Shatner's Star Trek cameo (if only they had consulted me)

Okay. I saw the movie. It was good. The time travel/double reality plot struck me as a little bit weak (is Spock's mother dead or isn't she?), and the snow planet monsters a little bit gratuitous. But it was a lot of fun, and the young folks playing the classic characters acquitted themselves well. One thing though -- why couldn't they give the kid playing Kirk brown contact lenses? Not that anyone asked me.

I do wish they had asked me, about that, and about other things. Why no tribbles, for example? And I'm glad Kirk at least ate an apple during the Kobyashi Maru training session, but that didn't seem quite sufficient a tribute to the fact that one of the charms of the old series was that these people were people who were, after all, at work, and who took breaks, had leisure pursuits, and ate actual food. Remember the old episode where Kirk's yeoman -- a girl -- serves him greens because he is on a diet?

And then there's the question of the movie's cameo appearance. Leonard Nimoy's "Spock Prime" was all right, but too extensive for a cameo. I recall reading somewhere recently that the producers wanted to work William Shatner into the story line in a cameo also, but just couldn't do it. Perhaps that's a polite way of saying "the dude wanted millions." If, on the other hand, they just couldn't think of a way to work him in -- well. That's ridiculous. Of course they could. They should have thought harder. If only they had consulted me.

I'm assuming, of course, that they could have written him into the script as an actor playing anybody, not necessarily playing "Kirk Prime" from the future. Why not? Shatner would have been huge fun as a janitor at Starfleet. As an instructor. As an ambassador.

Or this. To beef up the weakest section of the film, in which the preteen Kirk drives a car, really fast, as far as he can down an Iowa road and that's all.

*************

Iowa, ca. 2240. A blazing hot summer day.

A preteen blond boy races an antique 20th century red sports car at 80 m.p.h. along a dusty road. He is scolded by a furious voice coming over the car's intercom system, shuts it off and keeps racing.

A police officer on a personal motorcycle/hovercraft catches up with him and orders him to pull him over. While the boy is distracted, a vintage 20th century pickup truck approaches his path from a farm in the distance. The boy and the cop both swerve and stop at the last minute to avoid a crash.

The dust settles. Doors slam as the three drivers emerge from their vehicles. The driver of the pickup is a good-looking woman in her mid fifties. She takes in the situation.

Woman: Well, at least you're in one piece. And so is the car.

Officer: You know him, ma'am?

Woman: A little better than I'd care to, sometimes, officer. Of course he was speeding?

Officer: Excessively. Driving far under age. In a stolen vehicle, I assume.

Woman: Not stolen. Borrowed, sir. That should get him some time off, almost like for good behavior (she glares at the boy).

Officer: What's his name?

Boy (quickly): James Kirk.

Woman: My nephew. My sister could never handle him.

Officer (to Kirk): You got a license and registrations, kid?

Kirk: What's registration?

Officer (reading a hand held computer): According to this, the owner is --

Woman: If you'll allow him to drive, you can both follow me back to my property and see that he stays there until my sister comes to get him and claims the car. (Quietly) She's had a rough time, officer. If we could get back before her husband -- before the car owner knows it's gone, that would be good.

Officer (hesitates, glances at the distance, then at his computer. Hands the computer to the woman): Punch in your name, address, and sign it. When I file the report, you will be on record as the responsible party. That's an expensive antique, ma'am. And I don't know your brother-in- law.

Woman (smiling, works the computer and hands it back): Actually you probably do. Apples don't fall far from trees. But I can handle him. Thank you, sir.

The policeman roars off in a cloud of dust. Kirk and the woman face each other.

Kirk: Why did you do that?

Woman: I think it's kind of stupid to drive off cliffs. How about you? And because ... you remind me of someone. (Businesslike.) Get in the car and follow me.

Kirk: Why should I? (Woman whirls on him.) Okay, okay.

They drive to a farm, get out of their cars, and Kirk follows the woman across a dusty open space, rutted with tire tracks, to a stables.

Woman (peering in): Hey?

In the shadows and shafts of light, an old but imposing looking man is brushing a horse.

Man (still working): You're back early.

Woman: Have we got a spare charger?

Man: The device, or the animal?

Woman: The device. I met a ... motorist in distress.

Man (turning slowly to face the woman and Kirk. Does he recognize the young son of the dead hero, George Kirk of the USS Kelvin? Possibly. Do we recognize William Shatner? Definitely): He's a little young to be a motorist, isn't he?

Kirk: That's why I'm in distress. (Glances at the woman.) The cops caught me.

Man: Evidently not.

Kirk: I mean, they did until ... she .... (Turning to the woman.) Thank you.

Man (still working): I see. That's better.

Woman: I kind of signed off for him -- on his good behavior, the car, everything. It's all going to be in the nice officer's report.

Man: Is it.

Woman: I thought you could look over his vehicle. It's a real antique. You'd have a lot to talk about. And then you could see that he gets home? I've got some things to do.

Man: I can do that.

Kirk: It's okay. I mean, I'm not that far from my house. I don't need any help. Thanks.

Man (putting down his brushes): I'm not sure you'll get too far in Starfleet with that attitude, sir.

Kirk: What do you know about Starfleet?

The camera lingers on lifetimes of experience in the old man's face. Who is he? We don't know. The next time we see the preteen Kirk, he'll be the young man in the bar ten years on.

***********

Now I ask you. A brief cameo, a thrilling mystic jolt for the audience, no time-travel "Kirk Prime" problems, and surely no jillion-dollar fee for these few minutes for Shatner. I even throw in a good looking woman as a reference to, well, all Kirk's good looking women. Is she daughter, niece, wife? I throw in horses as a nod to the actor's hobby.

Now I ask you. Couldn't this have been fun? Why in the world didn't they consult me?

A serendipitous quote

"I have a reason for telling the story now. You know what people are saying in all parts of the world, that the present system of government deserves to die. Because some people have easier lives than others and a larger share of worldly goods, they want everything changed. To achieve complete equality -- or what they hope will prove equality -- they are willing to forego the personal freedom we have won so slowly and painfully over the ages, the right to think and say and do what we please. They are willing to bring back the tyranny of absolute government. Ah, if they only knew! If they could look back into the past and see for themselves what mankind has emerged from!"

Thomas Costain, Below the Salt (Doubleday, 1957)

When I was St. George

What do you think of as you lay in bed at night, you who have not even the rudimentary possessions and proofs of living – man, baby, dirt and food and exhaustion yes, but proof among the rumpled sheets that you have gone out into the world, have lived? What replaces the breath and blood of family beating in the next room, when your own childhood-ness, the waiting time, fades decades into the background, when you haven’t seen childhood cousins in twenty-five years and it begins to look as though the waiting was all for nothing?

My sister ekes out her hardworking smiling solitude with hobbies, concerts, cats, and friends, but surely that was not all she had wanted. Surely, an endless smiling attendance at her pretty nieces’ weddings was less than she had wanted.

And yet look at other people’s stories, look at the Sunday paper. Look at the Sunday paper often enough and Elizabeth’s life, any life, will begin to seem suspiciously, unrighteously quiet. For one thing there are plenty of young women, "contributors," with their pictures at the back of the magazine, all teeth and curls, already finished interviewing prime ministers. Then there are the local women in the newspapers’ society pages, all teeth and curls, who evidently sketched a more compelling pattern of living twenty years ago, and are pearled and prominent now. It’s not that I envy them. It is not enough that Elizabeth has never seen Venice (neither have I yet), and has no family.

No, read beyond the society pages and get to the meat of the thing and it will seem that not only is her life serenely closed, sheltered, it is also unjustly, inhumanly clean and untroubled. Genuinely good people suffer. How many strong women in the newspaper human-interest pages (on the front pages, for God’s sake), have survived disease, drug addictions, and the death of children? How many foreign women in the paper have lived through war, bombs, starvation, agitation, finally to be interviewed in bright patterned cottons, a soft nobility of expression in their faces, finally to speak of closure, humor, and renewal? Suffering and great goodness bestow maturity and decency, and more goodness, and therefore the right to be happy. Women open halfway houses for the battered homeless, using personal funds more modest than my sister’s own. Women are sometimes vivacious, cancer-stricken, sincerely loved local actresses or wine importers, and joyfully get married on their deathbeds and then are laid to rest a week after with three devoted ex-fiances and the new widower as pallbearers. I won’t have three ex-fiances at my funeral. Neither will she.

What great, great stories. It seems hardly fair that the humble, dull, and good – the mistaken, the waiting – should not get what they probably wanted, and then age, and run all the usual human risks, all the while not earning nearly the attention that the paper heroines do. All their potty adventures scream little but ego anyhow. Yes, she wanted the morphine, but she wanted to marry him first. If I were in that hospital room witnessing that, I would have either burst out laughing or stormed out in disgust. Of course I probably wouldn’t have been a friend of such a grand person to begin with. How horrible I, we both, must be.

Naturally you put yourself into stories. Sometimes they are all over in a moment’s thought. You attend elegant parties in black and pearls, black pearls, while the black city glitters below, outside large plate glass windows. There was once a pair of earrings for sale in the Metropolitan Museum of Art catalog, one black drop pearl and one white drop pearl, modeled on a pair worn by a Rubens Venus. You imagine wearing them, and someone complimenting you on them. You say arch things to prominent men, preside over meetings and deliver charming, mannerly rebukes to rising politicians. You have reason and income to see Paris, Rome, Jerusalem. Somehow good things, perhaps including a good man, come to you in mysterious compliment to your youth, as they seem to do to other women. You leap one night, overnight, into a world of Titans, and there is no point making any real plans until that happens and you know where you are.

Until you know where you are. Elizabeth works at the same company as our maiden great-aunt of sixty years ago, who also had her own house full of pretty things. One day I stopped in the middle of dishwashing to realize that my grandmother also married a mechanic whom she met at a church social, and had four children. Are women – and men – allowed their own lives, or do two or three patterns only exist, and taking up a pattern is part of the dignity of human experience? Then what of the noble women in the Lifestyles section? Perhaps they do know something different. Elizabeth’s friend Jane has a child with a hole in his heart. Thanks to several babyhood surgeries he has survived to the age of nine (but wait, it’s been years since I’ve seen her – he’s fourteen, no, nineteen), but Jane lives every day with the knowledge that he might have a heart attack at any moment. She and her husband vacation in Mexico every year.

If I could I’d call in the devil.
"Elizabeth" would give, not her soul, but her bodily favors to the handsome devil in exchange for the right to meet historic ghosts and eat fine meals and see beautiful jewels in compensation for the unbidden dullness of her "narrow, deep little life." She would talk with all her favorite medieval queens, and eat a clambake right in her own living room amid roils of steam, and have beautiful furniture of cherrywood inlaid with tiny hand-painted Italian tiles. She would wear oxblood-velvet gowns and green capes with yellow silk lining and have pots upon pots of yellow roses and bird of paradise in her bedroom every day. And the devil would appear dressed in evening clothes, a burly, graying figure, clean-shaven with warm brown eyes and heavy arched brows. He would appear suddenly, an immense rush of black. His beautiful voice would lie full and high in the back of his throat, sounding like liquor poured in a glass.

In the midst of all this, really, my sister’s company offered her a temporary position in Paris. She accepted it, thrilled. Perky, virginal Elizabeth was thrilled to go. I was terrified for her, but was busy anyway with a fifth baby.

She lived and worked there for two years. I read as many books describing France, and Parisians in particular, as I had time for. The French live for their marvelous food ... no, they scour their supermarkets for American maple syrup, and think chocolate chip cookies (with raisins) the height of chic. They luxuriate in fragrant baths, and consider the quick shower uncivilized ... no, they take very quick showers because water is so expensive. They drink gallons of water for their complexions ...no, they drink very little because they hate the indiscipline of needing to find a bathroom away from home. They are insanely cruel, they will smirk "How spiffy!" at you if your clothes look too new ... no, they are kind and even-tempered. Their favorite response to any mistake is "de rien," it’s nothing. No matter, all of it. How would Elizabeth survive alone?

Survive she did, speaking only English and getting things done for her company. American business practices have so far permeated the world, as she explained when she got home, that even the cultured, leisured Europeans have to do things like staff their offices overnight, to accommodate the calls and faxes that hard-working Americans make whenever they want, time zones and ancient local customs of gracious living be damned. Tiny French code-slights intended to rough up visiting rubes, if they are even done, will not matter much longer compared to that. So she was in her element, and besides was not a rube. Paris had to work around her. The men especially tended to be very kind to her. She found everything delightful.

That made for a new story. I love the stories in the paper, I’m sucked into them as we are meant to be, but afterward I have hated them and their heroines on her behalf, and almost hated myself. I was St. George, Elizabeth the princess in pink damask robes and a silver crown. The dragons were the heroines who led better lives than either of us do. Heroines, almost always heroines. Who decides who gets interviewed, and what is important? There is praise and glory everywhere. But the time has passed ferociously, and now she’s been to Paris, I really don’t care what makes her tick anymore.

Besides, didn’t medieval queens have interesting lives, and didn’t that undermine my point? A woman asked this. And then that insufferable Roger folded his arms and said in his usual slurry monotone, "I don’t know that we’re going to get anywhere, deigning to speculate how unhappy our fellow human beings are." Well, what on earth was I to say to that? His diction was professorial, perfect. The scents of coffee and pastries wafted across the store. I left, and joined a poetry workshop elsewhere.

Shining Path

There was a photograph buried in his father’s dresser drawer, a photograph of his father standing, in uniform, on a beach with a strange woman. They did not stand as a couple. Their bodies did not even touch, but from his father’s familiar hunched posture, from the look of his hands resting easily in his pockets and his easy smile and the defiant, slight tilt of his head – against the wind, perhaps? – the picture made clear that something powerful and pathetic and haughty bound the man to this scene, this sand, this woman. There were palm trees in the background, the only honest note of romance and of wind; later, from what little he learned from Jack’s, reticent Jack’s stories, Tom gathered this must be Ceylon. They had heard some of his stories, Tom and his sisters. The stories always conjured up the same image, of a man in uniform alone in the jungle, glimpsed as if by the gods through the shifting clouds on an Oriental scroll-painting. And then gone. The woman for her part was very pretty, though not as at ease as the man, with her dark hair and her scowl, and her big smile showing odd long teeth.

Tom always imagined himself asking his father about it, someday. Someday when the time was perfect, when they were alone, when a spell of sweetness and quiet had fallen upon them, as it sometimes can among people who love each other: a kind of evening hush to the emotions, to one’s whole character, when not a wind stirs, and old bubbles come to the surface and one wants to confess – a soup correctly, barely simmering in a pot is said to "smile" – and everything seems possible. Jack had almost seized such moments himself, once or twice, to tell Elspeth everything. Mercifully he never had.

Only the time had never yet come for their son either. Tom had grown up and gone off to his own war. When he returned, having seen and especially done things he still could not grasp were real, his reticent father strode forward from the crowd and locked him in a shocking, breathtaking embrace. In his daze Tom almost said, "Gee, I didn’t know I was that important." More important than any cause, evidently. What a strange thought. But they hugged him, everyone, on his return, as if it were true. And if his survival was that blessed, why had he gone at all? Each dazed thought limped along after the other. He was thinking in language again, for the first time in a long time. Was it the same at his father’s homecoming? Jack had merely returned a married man as usual and got on with earning his living, professor of Oriental languages and history, unroller of cloud-filled scrolls. Maybe long waits and ocean voyages home have something to do with calmer receptions, or maybe it was just the reality of victory. Tom went back to school too, not to resume teaching already mastered things, but only to begin to learn how to earn his living.

He sat down tremulously to the feast, and here is where his entire personality was emptied out, stirred around, and put back in, far more potent stuff than it had been before. He was more important than any cause, certainly, except this one – teaching – because in this one he became himself. It was a simple enough matter. What he learned, what attracted him to more learning, was basically an emotional postscript to his powerful father’s hug at the airport. That was why the lessons all resonated so. Everything he had known up to now was corrupt and a lie. That explained the hug. Even people, even heroes like Jack who pretend to have served goodness secretly just want their own sons to survive; nothing is more valuable than you – than me, Tom, and what I will begin to understand now, from new men, not my father. Tom was a good person, and no one who was not an ogre or stupid could fail to be moved, to have his interior stirred, by this new information.

Dear God, but there’s no tonic like a liberal university education. The specifics, about coffee and banana growers in league with the CIA or the misfortune of Lenin gutting Marx of his humanism, were only details. At the very first he was furious about those details, true. It was sickening to hear put into words, words and words and thousands of words, crazy angry things that could not be contested because there they were, in books and, worse, in films. Girls in class burst out sobbing in the flashing blue darkness. They saw soldiers invading a university, bodies in the street. It was hard to have flayed all sorts of simple assumptions he had not even realized were assumptions. His professors hated assumptions. Only children had them. "Common sense?" they roared angrily.

But Tom was good. He changed. Even his mother’s Bible instruction came back to him. "He that hateth reproof is brutish." And his father had hugged him when he returned, like any father. All people are the same, just people. The struggling human family must win through to peace on its own terms. No outsider has the right to judge. Better professors than Jack said to him, "We grow." Growth is painful. True. More importantly, it also guides us past and explains other pains.
An English comic novelist, and one of his father’s favorites at that, summed it up as "’Pessimism, etc.,’" but Tom never read that. It would have been too late anyway. What he learned was shaming and intoxicating and it cleared the daze. He learned a perspective, a way of looking at things from a kind of majestic trained underview, always perfect, seamless, brave, noble, dignified, true – in short, revolutionary. It amounted to a kind of victory after all, only better than his father’s because it was not tethered to a particular place or cause outside himself. Nor to a land. It was interior and perpetual and, most beautifully of all, political, so it could change, sharpen its sights at any time with the best of political truths. Provided it kept to the trained underview, of course, but what intelligent person, past his first pains, would not do that? Only a child would not. You could always spot the children by their stature.

When it was all over and he was a "Doctor" himself he went to a secondhand bookstore and bought a poster photograph of a lush jungle scene with an Oriental woman in the foreground wearing a conical straw hat. He put it up on his apartment wall to remind himself of everything he now was.

*******************

Naturally his ambition in life became to clear the daze for everyone, for the young, for all time. He became another Professor Howard, and a superb one. He also married and had a son of his own, and then got divorced. It was his duty and joy to settle down, right in his hometown, to bequeath to others all that he had won through the painful instruction of extraordinary men. They were great men, his second and real fathers, real veterans – the information they had at their fingertips! Where had they come from? Who had been the first to understand? – men wildly different from his father. He approached the gleaming glass and silver doors of the college that first August morning only hoping he could do half what they had done.

He could not. For twenty years he tried to whip up enthusiasms about politics and "shining paths" among nice kids who mostly kept strictly silent. Once every year or two someone would look back at him with his own eyes, when young, but to Tom that didn’t seem enough. He wanted disciples in the thousands. Most of them looked at him politely, as if they were all locked together in a dull zoo. They took notes. The young men had big biceps. Sometimes one of the eager girls telephoned the White House for information that would have been easily available at the dumpy little public library, but that too was rare. What was happening? How had it been so different before?

In his courage at least he was his father’s son, but finally even he got sick of it. He felt a failure, peerless in a pejorative sense – having no peers. Part of his trouble was that the world had changed (who could have imagined the wrong flag flying over the Kremlin?) but surely the world never changes as much as all that. His own teachers represented a long tradition and they had taught and thought through many changes and gotten stronger for them. The point was to go on applying the majestic trained underview to something, anything, but somehow teaching was no longer its venue. Not for him.

His new fiancee Paula, thirty-three and a former student, God help him, sloe-eyed, two curtains of brown hair like satin framing her face, wanted him to move away with her and take the journalism job she had unearthed for him. He told his ex-wife about it over the phone and she was delighted for him. "Go for it," she said. "I can’t believe you’ve stood it this long. No one we ever knew is still teaching." He felt like the stupid husband, ever the last to know.

"What’s happened?" he asked, and she said, "You’re in the boondocks, that’s what happened. You need to be in a big university or else researching. Closer to civilization, they’re a little more on the ball."
"This newspaper is out in the boondocks."
"That’s different."
Maybe. What should he do? Dad, what would you do? I cannot believe it of myself – Professor Howard, leaving teaching. Who was that woman on the beach? Did you ever do anything wrong, anything you would change if you could, do you have any regrets? What should I do? What can I best do?

*************

He walked up the shady front walk to his parents’ house, the old homestead, the house of his and his sisters’ childhood. His father and mother had aged from thirty-eight to seventy-eight and beyond here. Only forty years, or a little more now. He remembered the night his father had delivered the youngest, his little sister Norah, himself. Tom had peeked into his parents’ bedroom and had seen the open suitcase and the unmade bed. Jack had gotten Elspeth on her feet and was slowly supporting her, waddling, toward the door when she paused and held her breath and crumpled very still against him. In a minute she fumbled back, sweating, to the bed, and then Tom’s father caught sight of him and shouted "Go to bed!" and kicked the door shut.

Forty years ago. Norah was forty. Tom had not been afraid that night. He understood his mother was going to have the baby right now and that his father was going to bring it. Everything would be fine. And it was. The next Monday Jack returned to his classroom and to his colleagues’ congratulations and hearty smacks on the back. Young women looked on eavesdropping, wondering if the very private Professor Howard could possibly be more devastating.
Tom always associated Norah with the picture hidden in the dresser drawer, too, but really that made no sense. Surely he hadn’t been snooping that young. There was a treacly poem in the McGuffey Readers, wasn’t there, "Forty Years Ago," addressed to a "Tom." ("But the master sleeps upon the hill, Which, coated o’er with snow, Afforded us a sliding place ....") He had come back here after his war and his divorce and now he came back for – what, advice? He could not imagine his parents going back home, hat in hand, at fifty. They had taken in their own parents to live with them and all the kids by that age.

The October afternoon was splendid, but hardly seemed conducive to revelations and secrets anyway. The wind blew strong and the sun slanted up low under the blue sky, through the canopy of vivid green and yellow trees. Cars tooled along the busy street as usual, and radios played. Some girls rode by on their bikes. It was paradise, far more so than any place with sand and palms, but a businesslike, everyday paradise. And there was nothing simmering, or confessional, or twilight-ish to be felt.

"Hello?" he called, and let himself in the front door. Jack sat in a chair in a sunny window beside a potted palm, reading. He looked up and focused. "Tom!" he said. He rose stiffly from his chair and came and held on to his son’s forearms. "Tom. Sit down, sit down. How are you?"
"I’m fine."
"Your mother’s out shopping." Jack eased himself back into his chair at the sunny window.

That was either too bad, as it would make mere banter more difficult – there was no one like Elspeth to keep a conversation moving – or else it was a stroke of luck. What woman, even at eighty, wants to sit and talk about a photograph of an eternally young and mysterious creature at a beach with her soldier-husband fifty and more years ago? If his mother stayed away long enough Tom dared to think that perhaps the confessional, twilight mood he was after was his for the making. But then Jack spoke. You never knew, with him. Sometimes it seemed he had been dipped in manners at about age three and had never broken out of their hard golden amber. Sometimes he skipped all form, took advantage of the absence of female fluttering, and came straight to the point.

"So. Your mother says the teaching career is, uh ... has kind of hit a rough spot."
"What? Oh. Yes, I think so," Tom answered, plunging into it. He rubbed his beard. "I don’t know. It’s been over twenty years. Maybe I’m just burnt out, although I hate that jargon. Didn’t you get tired of it?"
"I had an easier subject to teach. It was a skill, nouns and verbs. Characters and radicals. It’s awfully hard to teach politics. I think it was Aristotle who said you shouldn’t. Not to the young."

That’s why I wanted to do it, Tom felt a bit of the old gorge rising. But for the first time in a long time he looked at his father instead, and considered him as he must have been, one professional to another, considered him as if he himself were an incoming, ignorant student, anxious to learn Siamese or something. Oh yes, he had heard about Dad, when he got older and entered the professional pipeline too. The famed Professor Howard. He was burly and handsome then, quite like the soldier – the officer, don’t forget – in the photograph. Young women made fools of themselves over him, no matter how many children they knew he had. They called Oriental consulates for him and told him so, when all they need have done was study their verbs. He remained always the soul of decency. He loved his wife, and looked the young women kindly in the eyes and explained what the assignment had really been. (Actually what he wanted to do was to wring their fathers’ necks and only then ask them how long they thought these little jenny-wrens could survive in the East.)

Circumspection with young wrens was a knack Tom did not learn as readily. He smiled too much. Forty years ago, Tom and Norah and all the other sisters stood in awe of Dad, of his big jutting features and the gravelled voice that lent authority to every look. They knew they were loved and stood in awe of that, too. Jack didn’t embrace children much then. For them he was a mysterious, pharaonic profile against a sheet of Oriental calligraphy on a wall. With their mother it was different. Tom remembered the way his father’s face corrugated up when he took their mother in his arms and kissed her. And she would tell her friends about him. She would say with exasperated pride that she had taken him shopping and he had picked out all her clothes, and they all suited her better than her own choices. What a joy it was to be married to a man who gave commands, not often but when they were needed, who watched to see when he could be of service to a woman.

Tom thought all marriages were like that. It wasn’t like in stupid modern movies – he watched them with Daniel, watched Daniel’s face as he watched them – when a man and woman laugh and have fun together and that’s supposed to be all of love. No. Don’t lift that, Elspeth. I’ll do that. It’s time – no, it’s too late? I’ll deliver the baby. You’re safe. That was love.

He recalled himself to the sunlit October room and the presence of his father, eighty, in the easy chair. "I wouldn’t have thought you can’t teach politics, teach the truth, but I suppose that could be it. I just don’t feel that I’m reaching anybody. Haven’t for a long time. These kids need credit hours. Is that all they wanted with you? I mean the successful teachers around me are the ones preaching to the choir now. God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. Those of us who still want to get them to think, to have an open mind, are ...well. Maybe we don’t belong in the boondocks, that’s all."

Jack nodded, and as a teacher picked out the one question in his son’s speech. "I don’t know. All those years ago I can’t recall anybody talking about credit hours much. I suppose that may have been all they wanted. I was teaching a skill. It wasn’t open to discussion. Thank God. Whatever else they believed in didn’t interest me. They weren’t my possession." He paused, noting the scolding tone that had crept into his voice. "It may be changing times, too. I think the worm is turning." He meant to express a thought that had come to him like a purr as he put down the newspaper this morning and gazed off, past his coffee mug, into the middle distance. Three separate headlines that day advised him that the topsy-turvy habit which had, to his mind, remorselessly and without his leave transformed his own father’s civilized world into his children’s barbarous one, was perhaps being outgrown. A court decision here, a referendum there, an opinion column elsewhere: it seemed people were at last trying to find their footing again. Thank God he had lived to see hope.

But they both grew embarrassed at speaking as it were past each other, in metaphors and quotations that may have made sense in their own private thoughts but did not adduce to conversation. What choir? What worm? What do you mean, possessions? I don’t consider my students mine. I teach them how to think, not what. Here between them also was the distressing memory, inevitable, of the time Jack had come to meet his son for lunch and had paced for a while outside the younger Professor Howard’s classroom, smoking, listening with pride, at first, to Tom’s lecture. This was more than twenty years ago. Jack was burly and grizzled. Tom, already an enthusiastic, arm-waving classroom performer, happened in the middle of his florid talk to glance out the door and see his father stop pacing abruptly, turn, slowly crush out his cigarette, and look daggers, like a basilisk, right at him. One professional to another. What had he done? His father went and leaned against a pillar, motionless but still in view, until class was over and the students streamed out. The two men ate lunch in silence, the pale blond son getting madder and madder and the dark father looming massively over his coffee.

Well, that was years ago. "Just let them learn," Jack had said then, spitting the words out with effort. "I know, Dad," Tom had answered, puzzled. They both knew it was not an answer. In the pause now, nevertheless, Tom, the former teacher, the father and provider of grandsons, felt love for his father well up like sugar in the blood.

"Dad. This is apropos of nothing, but. When I – when I was little I have to admit I went rummaging through you and Mom’s – through your and Mom’s drawers occasionally. I know I should have been thrashed for it. But I used to find this old photograph that fascinated me. It was of you on a beach with this woman."

Now that he had said it, he felt as terrified as if he were six and had been caught. Maybe Professor Howard would still thrash him. He looked up. Jack was smiling slowly, right at him. The basilisk smiled. "Yes, I know it."
"Did you know I had seen it?" Tom grinned.
"No."
"Where was it taken? Ceylon?"
"Yes."
"Before or after the bridge?"
"I’m not sure. Either way, maybe."

Either way. Tom was free to imagine Jack and the woman in some sort of bungalow the night before, she weeping, desperate, he grim but loving; or afterward, months afterward perhaps. Perhaps he strode up to her on the beach, limping, with the sun blindingly behind him so she did not recognize him. He knelt quickly, splashing sand on her thighs, and kissed her with all his force. She tried to speak but only gasped, laughing, and he shut his eyes at the sound of her voice. In a few minutes they got up, packed her things away, and retreated to privacy. Tom could hear the ocean outside.

"Who was she?"
Jack had a vision of her face the day before he left for good. It seemed to float in the surf, in waves caught in his memory, in the memory of an angle of sunlight unchanged in half a century, her face a mask of tragedy and anger. It floated there like a discarded native mask on the beach. Shame pricked him again, a cold little pin-prick in the gut.

"A friend. A very kind lady." Shame. Shame. Stop thinking about it. He had almost told Tom years ago, that day at lunch. He was so angry that day. You think you’ve turned over every rock there is, he wanted to say then. You think you’ve discovered pessimism. And growth is painful. Listen to this.
"Did Mom ever know?"
"No."
Tom leaned forward. "Don’t you think in the last fifty-odd years she’s found that picture?"
"I don’t think so. Married people have privacy."
I never did, Tom almost blurted out. "Oh. Well. Anyway, it’s none of my business."
Jack smiled. There was an uncomfortable pause. Then he said, "So, if you don’t teach, what will you do?"
"Paula has a job all lined up for me, actually. At an independent newspaper that’s doing quite well. It looks like I may be a journalist. Of course, it means moving."
"Moving. Where?"
"Just downstate. Not far. We’re looking at houses about an hour away."
"Well, thank God. Your mother will be glad to hear that. We’d hate to have you go any farther away than you are now. All you kids."
"I would never have moved too far from Daniel."
"Yes, that’s true. Well, thank God." He shifted a little in the chair. "A journalist! That’s wonderful. Wonderful. You’ll like the writing part." Jack was so relieved at not losing his son to the threat of relocation that the gorge that had risen, a little, just about evaporated. It looks like I might be a journalist, Tom had said, and Jack’s first thought, not a purr, reeled off unbidden in his head as if somebody else, not an aged father, had spoken it there. Oh my dear boy, always and everlastingly the search for power. Always and everlastingly teaching "how to think." People know how. Where did language come from?

"Yes, that and not grading other people’s writing and other people’s exams. These kids .... It’s not what I ever expected to do with my life, but I think it’s the right thing, now." He almost used the phrase "I’m in a place in my life where" but he caught himself, knowing Jack, the linguist, would hate it.

But Jack was moving restlessly in his chair and that made Tom nervous. It was silly to be morbid but he always felt, with old people, that any second might be the last. Jack tapped his fingers on the arm of the chair and then got up with surprising strength. "Just a minute," he said, and walked off down the hall to his bedroom. Tom looked out the window. Sun and sky and all the commonplace things that had been in the world half an hour ago were still there. A neighbor two doors down was still waxing his car.

In a few minutes his father returned with a parcel wrapped in brown paper. He handed it to Tom. "Talking of Daniel reminded me. I’ve got a few things he may be interested in. Both of you, I mean. You can keep them, or give them to him."
Tom took the package and began to open it while his father sat down again. Inside there was a uniform, well folded, a ring, a medal, a picture of Jack when young – yes, he had forgotten he looked like that – and a few letters. Oh my God, Tom thought, smiling a frozen smile as he rifled the package, the photograph is in here. He’s stashed it here and he’s going to give it to me. I don’t want it.

But it wasn’t there. In his relief, his smile faded. One of the letters, though, on big thick paper and very official-looking, almost nineteenth-century-looking, was just the one Dad had been rumored to have all these years. Who first told him she had seen it, Linda, or Pam? One of the sisters who had ended up marrying cops. How had he missed it in his own snooping? There was the famed enormous signature above phrases like "ambush" and "grievously wounded." "Your valour." Tom looked up.

"Well. All right. This is amazing. Didn’t you want anyone to know?"
"Your mother knows. So did my parents and my superiors. That was enough."
"I guess it would be." Tom stopped and handled everything slowly, one by one. "You’re sure I can have these?"
"You’re more than welcome to them. Hang them on the wall beside your own." This last came gently.

"Oh no. What, for some great victory? Killing people? Mine are in a drawer, too. I don’t know why I haven’t thrown them out."
Jack did want to thrash him. He kept silent for a minute. "Does Daniel know?"
"I don’t know." They looked at each other, both exhausted, but smiled wanly. "Probably."

Later that afternoon, after his mother had returned and they had visited for a while, Tom said goodbye, having forgotten all about asking advice, and went back to his own house and his sorting and packing in preparation for his move – and for a wedding, soon. "Oh, you’re finally giving away your old stuff, are you?" Elspeth had remarked to her husband, glancing at and instantly recognizing the brown paper parcel in Tom’s hands. "Is the ring in there? That was pretty valuable, wasn’t it?"

"Yes, it’s in there," Jack answered. "I thought it was high time somebody had those things. Maybe Daniel might like to look at them. They’re no use to me."
"Good," Elspeth said, and that was the end of it. She had gone on chatting and putting away groceries. Tom watched her. She was an unknowable lady in many ways, as reticent as Jack, and well matched to him despite their periodic, fiery quarrels. The "brainwashing" of her generation had been one of her most frequent conversational themes at the dinner table during Tom’s childhood, yet when her own children, unbrainwashed, free, got their share of divorces she snorted with private contempt. What she still called Women’s Lib had delighted her at the beginning; now she snorted at her young women neighbors who put two children in day care ("I raised eight!") and did not cook. Her brother retired from a job he loved and moved to Texas, and she treated this as a grievous moral mystery. "Things just got so different for him," she said, "new people coming on the job ...." She shuddered, a moral shudder, not a bigoted one. "It’s different for you young people, you’ve grown up with this. But people our age – it’s just too difficult to adjust. He had to get out." And that, too, was the end of that.

Tom watched her and chatted with them both and went on holding the parcel, another moral mystery. He felt he was holding the sound of the ocean in his hands, holding his father’s youth, and a bomb all in one. Holding also some woman whose fate and memories God alone knew. She stood eternally on that beach, young, pretty, and scowling, a passion untouched. It was impossible to imagine her, eighty years old herself. How ironic that Ceylon was a new country now, with its own separatist movement. He almost felt he had been there.

***************

Yes, but whom would he ever teach about it? Alone in his house that night he straightened up, abandoned his packing and went back to the parcel of his father’s things not once but several times. He opened it and took out the big, nineteenth-century- looking letter. It was not that Sri Lanka was not important. It was. How often had he bullied and mocked and prodded his students into revealing what little they knew of foreign affairs? He wanted them to care about something outside themselves. He wanted to give them the majestic trained underview – it was so simple – because he loved them. If he couldn’t do it anymore, who would? The idea of the world no longer being important enough to teach about ate at him; it was that, not unlike a cold pin-prick of shame in the gut, that he had to combat.

He concentrated on the paper. He might have been praying. I’m the son of a man who got a letter like this, he thought. The paper was so thick and had been folded so long that it seemed to hold itself up delicately and strongly in his hands, like an animal. After a few minutes he actually nodded at it. If change is needed, I can change. He once thought he could teach forever because he possessed the master key to political truths and teaching only meant infinitely copying the key. Now he knew otherwise. This was humility. He would accept his shortcomings, and take himself off to a different task in life. After folding the letter again – it closed in upon itself obediently, like an animal going into a shell – he put it back in its envelope and then back into the parcel. He packed it in a box of clothes intended for one of his dresser drawers, too.

When Paula learned he had made up his mind, she was thrilled. Looking forward to an engagement ring shortly, she went out and bought him a book of inspirational quotations, and laid a new bookmark in a page bearing a line which seemed blessedly appropriate. It was something about the folly of not changing when failure made change necessary, and it was a quote from the very same person who had signed his father’s letter. "When a cherished scheme has failed," he read. Tom was the opposite of superstitious, but he read the quote silently three times in Paula’s presence, laughed, then drew her face to his and kissed her deeply.

***************

They married, and bought a house an hour away, as he had assured his father. Tom saw a lot, more than ever, of Daniel, growing up so handsome. He saw more of his parents too. There was so much to do and so many distractions in his new job and life that after all he scarcely had time to miss the routine of teaching. On a practical level, he had first to grow accustomed, as Paula warned him, to a woman boss, Renee, a red-headed education major not much older than Paula. Tom was old enough and had been established enough in his previous profession to have never known a woman superior before. More humility. But at growth he was a past master, and he had chosen a good home for it. It was a going concern, this newspaper. Its circulation, thanks to a respected parent, climbed sturdily and it was well thought of. Thanks to Paula’s influence Renee started him with what he surmised were the more glamorous assignments. At any rate they interested him very much. He investigated the fate of a small independent radio station being hounded off the air in California, ostensibly because of federal tax irregularities but much more probably because of its coverage of industrial pollution and migrant workers’ problems. This was exactly what he wanted, exactly where he could make a difference.

After the radio station piece (the station stayed on the air longer than it might have) he started a series about wrongfully convicted prison inmates. He walked into a prison for the first time. There was no smell like it. Several men he wrote about had their convictions overturned and were released to freedom and their families. What else was he doing, really, than just pointing to a map and asking people to get outside themselves, to think about "foreign" affairs – it was the title of his column – to think about evil, to do something about evil, just as he always had? Only now, among grown people, he got results. He sincerely hoped the college kids were being taught adequately about Sri Lanka and so on, but for himself, he needed results. He had been baying at the moon for twenty years. Enough. His writing earned praise, and a following.

He was happy. Paula had twin girls, so beautiful, so beautiful. Some of the causes that Paula also wanted him to get involved with on his days off were, he had to admit, a bit dreary. Left to himself he would have thought the change he had made, the new work he was doing so well, was about as much as could be asked of him. He had ceased baying at the moon, he had ceased, so to speak, effetely opening locks with his master key, and now she wanted him to scrub the barn floor and water the animals as well. He was growing older, had long since reached the stage where, as the book of pertinent quotations said, "one wants to live as one pleases." When were you allowed merely to be human, when were you allowed pleasure, not occasionally (because you had to remember some people were suffering) but all the time? But he compelled himself. He accepted his limitations and strove to overcome them, and help her in homeless shelters and soup kitchens because it was right, not because he actually preferred it to sitting on his front porch with a drink and a book about painting. (Humility. But he did have some leisure and for it he found new leisure interests. Art turned out to be one. He loved Titian’s women, loved their sweet lordly faces amid russet draperies and silver-green landscapes. Sometimes his attention strayed even from his art books. He thought about wine, rocked his baby daughters’ double buggy, watched birds in the summer foliage. Good Lord, he thought. I’m becoming a naturalist.)

Occasionally a former student looked him up and wrote him, asking for a reference to apply for a scholarship or graduate school. He always wrote glowingly, gladly, whoever they were. Sometimes ex-prisoners wrote him, and at the sight of the smudged envelopes he felt a pin-prick of unease in the gut.

Tom was still young, just beginning a second life, and a new parent of young children. He could not help smirking at the descriptions of the great ports he read about in his wine books, "superb in the bottle now, but with fifty years of life ahead." And Jack was never any more forthcoming, nor any more judgmental, with his son than he had ever been. "You’ll find your niche," he had always said. That was his idea of advice, perhaps that was his generation’s idea of advice. Much good it does, to be descended from the strong, silent types. A strong silent embrace at the airport can send a son spinning into another world.

The next time they met they talked about the weather for quite a while. Comically enough, as time passed they both, like men, forgot Tom’s visit to the house that October day, and its purport. They would have found their own forgetfulness extraordinary if they had been reminded of it, and would then never have forgotten the subject again – the way re-reading an old diary can plant things in the mind that are never again uprooted, however trivial they were.

This was not so trivial. But they simply forgot about it. The photograph of the woman and handsome Jack stayed buried in a drawer. Years later when the time came to sell the old house and divvy up Jack and Elspeth’s things, it was accidentally, blindly, and forever thrown out.

Out of Sight

Anna came for two weeks in a row. She was a fine looking woman, a few years older than me, too tense and hunched to be pretty, but still fetching. She had thick black hair pinned up in a bun, and wide brown eyes and dark reddened lips, and above all the alert, staring look of a Greek statue come to life. In fact she was of Greek Orthodox background. In those days I still asked newcomers the ‘what made you decide to think about this’ question, because it seemed so cold not to ask. After all, there they were. Now I no longer ask, reasoning that it is not my business and that if they are the type to stay, they’ll stay, and eventually I’ll find out.

But I asked her, and that is how I learned. She fished about in her purse, seeming to lose track of what we were talking about. I thought perhaps I had embarrassed her. But she found what she was looking for and then raised her head and met my eye, as bright and confident as ever. "I have to take some pills," she said. "Is there a kitchen, or someplace I could get a big glass of water?"

"Sure," I said, and she settled her big black purse over her shoulder and we got up from the table where we had been eating sweets and drinking coffee after the service. I took her to the huge kitchen, and she got a glass of water, all the time happily talking.
"I had a liver transplant," she explained. "Two of them."
"My God."
"No, it’s okay." She poured a handful of pills from a plastic bottle into her hand and then counted them silently. I think I saw at least ten, all of different sizes and colors. Some of them were as big as the giant orange and yellow tetracycline capsules I used to take for acne when I was a teenager. It used to take me dozens of gulps of water to get them down, one at a time, and before I was done, I’d be in tears.

Anna gave her pills one final count and then threw them all in her mouth and knocked them back with one swallow. "Those are mostly for rejection," she gasped, the echo of water still her throat. Then she went companionably on.

"I was raised Greek Orthodox, but I haven’t been to church in nine months. Too busy with all this stuff, partly," and she smiled and waved the empty pill bottle before putting it back into her purse. We walked back out into the cavernous, yellow-lit social hall, with its sprinkling of people chatting about the perimeter.

"It started out with me just really liking this idea of ‘finding the sacred in the everyday,’" she went on. "I think that’s so meaningful – "
"Especially after what you’ve been through," I put in.

"You’re not kidding. Although with that, I had help. My doctor has just been great. I can’t say enough about him. We’ve really become friends. After my first surgery, he called me every day, just to see how I was, and said I could call him, and I did – whenever, if I had a problem, or if I just wanted to talk. And then after my second surgery, it was the same. For months. He’s only just stopped calling me in the last couple weeks, actually, and I still call him. I can visit him anytime I want, he said don’t worry about an appointment, just come in. He’s been great. I try to do little things for him, you know?"

"Little things?"

We sat down again at our table. "Oh, I’ve brought him books, and boxes of Jaffa oranges, and I’ve given him bottles of kosher wine for holidays. And then I got him those certificates, you know, about buying trees in Israel?"
"Oh, yeah. That’s such a nice program."
"It’s beautiful. And it’s the sacred in the everyday, you know? And I love how Judaism doesn’t believe that if you’re different, you’re going to hell. I never could deal with that. I mean, how dare anyone say such a thing?"
"It doesn’t seem to make much sense," I answered. "That’s an awful lot of people in hell."
"Exactly." She took a sip of her cold coffee, and then grimaced. "Of course, I’m having a hard time explaining that to my father."
"Oh, dear. Is he – concerned?"
"Oh, yeah. This is right up there with liver failure, as far as he’s concerned. I told him the story about all the souls standing at Sinai and hearing revelation, and about how I must have been there. But I don’t think he bought it."

We sat quietly for a minute, and then a kind old gentleman came up to our table to make conversation. We chatted with him awhile, and then with his wife; then Anna and I exchanged addresses and phone numbers, and shortly afterward, she went home, and so did I.

The next week she came back, and we sat together during prayers and then again during the oneg shabbat. "Oneg, it means joy, right?" she asked, and I said, "Yes." She was dressed exactly the same way she had been the previous week: black hair in a perfect, pinned bun – a style you don’t see much – dark, dressy suit, white blouse, black chunky shoes. I noticed again the pleasant raspiness of her voice, which I had attributed to a cold. Now it made me think of the tubes put down the patient’s throat during surgery. Or maybe she was just born with it.

And then, in the third week, she didn’t come back. I think I can guess what happened.
She went too far with her doctor. He chastised her – gently, ever so decently, perhaps after some really exorbitant gift, leaning against his desk with his arms folded and waiting to speak until his receptionist softly closed the door on the two of them. Or perhaps it was the next day after another late-night phone call, and that blazing look in his wife’s eye as she handed him the phone across the bed. Or perhaps he merely said something completely sympathetic and completely devastating: "Whatever you choose to do, do it because you need to, not because of me." Or, even worse: "I’d like to set you up with another, very excellent practice. It’s much closer to your house and they’re not nearly as close to early retirement as I am."

The mask of eager adoration on her face would dissolve, terribly, and in the blink of his eye, her coat would swing before him, and the door would laze back on its hinges. And she would be gone.

I never saw her again. If she is present among all the souls at Sinai, receiving revelation that day amid the heat and the rocks and the blaring trumpets – while no ox lows and the sea does not roar – this must be just the point when she shimmers, curiously, out of sight.

Drinking

The trouble with having a rich inner life is that it does not show, nor does it change real circumstances or responsibilities. Even secret love must be a bit of a bore, to all but lovers.
Mimi thought this amid the stifled whine of the airplane, as she turned her wedding ring back and forth in the square of upper sun coming through the window onto her lap. A silly conceit, to think of being closer to the sun than most of humanity could ever be for most of human history before. The big marquise diamond flashed beautifully. She had worn it on that finger for ten thousand days, twenty-eight years.

How she loved him. E perfecto, as Minnie sings of the bandit Ramerrez in the opera, he was perfect, so proud, so kind, so deferent. He was in love with another woman, a good sixteen or seventeen years younger than either of them, that Mimi knew. And yet there was nothing he could do about it, clearly nothing he wanted to do about it. She was safe.

The other woman was one of his liver transplant patients, twice over. He, the most decent of men, after he had put his hands in her body and cured her, had innocently found with her a second love of real beauty and pity. It was no one’s fault. They met, and found they shared a second soul. He used to stare into the darkness in bed at night, or at the opened, unread pages of his book, shaken out of himself. They were like people in an opera, exchanging one long wordless look, and then always hearing the same storms outside barred windows, always watching for the drape of a hem up a castle stairwell, ever afterward.

Why, just then? If it is possible to be tired of success, perhaps he was tired of it then, and tired, a little, of happy Mimi’s everlasting, smiling gratitude at life. Perhaps he was intrigued by a woman who did not pursue him, but lived quietly with death, and bent her head just so, smiling, listening to every word he uttered when he pursued her. They were circumspect. Very decent, very moral. Poor things.

When there was no need for her to see him any more as her physician, this woman had been asked to found a support group for other transplant patients at the hospital. She did it willingly, and would have done it even if the only available night for the group’s meetings had not been Tuesdays, the very night he sometimes kept late office hours at the hospital. So two Tuesdays a month, for years, they had a chance to run into each other in the halls. Their faces arced into joy. That was all, except for the occasional benefit luncheons, the chance meeting in the parking lot.
Over the weekend they had been thrown together for just such an occasion, had shared a room again in that poor old electric way they had. They watched, yet didn’t watch each other, thrilled if they so much as passed behind each other’s backs while socializing with old ladies. In fact they had long been such a fixture that people who had first heard some gossip years before would later unthinkingly interrupt their rare tete-a-tetes even now, blathering about the weather or about some task they wanted him to do on his day off. And then they would remember these were no commonplace friends, and foggily berate themselves for stealing the un-couple’s stolen time. The doctor and his former patient would act as though it didn’t matter, and resign themselves to the hope of next Tuesday, or a Tuesday after that. They would resign themselves to the hope of the next benefit luncheon.

Poor things. They had a rich inner life, the two of them, probably. For what it was worth. There was nothing anyone could do. The ring stayed on Mimi’s finger. Their rings stayed on, all of them.

Mimi’s elderly father had called at four this morning to say that her mother was ill. She had cancelled all her engagements and classes for the week to fly to Palm Desert to help them. Her husband had cancelled all his patients and meetings to drive her fifty miles to the airport. He had agreed she must go, he had sent her, he loved her, he was hers. She sat back in her seat now, closed her eyes, and enjoyed the warmth of the sun on her hands.

Mimi did not see everything. She never knew that the doctor had actually broken down enough, near the beginning of it all, to ask this strange woman to have an affair with him. He had asked her in such a poetic way that she had not understood what he meant, and so nothing happened. Mimi, at that time, which was the worst time, took a long weeping walk with her best friend to talk about her suspicions. The friend, grim with tact and anguish, said to her gently, they obviously think a great deal of each other, but I’m sure neither one is the type to do that. Strengthened, Mimi confronted him with what she thought was only his humiliating public crush. They had had a fight which left him gray-faced and furious. She had never dreamed he could look like that.

The other woman wept once, too, beside her sleeping boyfriend, whom she also genuinely loved and had loved since he took her to their high school prom. Sick of it, sick of it, she thought, her lungs boiling in the dark. After she refused the doctor, or realized she had done, he in a fit of pique and of shame ignored her for more than a year. It had been a lovely, exciting friendship of a kind, so not being a saint (and feeling more cheerful the next morning) she was bitterly hurt by this new experience. To be dumped. What, had she suddenly become a bore? She vigorously imagined turning to him in one of the hospital’s sloping yellow floodlit halls, holding out her hand, and saying horridly, "We met once, didn’t we?" But she lacked the nerve. Then she got angry, and ignored him for a year, too.

But – as in an opera – a storm outside the window, the drape of a hem up a castle stairwell, hearts streaming into each other, drew them back together. Her support group thrived. They met and smiled on those occasional Tuesdays. Other men saw him flinch at the sound of her voice, unexpectedly, in a bright suite where she normally did not go. Other women saw her try not to gaze at him. He ministered to other patients, who embraced him warmly and then moved on. Mimi had friends, they had friends as a couple, who ate dinner happily at their house, never guessing what such forthright privileges would have meant to half his secret life.

He happened to thumb through an old magazine once and found the cognac ad, Martell or Hennessey’s or whatever it was, with that glorious dark woman gazing out of the brown depths of the glass. Every man has a secret love, the ad said. The shock and pertinence were great. Love, comradeship, and denial – this rich inner life – all looked to go on indefinitely, and no one outside these three, these four, really, ever shaping their lives by it, nor giving a damn. The woman’s boyfriend, upon meeting the doctor, knew at once that this was the enemy, though he did not hate him for it.

It would go on until Mimi and her husband moved to Palm Desert too, or until perhaps the patient and her family moved somewhere, or until the un-lovers were, say, a harmless seventy-eight and sixty-two. Or eighty-eight and seventy-two. Who would care then? Or it would go on until the other woman died. Liver transplant patients cannot expect to live forever.

The plane flew on. Mimi relaxed, her eyes closed. He is still mine. He loves me after all these years and he is still mine, body, vows, duty, respect, history, ring, and all. I have seen him nod slowly when our friends talk about moral decisions affecting our children and our children’s children. Suppose they would fly to each other tomorrow, if they were free. So what? They are not. Besides, imagine them, the operatic ones really trying to make a go of it, unillusioned. Imagine their halting and stumbling over who snores, and who makes grocery lists and who takes out the garbage. ...You’ve almost got to be young.

He’ll go on being a doctor and playing golf and showing the neighborhood kids how he makes beautiful handmade paper in his basement mill, for our friends’ daughters’ wedding invitations. (They were the most popular couple on the block. Neighbors dropped by just to be with them, especially when it looked like they had other company.) And he’ll make nothing for her, never for her. Whether her face is impressed like a watermark, like the woman in the brown glass, into every beautiful piece is his business, not mine.

I will go on teaching. We’ll go to the Bologna book fair in March. She’ll go on swallowing a dozen anti-rejection pills, and working for the telephone company. He’ll throw me a party when I get my Ph.D.

Mimi remembered their children’s wedding receptions. She had paced the shadowed dance halls radiant in red silks and silver jewelry, speaking kindly to old women, his huge platinum wedding band shining like a piece of his soul on her finger. He loved her. That, and her fecundity of ten thousand days ago, was the reason for new weddings, new happinesses now. How small and simple other couples seemed, compared to them. There was the ring, blazing. She had the kind of love that moved airplanes. When it came to it she would be the widow, no one else. I am reality, ten thousand days and my large soft paper-skinned breasts still feeding him in the night.

She spent the rest of the flight chatting with a middle-aged man on one side, and helping a tense, very young mother amuse her baby with rattles and songs on the other. Later the plane landed in Palm Desert. It taxied to its gate. She could feel the desert heat already settling on the plane’s skin, and could glimpse through its scratched white windows the low, marled purple mountains abruptly rearing close, as if they had shouldered the city’s horizon out of the way. Mimi smoothed her pink and green suit, and stroked back her loose gray curls. She smiled at the baby, bade her new friends goodbye, and got up to fetch her bag and depart into the heat.

Postcards

At a hundred dollars a day, which is what Robin’s parents advised one should budget while vacationing, a ten-day trip to Europe should cost about a thousand dollars. And that was precisely what Ecotours charged. It included airfare as well. Robin was forty before she suspected that her high school, St. Scholastica’s, might have contributed a little to the pleasure of the eight girls – out of a graduating class of five hundred and twelve – who wanted to see Europe for their spring trip. Only the school’s generosity, surely, explained the cost of it jibing so neatly with Robin’s family’s rather modest expectations. The other choices Scholastica’s offered through other tour companies were cheaper and more popular. Many girls went on the Caribbean cruise, as did most of the teachers who were willing to be chaperones. Some went to Hawaii. A fourth choice, a week in Spain plus one day in Morocco, earned no enthusiasm at all, and was dropped from the list.

A thousand dollars, naturally, did not buy a Grand Tour such as a well-to-do young person of the century before would have enjoyed. Nor did it buy privacy for the eight representatives of St. Scholastica’s, plus their chaperone, Ms. Vollmer. Robin, her best friend Billie, and six acquaintances all had to join Ecotour’s previously arranged tour group of sixty-three girls from a dozen other suburban high schools. When they arrived in Europe they would board a huge coach and those seventy-one thousand living, laughing dollars would see, quickly, what so little money could buy. It bought a great deal of provincial West Germany, a little Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Austria and Switzerland, and a day in France.

From the very beginning, from the first parents-and-daughters meetings at school in the winter, Robin should have heeded the misgivings rising in her breast. It was not so much that she wanted to go. Billie wanted to go. Robin wanted the reputation for having gone, and did not want Billie to come home and explain Europe to her. Then the other girls’ mothers asked dotty questions – so it seemed to Robin, who had all youth’s harshness and little of its, little of Billie’s, foamy innocence – about whether there was hayfever in Europe (not in the Alps in April, as it turned out), or whether their daughters would be permitted to take their medications there. Then Miss VanDerAa, last year’s chaperone, warned everyone that the tour company’s European courier, Dr. Siegfried Jaschke, was an attractive man but a bit unenlightened about women. And, if the girls wanted to see Dachau, they would have to put themselves forward and ask for it. It was near Munich, but not on the itinerary. In those days World War II was only forty years in the past. The girls all knew what Dachau was.

But with this news about putting themselves forward, and about ten days with an unenlightened continental man, things seemed to be getting grisly and complicated. A whiff of adult choice, adult consequences, was in the air. Then the expense seemed to Robin to grow more catastrophic the more she thought about it. She marveled that her parents were willing to even think about bearing it. Truthfully, the option of Spain, cheaper, hot, rocky, and Catholic as it was, had really excited her. Was she sure the cloudy north appealed? All through their friendship it had become quite a stunt for she and Billie to play the sophisticates, liking opera and snails, and Billie, who loved to sing, was mad to see the places in Austria where The Sound of Music had been filmed. So, Robin supposed, the cloudy north would have to do. The two encouraged each other about what a glorious trip it would be, a thing easy to do in January. By mid-March, when premature homesickness was setting in, it was not so easy. They passed over a slight emotional hump arising when exuberant Billie announced one day in English class that she probably would not be able to go after all. Her parents could not afford it. This was after Robin’s father had already taken her to the bank to get a cashier’s check for one thousand dollars, payable to Ecotours. Robin acted shocked at the disappointment. In fact she felt partly relief, and partly a thin spear of ecstasy, at the idea that she might not have to go then, either.

But everything worked out. Billie’s parents found the money. The itineraries arrived: ten days in April chock full of activity. Luxembourg, Trier, Koblenz, Wurzburg, Rothenburg, Schliersee, Munich, Oberammergau, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Vaduz, Lucerne, Strasbourg, Metz, and back to Luxembourg. Return to Chicago, April 10. Robin had to go. The last, worst omen of all was that her period postponed itself for ten whole days, to flow the very morning of departure. She hurriedly re-packed her carry-on bag. Who knew what European women did at these times? Who could fancy wandering through European drugstores trying to puzzle out the German for "feminine protection"?

As the Icelandair jet peeled down the runway in the evening rain, she would have sold herself to be sitting safely home again, with her family and her gray cat.

The Icelandair flight gave them their first taste of Europe. They were served white chocolates filled with Cointreau, which Billie knew how to consume (she bit off the top and drank the liqueur, then ate the chocolate) but Robin spilled on herself. After-dinner cognac was freely available – for seventeen-year-old American girls. Billie had some. The blond stewardesses spoke Icelandic, did not smile, obviously not caring, not paid to care, how anyone felt. They never cleared away the dinner trays. Billie finally carried hers and Robin’s to the galley herself. For comfort, Robin took out one of the books she had brought to read on the flight, but it turned out to be an unfortunate choice. It was an anthology of short stories based on old episodes of Star Trek. It fell between the seats, and an unknown girl in the row behind picked it up and gave it to Billie, who passed it to Robin. There were giggles. Robin looked at the book for the first time with fresh eyes. Morose painted portraits of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy adorned the cover. What was Billie reading? She glanced over. Maya Angelou. Perhaps that is what gave a person the courage to take her own tray to the galley of a plane and face the European women smoking there. She had a lot to learn.

They refueled at Reykjavik, and shopped in the airport. The stop would only be forty-five minutes long. Left to her own devices, Robin would never have debarked the plane. Forty-five minutes was too terrifyingly small a window to risk jumping out of, so to speak. To even attempt shopping, eating, and using a bathroom in that time, which all the girls did, seemed to her the height of folly. Suppose the plane took off while they waited in line for something and they, any of them, were stranded in Iceland? In Iceland? But no. Everyone exited the plane. She had to also, or else look a ninny. At any rate she took the precaution of sticking to Billie’s side in the airport shops like a cockle-burr, while Billie bought lovely Icelandic wool sweaters duty-free.

Interminable hours later – it was still the same night of the day they had left home, only now it was about eleven o’clock the next morning, German time – the seventy-one girls rode slack-jawed on their coach through Trier. The courier, attractive Siegfried, spoke deeply, beautifully, over the microphone about Trier’s Porta Nigri, a Roman gate. Whenever he stopped speaking, Robin fell asleep. He tried to scold them into wakefulness by pointing out that it was Good Friday and the sun was shining and so be happy – a European would, evidently – but he had a hard time of it. It was on that first day also that he warned everyone about bidets. He recollected that young American ladies on previous tours of his had used them as toilets, much to the outrage of hoteliers who blamed him.

Three more things happened that first day. The girls were let out of the bus to change their own money at whatever currency exchanges they could find. At least ten of the seventy-one invaded one place exactly at noon. Robin knew that Europeans take long lunches and that they were all just about to ruin this man’s for the day. She turned to Billie.

"Look, it’s the first day," she whispered. "We all don’t need hundreds of dollars right now. Why don’t we each exchange ten, so we can get out of here?"
"No," Billie answered. "I want to get it all over with now. As long as I’m here, why not?"
Robin gave up. The shop’s owner waited on all of them, lips pursed, not looking at anyone. Robin longed to say, I’m sorry, but did not know how, and would not have wanted to look insufferable in Billie’s eyes by apologizing, either.

Then that evening the coach deposited them at their first hotel. (The management had very hospitably hung out an American flag on the balcony as a welcome. Two middle-aged women whose elevator opened on the lobby full of seventy-one American girls uttered some stunned imprecation at the sight and then pushed their way through the sea, saying "Schnell, schnell.") Billie had luckily been assigned to a room with friends, as she had requested. Robin, who had filled out the same forms asking to room with the same group, found herself bunking instead with the unknown Meg and Diane, who were friends, and with Maria, whom Meg and Diane did not like. Exhausted and miserable, Robin entered the room, smiled, and said, "Well. I guess we’re sort of stuck with each other for the next ten days." She did not mean to be coarse. She meant, generously, that she was sorry they were stuck with her, for she knew this arrangement was not their choice either. But Meg and Diane, also exhausted and miserable, were offended forever.

And finally that night they had their first dinner in Europe. The famous wiener schnitzel, breaded veal pieces, huge. Remembering Ms. VanderAa’s advice, Robin asked for "kalt milk" and got hot milk. Ever afterward, she hated breaded meat but liked hot milk.


Next day the whirlwind of the tour began in earnest. They barged on the Rhine, Robin wasting her one roll of film taking far too many photographs of small hilltop castles older than America itself. Siegfried pointed out the Lorelei. Billie and the others saw it, but Robin did not understand which rock, exactly, he meant, so she missed it. They saw the bishop’s Residenz at Wurzburg, with its ceiling frescoes by Tiepolo. Robin guessed that an Italian name this far north must mean something, so she committed to memory, not the name, but the look of the horses’ creamy breasts and underbellies as they flew in the blue sky. In after years she would recognize them in art books. There was a beautiful blue and silver room here, too, with many mirrors. Here, also, Robin and Billie accidentally got caught up in a German-speaking tour group – the white-haired man closed the door to the chamber behind them – and listened politely as he lectured to his compatriots. A couple of other girls from the bus had also been caught, but they solved their problem by loudly mimicking his rather pronounced vocal tic every time he paused for breath. Both Robin and Billie wondered how the lecture was going to end without one of the Americans present being killed.

Somehow they were able to rejoin the bus. They proceeded early in the tour to Innsbruck, where they saw beautiful white buildings trimmed in curlicues of orange and pink. Their bus passed a political demonstration in the street, which the temporary lady- courier speaking on Siegfried’s microphone nervously explained as a "peaceful demonstration ... for peace ...." When she took questions later from the girls, one asked her if there were any slums here. The two friends rolled their eyes and wanted to die from embarrassment and told each other so. They passed a synagogue.

As early as this, St. Scholastica’s alumnae had cohered to become the most forward of all the small groups on the bus. They sat up front, and looked around cheerfully. They, especially Billie and her new and growing friend Meg, had begun to pay a great deal of attention to Siegfried and also to Harry, the driver. Ms. Vollmer’s husband was a native German; perhaps they felt that gave them an acceptable adult connection to these men. Perhaps they were mature enough to cope with the foreign adult male, or perhaps they only thought they were. Billie’s superb figure and bright smile often got her mistaken for a thirty-year-old at home, and Meg was much the same, only tougher in face and manner. Siegfried’s tanned cheeks and rippling gray hair smote them. His being a man of nearly fifty, and knowing nine languages – not that anyone was likely to quiz him in Polish – smote them all. It was not long before Billie was sewing buttons on his trenchcoat, and Meg using her German phrase book to compose notes saying "Let’s get to bed," and stuffing them in the coat pocket.

And because of this and as early as this, Robin and Billie’s friendship suffered. Meg had come on the scene, and in her Billie had found the friend of her heart. They were wonderfully alike, happy, robust girls, loving nothing more than to laugh. By comparison Robin was a bit of a schoolmarm, and a jealous one at that. She and Billie had only met because their last names began with the same letter and so they had ended up in line together to take the freshman entrance exam years before. Robin now could not abide her friend’s camaraderie with this silly, late-come virago. Meg for her part thought Robin a mirthless stick. Robin drifted away a little, and joined other friends, helping to make up a new trio of skinny, athletic misfits. Compelled into friendship for survival’s sake, they were no match for the remaining five buxom private-school roses, all perfectly willing to shop and sing and flirt and drink, in English, in Germany for as long as the tour lasted.

In Munich they pulled into – and then out of – the mammoth colonnaded plaza where Hitler held some of his first big rallies. Robin tried to listen to Siegfried say which of the rows of columns were Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, but she could not hear over the talking inside the bus. They passed the ten-year-old Olympic Village, built on rubble from the war. A new guest tour guide graciously mentioned Mark Spitz. Being in Munich meant it was time to ask Siegfried to take the group to Dachau. Meg did it, suppliant but proud. Off they rode through high sun-streaked woods to a place that, fifty years earlier, people would have prayed in terror to avoid.
The bus entered a large gravel court and stopped, and the eight Scholastica girls and Ms. Vollmer got down. Siegfried had told them they could spend forty-five minutes here.

After passing a tree-shrouded gate area they walked across another big graveled courtyard, where, the brochure informed them, thirty thousand prisoners could be assembled for roll call at once. Foundations of the old barracks were marked by narrow concrete piers laid out on the sunny stones. A small concrete room, with a drain in the floor and a ceiling appearing about to bow in, was the gas chamber, never used, so it was claimed. A stone on a quiet path bore the chiseled word "Krematorium." Some of the girls claimed they could smell something. Private homes were clearly in sight about a half mile away. Were they new or old?

They saw the museum with its one striped uniform hanging under glass. There were two or three large photographs, time-lapse, of the surprised-looking face of a Jewish man under medical torture. In the second picture he closed his eyes. They saw also the ugly metal sculpture of corpses, and the ugly brick chapel meant to look like a chimney

Crunching to the bus across the prisoners’ courtyard, Robin wanted to bend down and take some white stones as souvenirs, but feared it would not be allowed and was unseemly. What would she say if her family questioned her about the rocks on her bookshelf? Oh yes, they’re from Dachau. "God," Wendy said, "can you believe it? Hitler might have walked here." Robin gave her a glance of great contempt. Meg was very quiet.

They boarded and drove back to Munich for lunch at a beer hall. It was Easter Sunday. Robin had the best sauerkraut she had ever tasted, and Meg and Billie sampled huge snifters of dark beer until the embattled waitresses cut them off. This meal was a rare pleasure, because eating and drinking in Europe had proved, for Robin at least, quite a trial. Ecotours’ package included a ready dinner every night, plus this one lunch, but it had not occurred to Robin that this meant every other meal was her own responsibility. She was mortified to order food in English from these people in their own countries. Compounding her trouble was the fact that she was
always a very slow eater, not unlike Europeans, really. She knew she could never finish the meals her friends could in the time they could. Hating to waste her money and then raise eyebrows at the end of a half-hour lunch by wasting food, hating as well to be archly accused of dieting, she fell into the habit of ordering quick sweets while everyone else, even tense Lisa and silent Ann, ate properly. Billie, the soul of kindness, sensed her friend’s predicament, and brought her up a croissant with a packet of currant jelly almost every morning.

Billie generously brought them, because as the trip wore on Robin fell in the habit also of seeking out privacy whenever she could, no matter if it meant going hungry. Billie felt sorry for her. Robin rarely breakfasted with the other girls and never went out in the evening with them. Part of her search for solitude was simply in her nature, and part came from habits formed living in a big family, where company was a given and isolation a treat. And part was the wretchedness of her situation. She gadded about with these girls, dined with them, slept with them, or tried to sleep. That was enough. She still roomed with Meg and the offended others, and Meg had a habit of staying up late smoking and singing, loudly.

All around the cathedral, the saints and apostles
Look down as she sells her wares.
Although you can’t see it, you know they are smiling
Each time someone shows that he cares.
Though her words are simple and few
Listen, listen, she’s calling to you –
Feed the birds, tuppence a bag
...Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag.

She sang, quaveringly. All this company made Robin’s solitary early evenings the solace of every day. Thank God, they all went out every night. She sat alone then, and wrote up her travel diary in peace.
She had to fight for every evening, however, for the girls did not like her sitting alone in the hotel room after dinner while they went out to drink or, once, to swim. How could anyone not want to swim in the hotel pool? But it was just things like this that were so complicated. No one understood. Robin was not cosmetically prepared to swim at a moment’s notice. Evidently they were. And her contact lenses were so uncomfortable that she took them out every evening, early. Of course she could swim with glasses or without them, but neither was a pleasure, and what if she lost them while they all played some stupid game? No, she did not want to swim, or drink, or go out with them, anywhere, ever. They took the keys with them and locked her in with her blessing. What if she wanted to go out? they asked. What if there was a fire? She was taken aback by that, but reflected years later that there had been no danger. She could always get out, she simply could not lock up again behind her. And she could not understand the first question at all. What kind of eighteen-year-old girl would have the slightest desire to go out alone in a foreign city at night? Where would you "go"?

Finally bowing before her determined, strained cheerfulness, they let her alone to write her diary at night. She had already happened to tell them she had made it a rule not to burden it with personal comments.

They came to Schliersee. It was a pretty town beside a lake ("see"). One afternoon the eight Scholastica girls walked out at leisure there. Robin wanted to see the lake. She could glimpse it, trembling in faint sun, through the trees and houses. If this had been a vacation with her parents, they would have gone to see the lake. The girls, however, were looking for a bar, in town, to go drinking. They drank every night, but today was the first day they had been free to go out purposely to hunt for the evening’s bar in the afternoon, in daylight. To do it right. Robin, savoring in anticipation her night in, accompanied them for form’s sake.

They walked along through the quiet gray streets still spotted with old snow. One orange car, with skis strapped to its roof, drove past.
Robin walked a little ahead of the group, who ambled along very slowly. In a few minutes the silence caught her attention. She looked about. She was alone.

She turned around and saw them. All seven had stopped about twenty yards back, at the driveway of the house where the orange car had parked. Two men had gotten out of the car, two private citizens, returning home from skiing, and had been accosted by the seven. They encircled them so closely that Robin could not see the men in the crowd. If the sexes in this encounter had been reversed, two women would have screamed for help. They clustered around the men for about five minutes.

Robin was dumbfounded. So they were hunting for a saloon, but they could stop for a few minutes to hunt down men. Was this what she was missing when she avoided their evening adventures? And they thought she was odd? The display brought, for the first time, a not very nice word about them into her head. She stood there alone and made a universal gesture of public bewilderment at the sky, hoping that some native peering out his parlor window would see it, and know she was different. Of course she was. She kept her distance from the group until the girls let the men go and swaggered up to her in a body like sailor queens having just received tribute from a conquered port.

They resumed the hunt. Robin walked with them, speechless. Of course they must go on, to find a place to drink. If Europe for her would be encapsulated in this awful memory, it appeared to be encapsulated, for them, in this: you could drink. You could drink. Dear God, you could drink. Robin wrote it all bitterly in her nocturnal travel diary, beside the tender descriptions of tanned and graying Siegfried. She wasn’t very fair-minded. Dear holy God and holy saints and Mary in heaven, you could drink. You could drink. In Europe, you see, you must see, you could drink. There was no drinking age. You could drink. You could have wine with lunch and beer with dinner. Or vice versa. You could walk into a bar and drink in the afternoon. You could drink before dinner, you could drink after dinner. You were seventeen and you could legally have a drink.

She wasn’t fair. Possibly they sipped – not drank – because they were sophisticated enough to want to fit in, unlike herself, who was childish and didn’t care. Ms. Vollmer, who accompanied the group everywhere but could do little else, lacked the heart also to tell them that she suspected, after one taste of "weisswine," they were being served vinegar because they were American. What they loved was not so much drink but the freedom – the intoxication – of hunting for it and indulging in it publicly. It was like a fairy tale, a dream from which you never woke up and in which you were never carded.

The girls on the Caribbean cruise at that moment could drink, too, probably, being in international waters and all, but it was not the same for them. They were mostly confined to a ship with a lot more teachers as chaperones. The girls in Hawaii could not drink at all. This, Europe, drink, men, it was unprecedented. Girls whose homes had not exactly been awash in the study of Old World provincial capitals (what on earth was a bishop’s Residenz?), but who had been reared to view alcohol as a forbidden Dionysiac glory, were sent to Europe and faced with a choice, symbolically speaking, between provincial Old World culture and alcohol. A few
nodded briefly at culture, but most instinctively drank with rapture, or at least stuck (like cockleburrs) to those who drank with rapture. They did not get drunk – "I don’t like this, it’s not horrible but it feels weird," Wendy said on her one tipsy night – but they searched for drink. Searching for, loving, thinking about drink crowned each day’s happiness, as much as solitude crowned Robin’s.

Robin called them a bad name in her head, but they were not, really. They were young. Not necessarily by European standards. Not like the German children who take their exams, for better or for worse, at fifteen, and have it decided then whether they may go to university or not. Nor like French girls who are taken to the gynecologist for their first birth control pills at about the same age, few questions asked. Life has begun. "When you are eighteen, you are an adult in Europe," Siegfried said. No, not like that, but they were young. They had grown up with milk and water, that was all. We only know what we know. They had also grown up surrounded by trees and houses, not by castles and statues left over from a time when people – children – had to fit in to a larger scheme, or maybe die. Siegfried scolded them twice over the coach microphone, not for drinking but for returning to the hotels laughing, rambunctious at night, disturbing people’s sleep. "Europeans have a right of silence after ten o’clock," he said, almost whining. No one heeded him. You don’t tell people what to do.

Robin, too, had a drinking problem, but her problem was what to drink. European restaurants do not serve water. Siegfried said it symbolized poverty. They absolutely did not drink milk. It was for babies. Tea and coffee were almost never seen. She hated the taste of wine and beer. She also hated Coke, but drank it by the quart, warm, because there wasn’t anything else. Coke with that delicious sauerkraut and dumplings. What an idiot she must look. Especially when the embattled waitresses forgot to bring it and Billie, everlastingly decent, went into the kitchens and fetched it for her. How glad, how very glad she would be – maybe how very glad they all would be, for when was the last time they had, any of them, asked each other how things were? – to go home.


It would have been pleasant all along to interrupt this recitative with an aria, for Billie and Robin’s opera-loving sakes, with action. It would be pleasant to say, that one of the girls met the love of her life on this trip, a German boy, and stayed behind to marry him and live forever in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, population 4000. It would be pleasant to report that Ms. Vollmer ran off with Harry, or that something alarming happened – at a peaceful demonstration for peace, perhaps – and the girls had reason to use Siegfried’s casual instructions as to how to recognize a policeman. But life, particularly for the young, can sometimes be just a matter of long befuddled gawping. It can be endurance, far more than adventure. The recitative went on, outside their control, in chants and halts, rather Wagnerian – rather German.


They all convinced themselves they were having a wonderful time. There was, psychologically, nothing else to do: either wrest an emotional triumph out of nerves, or else cry to be taken home. They did see many interesting things. They rode a cable car up the slopes of Mt. Titlis, its snowy peak lumped high above fog. They walked the cobblestone streets of medieval Rothenburg as churchbells chimed. They visited cathedrals, and bought warm pretzels and ate them in the square. In Lucerne there was a six-hundred-year-old covered wooden bridge to walk across. They talked about how many peasants, or princesses in pretty gowns, had done that, and and Meg and Diane and Lisa – for sometimes the misfit trio and the buxom quintet mixed – had a fine lunch in Lucerne, the wine poured in green knob-stemmed glasses. (And more Coke.) Robin ordered "ravioli al burro" from the menu without fussing, hoping it meant ravioli with butter. Hoping, as well, to make up for Diane’s rudeness. A kind young waiter had noticed her struggling with the language, and had said, "I want to help you." Diane turned on him a face literally, shockingly like Botticelli’s Venus and cooed, "I don’t want your help." What she ended up eating, Robin did not notice. Evidently it was not poisoned. Her own ravioli came with butter and she devoured it. They saw more castles and more churches, and ate Black Forest cake in the Black Forest.

Somewhere in the blur before their last day Robin photographed Patton’s grave. She found herself awestruck at the vividly painted cars and buildings, and at the wayside shrines and crucifixes along mountain roads. Woodcarvers’ shops in Oberammergau, where the Passion Play is performed, were decorated with bright murals of St. Luke. She was awestruck, too, by Austrian and Swiss merchants who did not give perfectly correct change for every purchase if they were not able to. Siegfried said this was normal. Robin thought it magnificent. Her older sisters’ horror stories of having to stay late at work to "balance your drawer" made her wish they could see what real freedom was. A few pennies don’t matter, she said exultantly. What do they matter when you are a human being and you want your lunch? Hard-headed Billie, on the other hand, thought the habit, and Siegfried’s smooth excuse of it, very suspicious.

Robin bought a little Austrian crystal pendant at a town beside a rushing ice-green river. It was her only purchase if the ten days, apart from a few postcards and chocolates. Everyone else stood in line every day to buy jackets, binoculars, boots, and glassware. "I thought you wanted to see Europe, not buy Europe," Siegfried marveled over the bus microphone. "Still, it’s good for our economy." Wendy’s new leather coat went missing from a hotel room early in the trip. She called the hotel from their next several cities to ask about it, which Robin thought nervy, but the coat was never found. Robin had to murmur sympathy, but privately felt satisfied that Europe, like a wronged woman, had been avenged.

For herself, she might never have thought of buying he pendant, but the trip was drawing to a close and frankly she panicked. If her friends were all shopping and happy, what a pity it would look if she were to go home empty-handed. Everyone would ask why. She had to muscle her way into a line of girls in the shop to get at the jewelry rack, explaining that she wasn’t cutting in, she only wanted this. Then she went around and stood in line, too. The ice-green river rushed outside in the distant sunlight. The pendant, etched with edelweiss, was pretty, but she didn’t want it, and all her life scarcely ever wore it. She wanted to fit in. And despite this it was so important also that Siegfried and everyone understand she was different, she was genteel. She pronounced this word on the bus during, at long last, an argument one day and Billie snapped at her for it. They apologized to each other a few minutes later, but they both knew Billie did not have arguments like this with Meg. Happy, singing, tender Meg. They sang together sometimes.

In Switzerland everyone went to a big crowded restaurant to eat fondue and hear some professional performers yodel and play ancient Swiss instruments. One woman swirled a coin in a metal bowl until it rang like cowbells. Before they arrived, Siegfried told them that traditionally, a woman guest who loses her bread cube in the fondue pot must get up and kiss every man in the room Poor stupid Robin took this terribly seriously, envisioning herself losing her bread, being seen, and then being pawed randomly. At the party, Meg and Billie and Wendy laughed and squirmed, trying to knock each other’s bread off their forks into the pot. Billie turned to attempt the same trick on Robin’s fork and Robin wanted to scream at her.

Then a curious thing happened. A man approached her from behind, placed a coin on the tablecloth beside her plate, said something in German, and vanished. What in the world? Robin’s hair that night was an even greater mess of long tow kinks than usual; perhaps he wanted to tell her she looked like a Rhinemaiden. Perhaps not. Perhaps he wanted to use for her the same mean word she used in her head for her friends, sometimes. Ms. Vollmer appeared instantly beside her. "Don’t worry," she smiled. "If he tries anything – I take karate – I’ll beat him up." Billie had a similar experience later. An elderly man came up to her in a busy city street and spoke vociferously, gesticulating, in German. No one ever knew why.

Salzburg was best of all. They rode a wooden slide down into the salt mines. They toured Mozart’s house, and while they wandered the rooms a lady sat down and began playing his music on his piano. Siegfried hurriedly summoned the Scholastica girls into the room– they were the only ones who cared – and paused only to stare expressively at another pair from his anonymous busload of seventy-one, slumped on a bench, refusing to budge for the honor cascading out upon them.

That night Maria, most misfit of all, stayed in to keep Robin company. This prevented her from writing her travel diary, as she did not like to scribble in a corner, ignoring the girl. Maria was not liked. She was an athlete, a bumptious man-child, worse than Robin in comparison with the buxom roses. But the two of them had a pleasant chat sitting out on the balcony in the dark above Salzburg’s biggest street, watching the twinkling lights of cars and shops, watching all the people who did not know they were up there in the coolness. Robin liked Salzburg. "It reminds me of my room at home," she said.

And so, at length, they went home. They rode one more stretch of the autobahn, listening to old American pop tunes from the ‘70s ("Goodbye, Michelle, it’s hard to die") on the bus’s German radio because they had complained, all except the Scholastica girls, about the classical music Siegfried forced on them. They sped through eastern France, stopping only for lunch. The wait staff began clearing away plates the instant the last one had been laid down. Robin thought they had been told to do this because Americans eat fast, but it did not make this meal any more pleasant than the others had been.

At the airport everyone shook Siegfried’s cologned hand, and called out "Liederhosen, Harry!" to the driver, as they had done every time they saw him for the last ten days. It was meant to be hysterically funny. Harry always smiled. The Scholastica girls gave each man a coffee mug as a parting gift, each with his name on it, each filled with candy. Robin was the one who spotted the mugs in a store, though none of the others would later acknowledge that Siegfried’s gift was her doing. Ms. Vollmer bought a card to go with, and the girls all signed it in their own fashion. Robin and Lisa and Maria and Ann simply dashed off "thank you." The others wrote long excited messages. Ms. Vollmer wrote "We are a fun-loving group!" which Robin hoped was meant to be an apology.

Icelandair took them to Reykjavik and then to Chicago. The strange hush on the plane, just before landing, burst into cheers and applause when the wheels touched down. The Americans were thrilled to be home. Robin was thrilled to be able to stride past all the foreigners waiting to go through an arduous customs check, while she, a citizen, need only say to her fellow countrymen at the gate that she had nothing to declare. (Whatever that meant.) When her parents met her, they remarked how gaunt she looked. She raved about wonderful Europe, and especially about the food. She and Billie and Billie’s parents waved goodbye, and the girls said they would see each other at school tomorrow, Monday. Was it really tomorrow? Blessed thought.

The eight girls gathered together twice more. After graduation Meg and Billie and, of all people, tense little Lisa (who put on full makeup before going to bed – dear God, how did she enjoy her trip?) organized a summer picnic in a suburban woods. It was a deathly hot American day. There were no castles and no mist, only trees and the cicadas up in their heights, buzzing below the sun. The slimy flowing creek seemed not much smaller than the Rhine. Meg did a kindness to Robin in pulling a mosquito out of her eye without dislodging her contacts.

The following December Ms. Vollmer invited them all to her and her husband’s apartment the night before New Year’s Eve. By now the girls had all been four months at college – except Robin, who had stayed home, doing watercolors and submitting sketches to children’s magazines by way of a career – and were full of news of their professors and their studies. "He says I’m a free spirit," Meg smiled at them. Meg and Billie were greater friends than ever, and called each other "woman." Ms. Vollmer served wine and fondue again. Everyone stayed until three in the morning.

When they finally filed out into the dreadful cold, Diane, who had chauffeured them all, looked ahead into the darkness and started to cry. Her hand shook against her mouth. "Oh my God. Oh my God," she said, running. A carload of young Mexican men had smashed into her parked car. Ms. Vollmer lived at the gentrified core of a bad ghetto, so this was a sickening dilemma. God knew who these men were or what they carried. Ms. Vollmer went back upstairs and called the police. Diane tried to get the men to exchange insurance information with her, but they seemed uncommunicative. They were ridiculously underdressed for the winter night. One of them kept repeating, "Shit, it’s cold. We go now, okay? We go now. Shit."

Robin and the other girls returned to the apartment while Diane and Ms. Vollmer, back from her phone call, dealt with the Mexicans and the police. They all called their parents, and Diane’s, to explain matters. Eight sets of middle-aged suburban mothers and dads got a heart-stopping phone call at three-thirty in the morning before learning that everything, so far, was still all right.

Robin was boiling with anger and fear. Meg suggested that they all go back downstairs and stand by Diane in her trouble, or maybe take taxis home and spare her the effort of chauffeuring them all again. From this Robin quickly spun visions of her one certain ride home, Diane, evaporating into the city night, and of the seven of them negotiating with seven taxi drivers from Christ knew where. Probably hers would be the paroled felon. "There’s no need for that," she spoke hard and low. "If the police are there, this will be over soon. They know what they’re doing. And
her car didn’t look that damaged to me. I’m sure it’s driveable." She sounded nasty, even to herself, but the words were out and she couldn’t take them back. She lapsed into silence, like an old injured dog.

They waited. Meg looked at her and said, in what Robin supposed was her best soulful and mentoring manner, "What are you thinking about?"
Robin grinned crookedly. "Nothing," she replied. It was the wrong answer. Earlier in the evening Meg had remarked how she didn’t like it when people, her dorm-mate for example, said Nothing to a question about their thoughts. You have to be thinking something, Meg said.

Eventually it was over and Diane drove them all home – her car was all right – passing through the projects again, Cabrini-Green, as she had on the way up to the party nine hours before, because her mother had forbidden her to use the dangerous expressway. The eight girls never saw each other all together again.

Robin and Billie remained friends, as did, separately, Billie and Meg. Robin never saw Meg again, either. She was kept abreast of her doings through Billie. Robin got wise and went to college, too, long after the others had finished. Billie graduated from Dartmouth heavily in debt, but visited Europe with her aunt and mother the summer following. This time they did the grand tour, London, Paris, Venice. They loved it.

Robin went on, as the others did, to work, to love, to marriage, to children and running a home. Once in a while somebody mentioned a place she had been. A history professor said the memorial at Dachau was antiseptic. She thought – yes, it is. Another professor said, avoid Rothenburg, it is the worst, most kitschy "best-preserved-medieval town-in-Europe." She thought – no, I liked Rothenburg. I bought two postcards there. In their mid-twenties, she and Billie got together to watch The Sound of Music at Billie’s apartment. The movie was nearly over and the popcorn gone before kindly Billie understood that Robin had never even seen it until now; for her part it was only now that Robin understood what it must have meant to Billie to tour the Mirabell Palace, and walk in the gazebo, at seventeen, where Liesl sings "I am sixteen going on seventeen."

Much later an uncle of Robin’s by marriage, an Englishman in fact, said to her while she and her husband ate lunch with him in Chicago, "You were too young for Europe, weren’t you." She looked at him in amazement. "Yes," she said slowly. "Too young. Too young, too homesick."

She read Daisy Miller, about a young American girl loose in Italy for not much reason. And who makes completely innocent, tasteless comments about men. Henry James punishes her – or perhaps allows her to be martyred – with death by fever after she roams the Colosseum with a man at night. Robin thought, well, that’s close, but we did not die.


Oddly enough, an appreciation for Europe rose in her in the years long after her return. It was as if she grew to miss, or to hunt out relics from, a place she had never been. She began to read its history – dear, oh dear – drink its wine, cook its meals. She ordered French soaps specially from a catalogue store in Maryland. And she never failed to marvel, with some jealousy to be sure, but not only that, at new friends who went there, enjoyed themselves, and didn’t even think twice about it. As if it were their right. You don’t know, she thought. You don’t know where you’ve been.

What had happened, really? It seemed to her that the decision to go to Europe for a thousand dollars at eighteen was the one thing in her life she regretted. And it could not be rectified. She regretted postponing college, too, but she had been able to rectify that. Europe had been her one mistake. But why? It was mysterious, most strange. Merely for a start, if she had not gone, she never would have learned she should not have gone. But the real strangeness was that everything else she had done or had, that everybody has, birth, faith, work, crises and happinesses both major and trivial, had taught her something, if she looked deeply enough. Europe was different. It stood like a rock in the sea of her memory, unmoved, unmoving. She had no desire to go back to it, certainly not without a command of some other language than her own, and yet she felt that if she did go back, this time she would be superb. Really. She had invested too much of her youthful self into that trip to be able to look back and say, well, too bad about what might have been pleasure, spoiled – I’ll go again, and have a better time. That wasn’t the point. She wanted it to have been all right then, and it wasn’t. What did the others think? Odd how they had never spoken about it much. Once, only once, Billie in her thirties made a tiny noise about "not believing what we did then." Robin made a tiny corrective noise about its being them, not her, who had done it. And still they remained friends. Billie did not live in the conditional tense. She already was superb.

Robin thought for years. Finally she had to put Europe aside. It was the very ground on which Mozart and Tiepolo – and Hitler – had trod, yes, the subcontinent on which her ancestors had swarmed for ten thousand years until eight of them made their separate decisions to leave hardly a century earlier. A century earlier she might have spoken any one of half a dozen languages, including German. Yes. But she had to put it aside, finally, in puzzlement as totally unique, unreachable. It was the one experience of her life from which she had learned nothing.

The End