him.

“You see, we have this new Van Gogh. An early work, apparently. We acquired it very recently, and last month we showed it.” He hesitated. “Or do you know?” he asked suddenly.

“No, I don’t know. I haven’t followed art news. Now I will. Go on, Dan.”

He gave me a stricken look. Milly’s hands rubbed his. Her eyes widened and narrowed at me. She said, “This is so silly. Freddie, for heaven’s sake, a drink.”

Freddie had rather sunk down in his tapestried chair. He roused himself and looked owlishly at all our glasses. Dan’s was empty, and Freddie’s own was empty, and once more he poured the ice water from his pitcher, dropped in new ice, measured with precision, slowly stirred, and moved among us. As he poured another cocktail for Dan and another for himself, Dan’s voice started up again.

“This Drucquer. He published a thing on the show a few weeks back. You didn’t see it?”

“No,” I said.

“And I wrote him. And today he came in. And he wanted to argue.”

I had been watching Milly, who looked depressed and beautiful, and for the moment that Dan spoke, I had closed my eyes, so that I only heard him, did not see him. The voice was like that of a superannuated invalid discoursing on his ailments. I opened my eyes again and saw that he had got his hands out of Milly’s, and they were fluttering before him in a foolish, ineffective way. I was about to leap up and say something directly to him, something that would bring him back to me, and to himself, when Milly took up the new cocktail and tried to put it in his hand.

“Darling, it’s so unimportant,” she implored him.

“Oh, I suppose so,” he agreed, and let his hands fall on his legs, but I did not feel that he was relaxing so much as letting something fall inside himself as his hands fell outside, letting something go.

Impressions had come too fast that evening, and they were all undefined, but through them all was the dominant impression of uneasiness, of Freddie watching, of Milly shifting back and forth from candor to some concealed complicity, of Dan, in spite of his appearance and first easy friendliness, living in some dark distress or deep indifference. But see how confused and vague even this impression was—distress or indifference? It could hardly have been both, or so I thought. And Freddie had ceased to watch at just the moment that Dan was most distressed, had fallen, then, into a kind of drunken indifference of his own.

The drinking, and Milly’s encouragement of it, had impressed me, too, and as we moved now into another darkly paneled, heavily beamed room to dine, I could not fail to observe that Milly and I were nearly sober, and that Freddie and Dan, if not quite drunk, were certainly not sober. There was wine at dinner, and the effect on the two was different. Conversation turned almost at once to childhood and Silverton, and the wine, together with Milly’s animated recollections, brought out in Dan something of his old animation, a dance of laughter in his eyes, the light breathiness into his voice. Freddie seemed content simply to be there, and sat in heavy silence as he emptied glass after glass of wine.

We were sitting at the middle of a long table. At the empty ends were thickly clustered candles and large blue hydrangea plants in silver bowls. Freddie and I sat side by side, and opposite us, side by side, sat Milly and Dan. It was that old pattern of the senior Fords, and as I looked across the table, I had a strong conviction that here again I beheld the relationship of Dan’s parents, or part of it—the brother-sister fondness and equality, the imperviousness to passion. What was missing was the eccentricity, the vast security, the comic superiority. And a child across from them to share in it all. Instead, they had me, they had Freddie. And yet, as I laughed and chatted with them over events that were stone dead to me, their pleasure in recollection warmed me. Quite simply, I loved them.

Freddie may have been listening or he may not have been. I glanced at him occasionally and saw him perfectly solemn, perfectly happy, and once he turned to me and his light eyes were filled with perfect benignity. “Come often,” he managed. Could I have been as mistaken in him as that muttered invitation made me feel?

After dinner, over brandy, Dan suggested music, and we listened to a lot of recordings of Scarlatti. The thin, rigid patterns of sound could not fill that room, which required more than the little sonatas of Scarlatti—the late Beethoven, at least—but something in the very smallness of the music was soothing to all of us, or so I felt, and as those fugal airs ran up and down, with their precise grace and absolutely controlled charm, I felt myself sink into a deeper happiness than I had known for a long time. Dan and Freddie drank a good deal of that brandy. I did not and Milly did not. I did not need to. What I felt inside me was warmer than any benefit of liquor could have been. And then, through all of that florilegium, Le Donne di Buon Umore, I sat looking at Milly’s profile. The proud head was lifted alertly above that foil of high black collar as she listened, and the music seemed like an adornment to her, and as I let myself reflect in happy idleness on their likeness, the kind of beauty in the music and the kind of beauty in her face—the composure that suggested not struggle but interplay between its own small elements which did not include passion, passion that makes struggle and makes large elements and makes composure great—and from that, on those two Millies, this calm, friendly one who listened to Scarlatti now with the three of us, and that other, almost cold one who, over her cocktail, had remembered my cousin Margaret whom I had nearly forgotten—with this, my mind at last organized at least something from all that welter of unsettled impression which had been this evening.

It struck me that Milly belonged to both these men and yet belonged to neither. Or perhaps I should say that she had taken to herself qualities of each of these men, possessed herself of them by a kind of moral osmosis. The first Milly, who was without guile, was Dan’s Milly; the other one, who was tensely cold, was Freddie’s; and neither was a woman. The first was a more gracious version of a part of the child that she had been. The second was a frightened creature who had fled outside the limits of her sex and was thereby also another version of another part of the child that she had been. And thus I faced an irresistible conclusion: there was still a third Milly, Milly herself, a potential woman, more tender, more beautiful, who needed only to be found to be awakened; and she was mine.

The discovery was thrilling, like new knowledge, when, in a moment, we are taking a felt step beyond what we have been, and I was suddenly alive with that knowledge, vibrant as taut wires in a wind. Some wilder music than Scarlatti’s sang up and down in my blood, some sharper, more stinging wine of happiness than that flood of youthful love that overtook me at dinner. And for the moment I was completely outside speculation, either as to the practical steps by which the goal of this knowledge was to be attained, or as to the difficulties, moral difficulties among them, that the pursuit would entail. I existed completely in the awareness alone, in that galvanized state of new perceptivity, and then, without meditation, I knew that for the first time since some lost point in my youth, everything had come into focus again. I thought that I knew why I lived.

I have felt it necessary to define the force of this emotion because this emotion was to bring me again, for a short time, into an active role in this strange relationship, and the justification of my actions must lie in part in the rightness, the inevitability of my feeling on this first night as we listened to antique music which, by its very incongruity, had plunged me into this experience of the immediate, of myself as collected, like an athlete ready to spring forward at a starting line, on the very pitch and point of the present. The rest of the evening was, of course, an anticlimax. During the remainder of the music I found myself in several unguarded moments staring at Milly’s face with eyes which, had they been observed, would surely have been described as greedy, for I felt my greed. But when the music was over and conversation between the four of us picked up again, I was ready to leave. It was late. We were once more on the subject of my work. I had no interest in discussing it, I wanted to save that, and the whole world of value that it carried, for Milly. Let her take that from me, when we found our time, as she had taken these other qualities from them in time past.

But still, out of their rarefied world, they questioned me—Dan ingenuously, Milly quite seriously, Freddie with his air of sly knowledge beyond ours. I said what could be said, so late on a liquor-soaked evening, about the function of liberal journalism, until at last Freddie made the expected remark about starry-eyed unrealities. I almost loved him for it. It was so right that he should have said it. It brought the discussion to an end, and it gave me a point at which to begin.

I asked him where he lived, and when he told me, I suggested that we walk together down a stretch of Madison Avenue to clear our heads. He seemed glad to. When we left, Milly laid her hands on my arm for a moment in a way that made me tremble, and I did not very much want to look at Dan.

I have had my uncertainties. I have had moments, yes, hours, when I have heard myself saying, I want assurance, I want someone to tell me that I am doing the thing that is right. Down twenty wintry blocks Freddie walked with me, and I had no such uncertainties then, no, not then, nor over that nightcap at last in an empty bar when, as before, I plied him with questions, trying to trap him. I could not know what it was that I wanted him to say, but I knew that there was something he could say. He seemed a villain. And, Say, say, say, every question of mine beguiled him, but he would say nothing, he was all clever, befuddled friendliness.

“Come often,” he had said to me at dinner—but who was he, to say that?