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It was a relaxed friendship. We were about the same height and had the same degree of athletic incompetence and the same curious lack of whatever it was that aroused loyalty and compliance in beautiful girls. But it seemed to me the most important thing—about both our friendship and our failures to become, for all the love we felt for women, actual lovers—was that he and I lived with grandparents. This improved both our backward and forward vistas; we knew about the bedside commodes and midnight coughing fits that awaited most men, and we had a sense of childhoods before 1900, when the farmer ruled the land and America faced west. We had gained a dimension that made us gentle and humorous among peers but diffident at dances and hesitant in cars. Girls hate boys’ doubts: they amount to insults. Gentleness is for married women to appreciate. (This is my thinking then.) A girl who has received out of nowhere a gift worth all Africa’s ivory and Asia’s gold wants more than just a good guy to bestow it on.

Coming onto the highway, Neil turned right toward Olinger instead of left toward the Turnpike. My reaction was to twist and assure myself through the rear window that, though a pink triangle of sandstone stared through the bare treetops, nobody at my house could possibly see.

When he was again in third gear, Neil asked, “Are you in a hurry?”

“No. Not especially.”

“Schuman’s having his New Year’s party two days early so we can go. I thought we’d go for a couple hours and miss the Friday-night stuff on the Pike.” His mouth moved and closed carefully over the dull, silver, painful braces.

“Sure,” I said. “I don’t care.” In everything that followed there was this sensation of my being picked up and carried.

It was four miles from the farm to Olinger; we entered by Buchanan Road, driving past the tall white brick house I had lived in until I was thirteen. My grandfather had bought it before I was born and his stocks became bad, which had happened in the same year. The new owners had strung colored bulbs all along the front-door frame and the edges of the porch roof. Downtown the cardboard Santa Claus still nodded in the drugstore window but the loudspeaker on the undertaker’s lawn had stopped broadcasting carols. It was quite dark now, so the arches of red and green lights above Grand Avenue seemed miracles of lift; in daylight you saw the bulbs were just hung from a straight cable by cords of different lengths. Larry Schuman lived on the other side of town, the newer side. Lights ran all the way up the front edges of his house and across the rain gutter. The next-door neighbor had a plywood reindeer-and-sleigh floodlit on his front lawn and a snowman of papier-mache leaning tipsily (his eyes were x’s) against the corner of his house. No real snow had fallen yet that winter. The air this evening, though, hinted that harder weather was coming.

The Schumans’ living room felt warm. In one corner a blue spruce drenched with tinsel reached to the ceiling; around its pot surged a drift of wrapping paper and ribbon and boxes, a few still containing presents, gloves and diaries and other small properties that hadn’t yet been absorbed into the mainstream of affluence. The ornamental balls were big as baseballs and all either crimson or indigo; the tree was so well dressed I felt self-conscious in the same room with it, without a coat or tie and wearing an old green shirt too short in the sleeves. Everyone else was dressed for a party. Then Mr. Schuman stamped in comfortingly, crushing us all into one underneath his welcome, Neil and me and the three other boys who had showed up so far. He was dressed to go out on the town, in a camel topcoat and silvery silk muffler, smoking a cigar with the band still on.

You could see in Mr. Schuman where Larry got the red hair and white eyelashes and the self-confidence, but what in the son was smirking and pushy was in the father shrewd and masterful. What the one used to make you nervous the other used to put you at ease. While Mr. was jollying us, Zoe Loessner, a new interest of Larry’s and the only other girl at the party so far, was talking nicely to Mrs., nodding with her entire neck and fingering her Kresge pearls and blowing cigarette smoke through a corner of her mouth, to keep it away from the middle-aged woman’s face.

Each time Zoe spat out a plume, the shelf of honey hair overhanging her temple bobbed. Mrs. Schuman beamed serenely above her mink coat and rhinestone pocketbook. It was odd to see her dressed in the trappings of the prosperity that usually supported her good nature invisibly, like a firm mattress under a bright homely quilt. Everybody loved her. She was a prime product of the county, a Pennsylvania Dutch woman with sons, who loved feeding her sons and who imagined that the entire world, like her life, was going well. I never saw her not smile, except at her husband.

At last she moved him into the outdoors. He turned at the threshold and did a trick with his knees and called in to us, “Be good, and if you can’t be good, be careful.”

With them out of the way, the next item was getting liquor. It was a familiar business. Did anybody have a forged driver’s license? If not, who would dare to forge theirs? Larry could provide India ink. Then again, Larry’s older brother Dale might be home and would go if it didn’t take too much time. However, on weekends he often went straight from work to his fiancee’s apartment and stayed until Sunday. If worse came to worst, Larry knew an illegal place in Alton, but they really soaked you.

The problem was solved strangely. More people were arriving all the time and one of them, Cookie Behn, who had been held back one year and hence was deposited in our grade, announced that last November he had become in honest fact twenty-one. I at least gave Cookie my share of the money feeling a little queasy, sin had become so handy.

The party was the party I had been going to all my life, beginning with Ann Mahlon’s first Halloween party, which I attended as a hot, lumbering, breathless, and blind Donald Duck. My mother had made the costume, and the eyes kept slipping, and were farther apart than my eyes, so that even when the clouds of gauze parted it was to reveal the frustrating depthless world seen with one eye. Ann, who because her mother loved her so much as a child had remained somewhat childish, and I and another boy and girl who were not involved in any romantic crisis went down into the Schumans’ basement to play circular Ping-Pong. Armed with paddles, we stood each at a side of the table and when the ball was stroked ran around it counterclockwise, slapping the ball and screaming.

To run better, the girls took off their heels and ruined their stockings on the cement floor. Their faces and arms and shoulder sections became flushed, and when a girl lunged forward toward the net the stiff neckline of her semi-formal dress dropped away and the white arcs of her brassiere could be glimpsed cupping fat, and when she reached high her shaved armpit gleamed like a bit of chicken skin. An earring of Ann’s flew off and the two connected rhinestones skidded to lie near the wall, among the Schumans’ power mower and badminton poles and empty bronze motor-oil cans twice punctured by triangles. All these images were immediately lost in the whirl of our running; we were dizzy before we stopped. Ann leaned on me getting back into her shoes.

When we pushed it open the door leading down into the cellar banged against the newel post of the carpeted stairs going to the second floor; a third of the way up these, a couple sat discussing. The girl, Jacky Iselin, cried without emotion—the tears and nothing else, like water flowing over wood. Some people were in the kitchen mixing drinks and making noise. In the living room others danced to records: 78s then, stiff discs stacked in a ponderous leaning cylinder on the spindle of the Schumans’ console. Every three minutes with a click and a crash another dropped and the mood abruptly changed. One moment it would be “Stay as Sweet as You Are”: Clarence Lang with the absolute expression of an idiot standing and rocking monotonously with June Kaufmann’s boneless sad brown hand trapped in his and their faces, staring in the same direction, pasted together like the facets of an idol. The music stopped; when they parted, a big squarish dark patch stained the cheek of each. Then, the next moment, it would be Goodman’s “Loch Lomond” or “Cherokee,” and nobody but Margaret Lento wanted to jitterbug. She was a former interest of Larry’s who was attending the party anyway; she lived outside of Olinger and had come with another girl. Mad, she danced by herself, swinging her head recklessly and snapping her backside; a corner of her skirt flipped a Christmas ball onto the rug, where it shattered into a dozen convex reflectors. Female shoes were scattered in pairs about the room. Some were flats, resting under the sofa shyly toed in; others were high heels lying cockeyed, the spike of one thrust into its mate.

Sitting alone and ignored in a great armchair, I experienced within a warm keen dishevelment, as if there were real tears in my eyes. Had things been less unchanged they would have seemed less tragic. But the girls who had stepped out of these shoes were with few exceptions the ones who had attended my life’s party. The alterations were so small: a haircut, an engagement ring, a franker plumpness. While they wheeled above me I sometimes caught from their faces an unfamiliar glint, off of a hardness I did not remember, as if beneath their skins these girls were growing more dense. The brutality added to the features of the boys I knew seemed a more willed effect, more desired and so less grievous.

Considering that there was a war on, surprisingly many were present, 4-F or at college or simply waiting to be called. Shortly before midnight the door rattled and there, under the porchlight, looking forlorn and chilled in their brief athletic jackets, stood three members of the class ahead of ours who in the old days always tried to crash Schuman’s parties.

At Olinger High they had been sports stars, and they still stood with that well-coordinated looseness, a look of dangling from strings. The three of them had enrolled together at Melanchthon, a small Lutheran college on the edge of Alton, and in this season played on the Melanchthon basketball team. That is, two did; the third hadn’t been good enough. Schuman, out of cowardice more than mercy, let them in, and they hid without hesitation in the basement, and didn’t bother us, having brought their own bottle.

There was one novel awkwardness. Darryl Bechtel had married Emmy Johnson and the couple came. Darryl had worked in his father’s greenhouse and was considered dull; it was Emmy that we knew. At first no one danced with her, and Darryl didn’t know how, but then Schuman, perhaps as host, dared. Others followed, but Schuman had her in his arms most often, and at midnight, when we were pretending the new year began, he kissed her; a wave of kissing swept the room now, and everyone struggled to kiss Emmy. Even I did. There was something about her being married that made it extraordinary. Her cheeks in flame, she kept glancing around for rescue, but Darryl, embarrassed to see his wife dance, had gone into old man Schuman’s den, where Neil sat brooding, sunk in mysterious sorrow.

When the kissing subsided and Darryl emerged, I went in to see Neil.

He was holding his face in his hands and tapping his foot to a record playing on Mr. Schuman’s private phonograph: Krupa’s “Dark Eyes.” The arrangement was droning and circular and Neil had kept the record going for hours. He loved saxophones; I guess all of us children of that Depression vintage did. I asked him, “Do you think the traffic on the Turnpike has died down by now?”

He lifted down the tall glass on the cabinet beside him and took a convincing swallow. His face from the side seemed lean and somewhat blue.

“Maybe,” he said, staring at the ice cubes submerged in the ochre liquid.

“The girl in Chicago’s expecting you?”

“Well, yeah, but we can call and let her know, once we know.”

“You think she’ll spoil?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, won’t you be seeing her all the time after we get there? Aren’t you going to marry her?”

“I have no idea. I might.”

“Well, then: you’ll have the rest of Kingdom Come to see her.” He looked directly at me, and it was plain in the blur of his eyes that he was sick-drunk. “The trouble with you guys that have all the luck,” he said slowly, “is that you don’t give a fuck about us that don’t have any.” Such an assault coming from Neil surprised me, as had his blarney with my mother hours before. In trying to evade his wounded stare, I discovered there was another person in the room: a girl sitting with her shoes on, reading Holiday. Though she held the magazine in front of her face I knew from her clothes and her unfamiliar legs that she was the friend Margaret Lento had brought. Margaret didn’t come from Olinger but from Riverside, a section of Alton, not a suburb. She had met Larry Schuman at a summer job in a restaurant and for the rest of high school they had more or less gone together. Since then, though, it had dawned on Mr. and Mrs. Schuman that even in a democracy class distinctions exist, probably welcome news to Larry. In the cruellest and most stretched-out way he could manage he had been breaking off with her throughout the year now nearly ended. I had been surprised to find her at this party.

Obviously she had felt shaky about attending and had brought the friend as the only kind of protection she could afford. The other girl was acting just like a guard hired for the night.

There being no answer to Neil, I went into the living room, where Margaret, insanely drunk, was throwing herself around as if wanting to break a bone. Somewhat in time to the music she would run a few steps, then snap her body like a whip, her chin striking her chest and her hands flying backward, fingers fanned, as her shoulders pitched forward. In her state, her body was childishly plastic; unharmed, she would bounce back from this jolt and begin to clap and kick and hum. Schuman stayed away from her. Margaret was small, not more than 5’2″, with the smallness ripeness comes to early. She had bleached a section of her black hair platinum, cropped her head all over, and trained the stubble into short curls like those on antique statues of boys. Her face seemed quite coarse from the front, so her profile was classical unexpectedly. She might have been Portia. When she was not putting on her savage pointless dance she was in the bathroom being sick. The pity and the vulgarity of her exhibition made everyone who was sober uncomfortable; our common guilt in witnessing this girl’s rites brought us so close together in that room that it seemed never, not in all time, could we be parted. I myself was perfectly sober. I had the impression then that people only drank to stop being unhappy, and I nearly always felt at least fairly happy.

Luckily, Margaret was in a sick phase around one o’clock, when the elder Schumans came home. They looked in at us briefly. It was a pleasant joke to see in their smiles that, however corrupt and unwinking we felt, to them we looked young and sleepy: Larry’s friends. Things quieted after they went up the stairs. In half an hour people began coming out of the kitchen balancing cups of coffee. By two o’clock four girls stood in aprons at Mrs. Schuman’s sink, and others were padding back and forth carrying glasses and ashtrays. Another blameless racket pierced the clatter in the kitchen. Out on the cold grass the three Melanchthon athletes had set up the badminton net and in the faint glow given off by the house were playing. The bird, ascending and descending through uneven bars of light, glimmered like a firefly.

Now that the party was dying, Neil’s apathy seemed deliberately exasperating, even vindictive. For at least another hour he persisted in hearing “Dark Eyes” over and over again, holding his head and tapping his foot. The entire scene in the den had developed a fixity that was uncanny; the girl remained in the chair and read magazines, Holiday and Esquire, one after another. In the meantime, cars came and went and raced their motors out front. Larry Schuman had taken Ann Mahlon off and didn’t come back; that left Zoe Loessner to be driven home by Mr. and Mrs. Bechtel. The athletes had carried the neighbor’s artificial snowman into the center of the street and disappeared. Somehow in the shuffle of arrangements at the end Neil had contracted to drive Margaret and the other girl home. Margaret was convalescing in the downstairs bathroom. I unlocked a little glass bookcase ornamenting a desk in the dark dining room and removed a volume of Thackeray’s Works. It turned out to be Volume II of Henry Esmond. I began it, rather than break another book out of the set, which had been squeezed in there so long the bindings had sort of interpenetrated.

Henry was going off to war again when Neil finally appeared in the archway and said, “O.K., Norseman. Let’s go to Chicago.” “Norseman”
was a variant of my name he used only when feeling special affection.

We turned off all the lamps and left the hall bulb burning against Larry’s return. Margaret Lento seemed chastened. Neil gave her his arm and led her into the back seat of his father’s stately car; I stood aside to let the other girl get in with her, but Neil indicated that I should sit in the back. I supposed he realized this left only the mute den-girl to go up front with him. She sat well over on her side, was all I noticed. Neil backed into the street and with unusual care steered past the snowman. Our headlights made vivid the fact that the snowman’s back was a hollow right-angled gash; he had been built up against the corner of a house.

From Olinger, Riverside was diagonally across Alton. The city was sleeping as we drove through it. Most of the stoplights were blinking green.

Among cities Alton had a bad reputation; its graft and gambling and easy juries and bawdy houses were supposedly notorious throughout the Middle Atlantic states. But to me it always presented an innocent face: row after row of houses built of a local dusty-red brick the shade of flowerpots, each house fortified with a tiny, awninged, balustraded porch, and nothing but the wealth of movie houses and beer signs along its main street to suggest that its citizens loved pleasure more than the run of mankind. Indeed, as we moved at moderate speed down these hushed streets bordered with parked cars, a limestone church bulking at every corner and the sodium streetlamps keeping watch from above, Alton seemed less the ultimate center of an urban region than itself a suburb of some vast mythical metropolis, like Pandemonium or Paradise. I was conscious of evergreen wreaths on door after door and of stained-glass fanlights in which each house number was embedded. I was also conscious that every block was one block farther from the Turnpike.

Riverside, fitted into the bends of the Schuylkill, was not so regularly laid out. Margaret’s house was one of a short row, composition-shingled, which we approached from the rear, down a short cement alley speckled with drains. The porches were a few inches higher than the alley. Margaret asked us if we wanted to come in for a cup of coffee, since we were going to Chicago; Neil accepted by getting out of the car and slamming his door. The noise filled the alley, alarming me. I wondered at the easy social life that evidently existed among my friends at three-thirty in the morning. Margaret did, however, lead us in stealthily, and she turned on only the kitchen switch. The kitchen was divided from the living room by a large sofa, which faced into a littered gloom wherein distant light from beyond the alley spilled over the windowsill and across the spines of a radiator. In one corner the glass of a television set showed; the screen would seem absurdly small now, but then it seemed disproportionately elegant. The shabbiness everywhere would not have struck me so definitely if I hadn’t just come from Schuman’s place. Neil and the other girl sat on the sofa; Margaret held a match to a gas burner and, as the blue flame licked an old kettle, doled instant coffee into four flowered cups.

Some man who had once lived in this house had built by the kitchen’s one window a breakfast nook, nothing more than a booth, a table between two high-backed benches. I sat in it and read all the words I could see:

“Salt,” “Pepper,” “Have Some LUMPS,” “December,” “Mohn’s Milk Inc.—A Very Merry Christmas and Joyous New Year—Mohn’s Milk Is Safe Milk—’Mommy, Make It Mohn’s!,’ ” “MATCHES,” ” HOTPOINT,” “p R E s s,” “Magee Stove FEDERAL & Furnace Corp.,” “God Is In This House,” “Ave Maria Gratia Plena,” “SHREDDED WHEAT Benefits Exciting New Pattern KUNGSHOLM.” After serving the two on the sofa, Margaret came to me with coffee and sat down opposite me in the booth. Fatigue had raised two blue welts beneath her eyes.

“Well,” I asked her, “did you have a good time?”

She smiled and glanced down and made the small sound “Ch,” vestigal of “Jesus.” With absent-minded delicacy she stirred her coffee, lifting and replacing the spoon without a ripple.

“Rather odd at the end,” I said, “not even the host there.”

“He took Ann Mahlon home.”

“I know.” I was surprised that she knew, having been sick in the bathroom for that hour.

“You sound jealous,” she added.

“Who does? I do? I don’t.”

“You like her, John, don’t you?” Her using my first name and the quality of her question did not, although except for a few parties we had hardly met, seem forward, considering the hour and that she had brought me coffee. There is very little further to go with a girl who has brought you coffee.

“Oh, I like everybody,” I told her, “and the longer I’ve known them the more I like them, because the more they’re me. The only people I like better are ones I’ve just met. Now, Ann Mahlon I’ve known since kindergarten. Every day her mother used to bring her to the edge of the schoolyard for months after all the other mothers had stopped.” I wanted to cut a figure in Margaret’s eyes, but they were too dark. Stoically she had gotten on top of her weariness, but it was growing bigger under her.

“Did you like her then?”

“I felt sorry for her being embarrassed by her mother.”

She asked me, “What was Larry like when he was little?”

“Oh, bright. Kind of mean.”

“Was he mean?”

“I’d say so. Yes. In some grade or other he and I began to play chess together. I always won until secretly he took lessons from a man his parents knew and read strategy books.”

Margaret laughed, genuinely pleased. “Then did he win?”

“Once. After that I really tried, and after that he decided chess was kid stuff. Besides, I was used up. He’d have these runs on people where you’d be down at his house every afternoon, then in a couple months he’d get a new pet and that’d be that.”

“He’s funny,” she said. “He has a kind of cold mind. He decides on what he wants, then he does what he has to do, you know, and nothing anybody says can change him.”

“He does tend to get what he wants,” I admitted guardedly, realizing that to her this meant her. Poor bruised little girl, in her mind he was all the time cleaving with rare cunning through his parents’ objections straight to her.

My coffee was nearly gone, so I glanced toward the sofa in the other room. Neil and the girl had sunk out of sight behind its back. Before this it had honestly not occurred to me that they had a relationship, but now that I saw, it seemed plausible and, at this time of night, good news, though it meant we would not be going to Chicago yet.

So I talked to Margaret about Larry, and she responded, showing really quite an acute sense of him. To me, considering so seriously the personality of a childhood friend, as if overnight he had become a factor in the world, seemed absurd; I couldn’t deeply believe that even in her world he mattered much. Larry Schuman, in little more than a year, had become nothing to me. The important thing, rather than the subject, was the conversation itself—the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of those Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone.

She offered me more coffee. When she returned with it, she sat down, not opposite, but beside me, lifting me to such a pitch of gratitude and affection the only way I could think to express it was by not kissing her, as if a kiss were another piece of abuse women suffered. She said, “Cold. Cheap bastard turns the thermostat down to sixty,” meaning her father.

She drew my arm around her shoulders and folded my hand around her bare forearm, to warm it. The back of my thumb fitted against the curve of one breast. Her head went into the hollow where my arm and chest joined; she was terribly small, measured against your own body. Perhaps she weighed a hundred pounds. Her lids lowered and I kissed her two lush eyebrows and then the spaces of skin between the rough curls, some black and some bleached, that fringed her forehead. Other than this I tried to keep as still as a bed would be. It had grown cold. A shiver starting on the side away from her would twitch my shoulders when I tried to repress it; she would frown and unconsciously draw my arm tighter. No one had switched the kitchen light off. On Margaret’s foreshortened upper lip there seemed to be two pencil marks; the length of wrist my badly fitting sleeve exposed looked pale and naked against the spiralling down of the smaller arm held beneath it.

Outside, on the street the house faced, there was no motion. Only once did a car go by: around five o’clock, with twin mufflers, the radio on and a boy yelling. Neil and the girl murmured together incessantly; some of what they said I could overhear.

“No. Which?” she asked.

“I don’t care.”

“Wouldn’t you want a boy?”

“I’d be happy whatever I got.”

“I know, but which would you rather have? Don’t men want boys?”

“I don’t care. You.”

Somewhat later, Mohn’s truck passed on the other side of the street.

The milkman, well bundled, sat behind headlights in a warm orange volume the size of a phone booth, steering one-handed and smoking a cigar that he set on the edge of the dashboard when, his wire carrier vibrant, he ran out of the truck with bottles. His passing led Neil to decide the time had come. Margaret woke up frightened of her father; we hissed our farewells and thanks to her quickly. Neil dropped the other girl off at her house, a few blocks away; he knew where it was. Sometime during that night I must have seen this girl’s face, but I have no memory of it. She is always behind a magazine or in the dark or with her back turned. Neil married her years later, I know, but after we arrived in Chicago I never saw him again either.

A pre-dawn light touched the clouds above the black slate roofs as, with a few other cars, we drove through Alton. The moon-sized clock of a beer billboard said ten after six. Olinger was deathly still. The air brightened as we moved along the highway; the glowing wall of my home hung above the woods as we rounded the long curve by the Mennonite dairy.

With a .22 I could have had a pane of my parents’ bedroom window, and they were dreaming I was in Indiana. My grandfather would be up, stamping around in the kitchen for my grandmother to make him breakfast, or outside, walking to see if any ice had formed on the brook. For an instant I genuinely feared he might hail me from the peak of the barn roof. Then trees interceded and we were safe in a landscape where no one cared about us.

At the entrance to the Turnpike Neil did a strange thing: he stopped the car and had me take the wheel. He had never trusted me to drive his father’s car before, as if my not knowing all about crankshafts and carburetors the way he did handicapped my competence to steer. But now he was quite complacent. He hunched in his gabardine suit under an old mackinaw and leaned his head against the metal of the window frame and soon was asleep. We crossed the Susquehanna on a long smooth bridge below Harrisburg, then began climbing toward the Alleghenies. In the mountains there was snow, a dry dusting like sand, that waved back and forth on the road surface. Farther along there had been a fresh fall that night, about two inches, and the plows had not yet cleared all the lanes. I was passing a Sunoco truck on a high curve when without warning the scraped section gave out and I realized I might skid into the fence if not over the edge. The radio was singing “Carpets of clover, I’ll lay right at your feet,” and the speedometer said eighty. Nothing happened; the Chrysler stayed firm in the snow and Neil slept through the danger, his face turned skyward and his breath struggling in his nose. It was the first time I heard a contemporary of mine snore.

When we came into tunnel country the flicker and hollow amplification stirred Neil awake. He sat up, the mackinaw dropping to his lap, and lit a cigarette. A second after the scratch of his match occurred the moment of which each following moment was a slight diminution, as we made the long irregular descent toward Pittsburgh. There were many reasons for my feeling so happy. We were on our way. I had seen a dawn.

This far, Neil could appreciate, I had brought us safely. Ahead, a girl waited who, if I asked, would marry me, but first there was a vast trip: many hours and towns interceded between me and that encounter. There was the quality of the ten a.m. sunlight as it existed in the air ahead of the windshield, filtered by the thin overcast, blessing irresponsibility—you felt you could slice forever through such a cool pure element—and springing, by implying how high these hills had become, a widespreading pride: Pennsylvania, your state—as if you had made your life. And there was knowing that twice since midnight a person had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me.