Front matter (continued 3)

Such are all persons but a very few, these days.

So are they taught.

So inspired: unpunctuality and unproductivity are un-American.

So do they urgently maintain themselves—egoists without the sense of individuation.

And that is why the earth is perishing for man.

In the hatred people have for people.

And the absolute hatred of posterity that rises from the absolute rejection of our real ancestry.

There are moments when the circumstance is unutterably clear to me—and in these, I know—without respect to the immediate employment of my body or the thing called I.

There are moments when the time-easements I have bought grow clouded.

And then the knowledge escapes arms, legs, cranium, and I.

What man, reared as I was, domiciled in this earth's insanity, has even the intimations, let alone the occasional assurance? And who, attached to his clocks, trains, bells, and the earth's turned shadow, keeps a continual hold upon the vital principle? Very few.

Say it was late.

Say I did not want to sleep.

Say, if you will, I did not want to face my circumstances. It is not so. The space during which I sat on the green sofa smoking my cigarette was what you call ten minutes—an infinity that could not be shortened, made painful, or even touched at any point by measurement.

I picked up the telephone.

The colored girl had a soft voice. "Hello?"

"This is Phil Wylie—is Hattie there?"

"What's the name again, please, sir?"

I spelled it. She was gone for a long time. I felt a little amused. If Hattie didn't remember—I thought she would—they'd be obliged to consult books or files or whatever records they kept, that went back to the wild, drunk, bewildering years when my first marriage had worn patience thin, shattered it, and turned loose on the town a younger man. A decade and more ago.

Hattie's voice—deep, harsh—worried, I thought. "Phil, for God's sake! Where have you been keeping yourself? I heard you were a reformed character."

"My wife told me to call you up."

Hattie was unruffled. "Sometimes they do. How are you?"

"Swell."

"I'm glad to hear it! What can we do for you?"

"It's a long, fascinating story that I'd like to run up and tell you."

"Be a pleasure. I'm losing at bridge. Looking for an out." She chuckled. "Stingers? Side cars? What shall I get ready?"

"Coffee."

"Better still! Viola keeps a percolator on—but I'll have her make it fresh. Usually—it's like French pot-au-feu—goes on forever."

"You've doubtless—moved—?"

"Moved! We're Manhattan's most displaced persons!" She gave me a high number on the West Side.

There was never a rush hour at Hattie's. But two a.m. was what might be called the peak. It embarrassed no one: she had plenty of sitting rooms. In any case, most of the customers knew one another—and knew one another as clients.

A white marble lobby. An elevator with much gilded fretwork. It was operated by a Negro with an exceedingly noncommittal face. Only one door in the hall on the top floor. A good-sized apartment building, I thought, as I pushed the bell and heard the chimes; hence a good-sized bordello. The colored girl who had answered the phone answered the door, keeping the chain attached. I told her my name.

The foyer was dim and modernistic. Two halls branched from it. I could see doors along both—and hear music.

"Jes' follow me, please."

She said it all night.

The perfumes mingled, the way they do. It is a woman's medley—expensive or cheap—with no other detectable difference. One door was open. Two girls sat there—pale, straight hair that fell to a sharp, sculptured point over a book and a pair of shimmering, nylon legs.

Viola went on.

She opened another door. Hattie was standing at the window in a green dress—her once-sleek orange hair dyed black, now, and fluffed out—her ankles no longer slim—and when she turned I hid, as all of us do, my inner response to the etching of the interval—that very Time which I so recently had seen to be without importance. She was now about fifty-five.

"Phil," she said, "this is nice! You don't seem a day older—just wiser. But look at me!"

"Brunette."

"A harridan. The warmest heart in the world—and what happens? The opposite of Dorian Grey. I blame it on the high morals and low conduct of the cops. Hard years. I loved Fiorello—and he despised every bone in my body. I was even over in Jersey for a while. It was the lowest period in my life. Sit down over there in the red chair. Viola, bring us coffee. You know—I've often thought about you—when I read your books—or when one of the girls did—or when I read something of yours in a magazine. You aren't around here much, any more, though, are you?"

I shook my head. "Miami Beach. And now—we're building a house in Miami."

"Florida. I went down last winter. Had a cold I simply couldn't shake. Stayed at the Steinberg-Riviera. Hell of a place, Miami Beach! Wonderful weather, period. Everybody on the make. Shake a palm and out drops a chippy. A madam with ethics would starve there—and the news about good taste hasn't got south of the Mason and Dixon Line."

"I always think of it as the end of the American dream."

"It's the end, anyhow. Phil. Do you really want to see me? Because if you're being polite for old time's sake—maybe you'd rather put off the sentimental chitchat till later."

Hattie is a thoughtful dame.

I was about to laugh at her when an abrupt inquiry held me for a second or two. I was surprised—a little. But the question postponed itself. "I came up—solely and utterly to call on you, Hattie."

She shrugged one shoulder. She yawned. "Maybe we can return your calls. We used to. But—really—I'm delighted. Except when you were—overburdened—you were always fun to have around. It's a dull life—just being chaperon to a lot of whores. And it seems to me the boys aren't interested in philosophy any more. They used to spend more time chinning than cheating, around here. Back in the old days of humanism and liberalism and Coué and the market boom, when the world was full of fun. Why—I had to scout local campuses for girls who could keep in the debates! Now—the boys just come in tight and preoccupied—ask for a girl by hair color, like picking out paint for a kitchen—pay—and scram. I can't recall how long it's been since we held one of those impromptu breakfasts—for the celebrities and plain people who happened to be around! It's depressing!"

I knew what she meant. Everybody knows.

Viola brought the coffee.

"Pretty," I said.

Hattie looked at the door where Viola had gone. "Nice girl. Married and has two kids. The wages are no damned good—but the tips!—I think she does as well as I do, after taxes. More passes made at Vi than nearly anybody actually working. She's a strict Baptist."

"I wasn't—" I thought of reminiscing a little. Then I thought it might be sad. Hattie seemed to have read my mind.

"Remember Elysse? The French girl with the brown bangs?"

I did.

"She's married. Lives in Troy. Comes to see me once in a while. Lovely girl. And—Charmaine? The president of an oil company moved her onto Park Avenue—died—and left her his heap. Millions. She's a good customer of mine. You know, Kinsey should interview me before he writes more books."

Kinsey again.

"Why don't you drop him a note? Volunteer?"

Hattie's face wrinkled with amusement. "I wouldn't want to shock the poor man."

I laughed.

Her brows came together. They were ordinarily straight and level, red once, black now—like a crayon mark made with a ruler. She still had good-looking amber eyes, fiery but steady, and her forehead was very high. She was beginning to look like some sort of sachem—a tribal wiseman, or a poet. Quite an impressive dame.

"It's funny," she said. "I've even heard men right in these rooms argue that Kinsey was a liar and crazy and incompetent and a menace to society. Otherwise bright men. Heard them say that Kinsey only talked to screwballs and neurotics and people who were inventing stuff to show off. You'd hardly believe such self-kidding was possible!"

"They said it about psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, too," I agreed. "Said that their conclusions were obviously nutty because they never saw anybody but nutty patients. Never stopped to reflect that a neurotic is not a nut, that every patient did his best to tell the precise, detailed truth about his private life, and that every single one of those stories involved the sex behavior of many, many other people who are called normal. I mean—the psychologists learned a whole hell of a lot about what normal people did from every neurotic patient. So when they talked about sex—they had the dope. Most people never thought of that angle."

"Most people," Hattie said, "never think. And when it comes to sex, they think about ten times less than never."

"Which brings me," I nodded, "to the matter in hand. I got a nephew. A brainy apple and a good kid. And you had a girl here—or on your call list—till about six months ago, named Marcia something—who's gone to live with Paul—he being the nephew."

Hattie said, "Yes," and waited.

I realized that a dozen years is a long time in which not to see anybody—a time long enough for a change, especially if one has quit drinking, married again, and so on and so on and so on. Hattie was afraid I was up to some sort of Presbyterian nasty-work—and she was ready to be disappointed. Ready not to help me call the cops on Marcia, so to speak, and ready to write off one more guy as a galvanized hypocrite.

I said, "In my frank opinion, Paul is not the sort who will be happy with an ex-houri. And I don't say that because he's my nephew and because I'm broad-minded about everybody but who-touches-me. Let me tell you what Paul's like—and how he came to confide in me on the situation—how he got into it—and how he's acting about it as of this afternoon."

"Tell me."

The longer she listened, the more she relaxed. When finally I stopped talking she walked over to the window, where she had stood when I came in. Her broadening buttocks and shoulders blotted out most of the river-gleam and the Jersey-glow, which you could see from there—but not the boat-hoots which came up around her, wallowing through the city, buzzing the middle ears of the millions. She stood there a while. The frame of faraway light blinked around her and the ferry boats and the freighters hollered pensively at each other. When she turned around, there were tears not only in her eyes but on her cheeks.

"If people only knew what I know!" She said it in a quiet voice with nothing of the brash timber of her usual speech.

"I'll buy that. I'll even add a big apothegm, Hat. People have found out so much, they are now obliged to learn the rest. The whole God-damned, agonizing, exalted rest of it."

She smiled in a woebegone way and got a Kleenex from a drawer. "It'll take thousands of years," she said. "They've been making the same mistakes, that long."

"Yeah. Meanwhile, we've got Paul and Marcia. I'm supposed to have lunch with them tomorrow. You can see—from what I've told you—why I think the thing will fold—painfully. There is, however, a chance it won't. A chance that depends on what sort of girl Marcia is, mostly. Which is why I came up here."

She was shaking her head. "Not on the kind of girl she is—necessarily. On how much she loves him."

"Okay. That."

"Providing—she can love. Providing—she hasn't kidded herself into a sweet little daydream that she got from reading too many women's magazines. Or all those books. She sure was a reading girl. And smart. And attractive, too. How tough are you, Phil?"

"It's something you do, isn't it? Not fill out in a questionnaire?"

Hattie smiled. "I don't want to offend those fine sensibilities of yours. Or make you think I'm something special in the she-Judas line. But you want to know whether the girl means it. Why not send your Paul back to his laboratory after lunch—he'd like that—like you to get acquainted with her—and why not—?"

"I'm not tough that way. That's businessman tough."

She dropped a hand. "Still—there's hardly one of them in a thousand who wouldn't—work out some breezy little arrangement—for a G, say. And she'd have to be such a one."

"She might just see through it. You said she was smart."

Hattie shrugged. "If she was smart enough to resist the G, maybe she'd be smart enough. However."

"In other words, you don't know about her."

"Not Marcia. If it was ninety-nine in a hundred, I could tell you right off. Some of them make damned good wives—better sometimes for being here. With the kind of men who really understand what life is—and with the kind who don't mind because they don't understand anything at all. I like to see those girls get married. Lots more make swell mistresses for men who married hunks of flint. I could go calling at so many swank addresses that your head would swim. And sometimes I do. There are worse places to look for a wife than good bagnios. Any high-society party, for instance. Women's colleges, too, I suspect. Most country clubs. The dud percentage—the lack of warmth—runs higher there—"

"Not to mention know-how."

She sighed—and then chuckled. "Isn't it crazy? Something that should be given more loving practice than music—something that needs extra experience and skill for civilized people. They think you can learn on one bridal night! Or from a book! A girl it would take a genius of sex to seduce satisfactorily marries a bright young college boy in the chopsticks class—and what have you got? The American home. Did you ever—" the question—indeed, the entire subject—seemed to have roused her—"ever once have an affair with a plain American wife who was any good? Somebody else's, I mean?"

"Once."

"Once! And how many—?"

"Look, Hattie. I came to cross-question you—"

She thought awhile, when she saw I wouldn't reply—looking out at the city and detesting it. "I've had lots of men bring their wives right here—to look and learn."

"How many?" I grinned.

"God knows! I'm an old madam, Phil. But many a snooty female has lost her inhibitions in my parlors—and gained a little knowledge that went into making a happy home for some guy. The more people say physical sex is unimportant—the more it is likely to become the only thing that is important for them. And they don't realize."

"I know."

"You know. And a lot of my clients know. And a lot of women. But they can't change anything."

"Yeah."

"What do I really do here, then? Ask yourself. I'm in the business of supplying erotic fun to people who are made for it, born to it, urged from the cradle to the grave to take part in it, who depend upon it for mental health, for a decent feeling of good will toward others—and aren't allowed to engage in it even with their own wedded wives, by the statutes of New York State and forty-seven other little penitentiaries! That's my trade. And because I'm in it—I am regarded as the greatest blight in civilized society, by millions. Holy, jumped-up St. Peter's be-hee!"

Through a recollected haze of alcohol I heard this same tirade from old and distant days. And Hattie was right, in her way. The theory of accession to culture and intelligence, to morality and Godliness, through the restraint of desire by the demeaning of it, had run its course in the Western world and unstrung nearly all of us. And where that thesis did not exist, there were others, still more absurd, to bring other peoples to their repetitive, obnoxious dooms.

Quite suddenly, I felt like weeping.

She left the window and sat down. "Relax."

The feeling passed like a bird's shadow.

"What were you doing all evening?" she asked. "How come you're up so late? Work?"

I thought of telling her—telling her the truth. Thought of it hard and seriously. "Out with a dame," I said, which was not what I meant by the truth. "A wife. A pretty package of all the quality advertising, from Pasadena, who had caught her hubby in flagrante with a gent—and fled. Protesting too much, if you understand."

"Half the girls in the country—if they had the nerve—!"

"A latent thing. In maturity, according to the psychologists, it becomes the psychological stuff by which we understand and appreciate our own sex."

"And it does, too."

"If you say so, it must be right, Hat."

"There—you are damned tooting!" She looked at me. "So you took her out—?"

"Rumbaing. I've got good at it—since I knew you."

"Really good?"

"Good enough to please the Cuban girls. So we danced. And I brought her back to the hotel—and turned her loose."

"Nice guy!"

"I wanted her to exercise her mind. After all—I only met her at lunch—and she's already moved up on my floor, next door."

"You should change hotels, then."

"Too lazy. Too busy. And I can deal with her. Spoiled—and too bad—because the guy she left sounds okay. I wish I could help her out. Taking—what they call—advantage of her, probably wouldn't. And you can't re-do a person's attitude and background in a few days—especially with a serial to correct. Usually requires years, and a good analyst—"

"Another wife—to be hated."

"By you?"

Hattie nodded. "I hate thousands of them. Some, I adore."

We didn't seem to find anything to say for a minute. I could have given her one more name for the short side of the ledger but I didn't want to. Finally I said, "If you get any ideas about Marcia—?"

"Call me up—when you've met her. Better still—come by again."

"I will." I had no idea whether I would or not.

She got up. "Look. Do me a favor and autograph a couple of your books for me, will you? And have another cup of coffee while I go downstairs and get them?"

"All right."

She went. Pretty soon a tall, redheaded girl came in without knocking, just as I'd expected one would. Brown-red hair—long, curled at the ends, and a pair of legs to look at. A girl like a mannequin—but no pose; no hauteur. She had enough sex appeal for the end of anybody's chorus line. She smiled open a wide mouth on even teeth and fixed her hazel eyes on me. Hattie remembered: I had never approved of whores who looked like whores. This one looked like a bright assistant on a magazine—or maybe the wife of a lucky prof.

"My name," she said, "is Gwen Taylor. Hattie got stuck for a few minutes—and told me to come in. I've heard a lot about you—here and there."

I stood and shook her hand.

She briefly grabbed her lower lip with her upper teeth. "Or is that—indelicate?"

"No. I'm pleased. And not fooled for a minute. You see—I know Hattie."

"After all," said the girl, "it's her profession. She said we were having coffee."

Viola came again with a tray. Gwen poured. "There are half a dozen of us around. Would you like to meet them?"

"One's enough."

Her eyes flickered and she smiled. "Thanks." She handed me the cup, served the sugar with tongs, poured cream, and fixed her own. "Warm night."

We talked about that.

By and by she nodded toward the radio-phonograph. "Hattie said you like to rumba. So do I."

I shook my head. "Sometime—"

She looked at me and smiled. "I hope!"

Hattie came with the books, by and by. She made an apology. I wrote in both volumes and signed my name and Hattie accompanied me down one of the two long halls with the many shut doors.

"Like Gwen?"

"Very much."

"I thought you would. She's—something! It's been marvelous to see you, Phil. Call me up!"

The exceedingly noncommittal elevator man took me back to the street. It was gravy-thick with the smell of the river.

I got a cab.

It slatted downtown.

Once, I leaned forward to tell the driver to turn around.

But I didn't speak.

4

There is a metal clip on every door in the Astolat; mail and written messages are put in it—so the guests won't have to stoop. I had a letter. A tidy backhand with little circles for periods and dots over the i's. It looked like a billet-doux from Yvonne—and it was:

You meanie!

Everything you said got me so tremendously stimulated I couldn't sleep. I decided, after a struggle, if you were going to stir girls up that way, you were responsible for their condition. So I phoned you—and no answer! Don't you know hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? If you feel like a little chitchat when you do come in, phone me. I don't have to work tomorrow so you needn't be scrupulous about the hour. And even if you don't, thanks ever so much for a very disturbing, unsatisfying, lovely evening.

Yours, Y

It was four o'clock and my body was tired, though my mind was running round and round like a toy electric train.

I didn't want to see any more of Yvonne at the moment.

I turned out the lights in the sitting room, undressed, took a short, warm shower, and lay down on the double bed, naked. Usually, about two minutes after the lights go out, I fall asleep. But I knew it would take longer that night.

So I piled up the pillows and opened Vogt's Road to Survival at the page where the jacket was enclosed.

Mr. Vogt's thesis is simple and damning; I had somewhat reflected upon it earlier that evening.

It is the philosophy of modern man to produce. To industrialize himself. To learn the techniques and technologies of science and of applied science. This is progress. Chinese, Soviets, Americans—everybody strives to speed up production, distribution, consumption. It is also the object of all nations to increase their populations.

The earth cannot support either of these two goals.

The topsoil of the planet will not feed the existing numbers of us, even now—and our method of using it is diminishing it at a gruesome rate. Faster and faster, we starve; and as we multiply, more of us will starve. Medicine, which increases the percentage of persons who survive infancy and extends the life span of all these, is but rapidly adding to sure victims of starvation.

We are busy breeding mouths to eat our future out of house and home.

Ideas of this sort have been around since Malthus's time.

These days, the facts accumulate.

I often reflect that man's contemporary sexual taboos lead (as they must, by the law of opposites) to sexual excesses: these are seen in man's witless overbreeding. His "moral" Catholic couch, his unregulated Baptist bed, sustains orgy and is the senseless agent of biological catastrophe. This is the riposte of Nature to man's refusal to use reason concerning his own nature.

Vogt wants planet-wide birth control, before the teeming hordes locust up the hope of a human hereafter.

Try and get it!

There are other truths about ourselves of this same order:

The minerals. We are digging them up with the reckless violence of pigs after truffles. Truffles can grow again—but not minerals. We are converting the earth's elements into forms all but irrecoverable even by the most immense expenditures of human energy and time.

Our genes—and the holy habit we've got into, of inhibiting birth among our most likely specimens—of proliferating boobs and nuts—of maintaining the feeble and the dim, abetting their rabbity bedding together—and of sending the cream of each generation to war's slaughter. This, alone, will drive us back toward apehood faster even than our growing physical destitution. Some European nations are doubtless already floundering in the poverty of residual blood-lines—bereft of brains and leadership by their religious devotion and their glorious wars.

Also, of course, there is our failure to perceive our instinctual nature. My own elected department in the category of dooms. Instinctively, as we must, all of us feel the weight of such colossal crimes against the meaning of instinct as those above—our cosmic disavowals (by our acts) of any responsibility toward men to come. That is why, at bottom, no one is happy in modern society—happy in his spirit, content, full of a sense of purpose and significance. It is why we shall have to remake civilization consciously—or to suffer its self-destruction.

Mr. Vogt, I thought, would feel the power of instinct, as it now blindly controls us, when he saw how religious men reacted to his simple indication of the necessity for using reason in our sex relations. And he would see the inertia of our traditions when he saw how utterly his warning was disbelieved, ignored, ridiculed, and forgotten. Others, with the same wild cry of despair, have had such reception, for the same reason.

It is not that man cannot do for himself.

But that he will not.

And he will not because he is self-flattered into the incredible illusion that Mr. and Mrs. America are doing very well already, thank you kindly.

After a long while, grinning over the tremendous sins of those who take it upon themselves to reject knowledge and yet to say what sin is, I closed the book.

Hell has one funny aspect.

It is where everybody lives.

I sent a thought to Messrs. Sheen, Niebuhr, and their ilk: The up-to-date devil, which you so earnestly seek, gentlemen, may readily be found—wearing the costume of your own minds: unconsciousness.

I slept like a log.

PART THREE

Andante

1

Reveille was the heat of burning gasoline, gears grating, rubber clattering on the sticky pavement and bits of shouts, floating around like confetti. I can remember when it used to be hoofbeats, quiet neighbor-talk, and sometimes, utter silence.

I lay glistening in a depression of the bed. At first, the big noise of the city, diminishing when the lights changed, and plunging up with new zeal a moment afterward, gave me only the pleasant sensation, the titillations and satisfactions, of being in New York. Then I remembered my circumstance. The frightened little animal that I am tore terribly around while I tried to catch it and to hold it and to remind it that the thin tissue on the front of its brain was capable of managing its panic. I spent some time at the job and sat up trickling.

All my life I have listened to a wearisome cell repeat an old saw: the coward dies a thousand times, the brave man once.

A person is afraid to be cowardly.

For many years, owing to this rather superficial sentence, I had to accept the inner humiliation of cowardice. A boy with my kind of imagination, my style of projecting, could not but help finding in his head the taste of the thousand deaths.

And I am often cowardly still. In those few morning minutes, I chased my coward a long distance.

But I do think the aphorism should be discarded. Certainly the coward dies a thousand times. So, too, however, does the man of imagination. It is the manner of the thousand deaths that is important. And bravery—our poor, human bravery—is not necessarily consonant with faulty imagination or none at all, as this dumbbell's apothegm implies.

I finally caught my animal—a real beast and not a dream.

I ordered coffee and stepped into the sitting room.

It was after nine.

The morning papers had been put at my door. There was mail.

A letter from Ricky.

I ripped it open and read it hungrily.

Dear:

Would you please, if you get a chance, go to the Lingerie Department at Saks and ask for Miss Drewson? Tell her I'd like to have three more slips like the blue satin ones I got last July when we were in town. I could order them by mail, but I want to be sure to get the same kind and she will know. Size twelve, which I guess I needn't tell you. We miss you—everything is just the same, which is dandy—and have fun. I love you very much.

Ricky

I had a second little beast to chase, then.

There was a bank statement.

There were four publicity releases from business concerns which keep sending me their bilge even though I took the pains, almost a year ago, to write them that I'd quit doing a newspaper column and had no way of airing their propaganda even if I felt the urge.

There were three letters from people who liked my books.

There was a letter from the assistant to the dean of a small college in Illinois:

Dear Wylie:

Just how does one go about getting so swellheaded and self-righteous that he thinks he can tell off everybody on earth? I would like to know, because it must be a wonderful sensation to balloon around so gassily. Look out for pins, though!

Please reply.

Sincerely, John F. Casselberry.

I put the letter between my big toe and the next one, held it out at body length, and reflected.

There is nothing unusual about this letter; I get a version of it every few days, sometimes running into thousands of derogatory words. And, of course, it is true.

Of course, of course, of course.

Authorship is the supreme act of ego.

Whether it is good or evil, as an act, depends, I suppose not so much on what's written, as how the writing is.

Most authors conceal the egoistic aspect of the business under the nom de plumes of their characters.

But exactly as every man is all that he thinks and does—and dreams, too—so is an author all he writes.

A mystery writer is a murderer in his head and he sets down his gory lore for an audience of murderers.

What does that make you, Wylie? You first-person author!

Did I use it to take the blame and the guilt—to take the responsibility—and to tear down the artifice of the third person? And was it true (as I felt) that, since my purpose was to turn the thoughts of better authors into a vernacular more popular than their own, my I was the mere agent—and not the excreted vanity which it so constantly deplored? Or was the whole affair a secret exercise in look-ma-I'm-dancing?

God knows, some part of it had to be.

I fancied myself as a teacher.

I was mostly a ham.

What I knew, what I had learned, sought, made sure of, found comfort and understanding in—all this—and the long years I'd spent endeavoring to give it a dignified texture—forever emerged as the overemphasis of a self-enamored tyro reciting Hamlet. The truths were somewhat there. But the voice was the voice of cheap aspirations in a cheap world.

Some people heard my mentors. Yes.

A few, reading my wretched books, saw beyond the antic actor, the attention-compeller, the infantile see-how-I-do, to Freud and Jung and the physicists, to the mathematicians, to the calling world and the crying night ahead, to the ingenuity and inconceivable courage of those whom I ballyhooed.

But others—oh, how rightly—saw me!

Yakkety-yak.

Wylie's next.

Shock you. Make you think. Inspire you. Scare the hell out of you. Set bristles standing on old Comstock's neck.

Christ Jesus!

I had thought a havoc in prose might be a substitute for havoc itself—sparing a man here and a woman there from the reality of acquainting them with the instinct.

O tin messiah.

Tawdry complex.

Bawling calfcake.

Jackass of your own worst describing.

Balloon.

It must be a wonderful sensation.

Not truth, so much as show-off.

Not love of you—infatuation with me.

Not—for what I did—but, like most of us, for what I might have done—and used instead to inflate the First Person Singular with the airs of my hot compartments.

The extravert posing as the introvert.

The hoofer philosopher.

Shame, shame, shame!

Shame ran off me.

And I shall die, in it and with it.

I went to my window to look at the city the messy cubes in the haze and somebody's radio performed an act of God.

Ja-da Ja-da Ja-da, ja-da, jing, jing, jing. Shimmy, I thought. Shimmy. Shimmy in your B.V.D.'s. You wear 'em in the winter and you wear 'em in the fall You wear 'em in the summer if you wear 'em at all. Shimmy. Shimmy! Shimmy in your B.V.D.'s. This is a message to and of the American people. The Dream. The Cross. Everybody Loves my body But my body Don't love nobody But me.

Dear Dean Casselberry:

I have read all the books in your library. I am a God-fearing, patriotic American. I believe in brother-love and liberty. In the folks, who made me what I am and from whom I cannot find myself different in any respect. Aside from that, you are right. I am sending you, under separate cover, my ear, which I have cut off for you. It is all I had to give and you may address it in the first person because it will then understand. Also, for the inflation of a balloon like mine, I send these directions: use equal parts of the outcries of the oppressed and laughter; for ballast—you will be there, and you should also carry a pail of tears.

Phil Wylie

Some give money some give work but if you give the person brother, you're a jerk. It didn't do me any good ... for ... If you try to tell the truth there's only you telling it.

2

It was a hell of a morning.

3

From nine-thirty until twelve-thirty I cut that serial. You wouldn't be interested. We'll go on, anyway. What the hell else can a man do?

4

Paul and Marcia, when they appeared for lunch, were expectably nervous.

The condition called strain is universal in this civilization, anyway. It begins in the cradle with the Freudian conditioning—the creation of each superego. Toilet training, the disciplines of the bawling id, meals according to schedule rather than appetite, the sting of parental palm on cheek, buttock, and wrist that follows erotic manipulation. All these, and countless other "punishments"—which change with changing social codes, change with changing fads amongst pediatricians, and differ from one home to another and one culture to another—set up such stresses that, by the age of two, there is hardly one civilized being in a thousand who is not loaded up with a lifetime of disparate indignities.

Add to this the regimentations of school—the musts and must nots of classroom and cloakroom. Impose upon it the innumerable stringencies of a religion. Require patriotism. Pepper the taut personality with familial prejudices and phobias. Jew-detestation, snake-dread. Now, in the passing years, fold in the Law—cop, truant officer, and prison bars—sidewalks not to be spit on, or park benches not to be initialed, or loud noises not to be made by individuals (but only corporations), and season with the regulations that rise around the older child, the adolescent, the adult.

Remove the person, then, from every natural source of his existence. Set him in a city where no useful plants grow and no animals graze—at the end of a steampipe that uses coal mined he knows not where, or oil sucked up ten thousand miles away. A city where no wood is chopped. Detach him, that is to say, from Nature—deprive him of its experiences and every direct sensation of the earth, upon which he depends. Bring even his water in far conduits, with chlorine added, so he will never know a spring's taste.

Set him to work at earning a living without acquaintance of how the whole of any living is made. On the contrary. Let his life's blood derive from some capillary of the flow. Let him take charge—not of house-building, or food-raising, or wood-gathering or fire-keeping, not of cookery or childbirthing or the weaving of fabrics—but of the twenty-eighth step in the manufacture of one size of ball bearings. Call this earning a living.

Give him a town to defend against all other towns and cities, a county to boast of, a state to regard as superior to forty-seven other states, and a nation which anyone can see is the greatest on earth. Teach him to hold such superiority as the supreme goal—to believe that no more can be asked of him or of his fellows than that they maintain the greatest nation—however low the rest may sink. Teach him never to inquire if his superlatives are adequate for the conditions of his age. Let him live to the full—by odious comparison. Let him say—I am better than you, wherefore you—not I—need all the improvement.

Now. Set a few wars in his time, with their alarms, rigors, restrictions, and dull regimentations. Load up his era with means for bacteriological attack and with atomic bombs. Invent great secrets, with attendant rumors. Frighten him all day long—and at night. Tell him he is nevertheless a free man and that, above all else, he must cherish and protect his liberty. Next, at every corner and edge of freedom, hack, harass, chip, clip, steal, stain, bribe, sabotage, and smudge each meaning and application of liberty, so that he no longer gathers its fundamental sense and comes to imagine liberty is consonant with security—which is all that remains for him to dwell upon, since he has been deprived of every secure thing and every secure experience in God's cosmos.

It makes you nervous, n'est-ce pas?

No one should be surprised that modern man shows signs of strain.

Nothing much in the world is sane.

Only the great instinct—the spaceless, timeless urge toward consciousness—continues its thrust of sanity. Because of it, even the maddest men are able to seize upon the illusion that they are sane by interpreting their own, spotty awareness as if it were the entirety of possible knowing. Because of instinct, however, all the mad men and all the mad societies will be brushed like bugs from the earth's crust and replaced by better, sensibler men or—if necessary—by silence. By silence while Evolution is retooled and instinct tries again with a new form—one which may not be so dazzled by its little consciousness or so greedy for the immediate fruits thereof as to attempt, with all the means and methods set down here, and ten million more, to deny instinct, repudiate Nature, and insist its petty Reason is the shape of truth entire.

So we three nervous wrecks sat down to lunch.

Marcia was a pretty girl, winsome, willowy, with eyes as blue as an upland lake and light-brown hair which, where the sun fell through undulant glass brick, turned opalescent, like duck feathers, and shone every color, as if it were composed of quintillions of submicroscopic prisms. She wore a light perfume—smelled like an April garden—and her voice was limpid.

Poor Paul.

Gloves on her hands—white little things, knit of string. She was nearly as tall as I am. A trembling came through the gloves. "So glad to meet you, Phil. Paul talks about you incessantly. It's practically a fixation."

Hot in the lobby, steamy; you could bake bread in the place. "Come in the Knight's Bar," I said, "and cool off."

She bewitched me with her lakelike eyes a moment longer—and deep in them I saw the shadow glide, the fear—the numb, dark carnivore that had to eat, that looked up at me with a guilty but imploring gaze.

You see, I knew her.

I held the door. She went first, walking confidently in the face of the strangers in the restaurant. Paul hesitated halfway through the cold doorway—hesitated, and eyed me with a sort of regret. Regret—and inquiry. I nodded my head to say she was lovely.

Jay saw her—gestured with a menu. We sat.

They ordered Manhattans and I a coke.

Music sprayed from its electrical hose—garbled a little, echoing slightly, like music from a lawn sprinkler. This wash of counterpoint in every public place is an attempt to assuage nerves that burn like beds of coals. We do everything we can dream of to relax—except relax. If we did that—we would lose the world that we own. And we are afraid to find our souls.

"It broke the record today," Paul said. Our best prop.

"Just over a hundred." Marcia moved her long hair across her right shoulder and kept gazing at me to see—not if I remembered her, for we had already acknowledged that—but what the effect was to be. "You ought to see Park Avenue! It's a parade—driving to the country!"

I tried to look like a man who had no memory—who regarded the earth as if it were a big flower. "Hot," I agreed. "But I'm one of those unbearable souls who likes it that way."

"Me, too," said Marcia. "Two winters ago, I went to Miami. I was crazy about it—"

It was a defiant thing to say. For that was where I'd seen her—with Dave Berne, one morning when I'd stopped at his hotel, early, to take him fishing.

"A young lady left over from last night," he said.

Miss Somebody-or-other, he had said. Marcia breakfasting in his bed. She exposed a nude shoulder to wave at me from the other room. Dave paid her and we went away.

He caught his first sailfish that day.

I supposed, now, that Marcia was offering me the opportunity to ask if I hadn't seen her in Miami; I supposed she had pointed out the hurt to let me, if I wished, open it up. Paul had crushed his napkin. He was sitting beside her and across from me—wondering, probably, how to turn the conversation away from the heat wave, the weather, to a less self-conscious, more profitable subject.

"Workin'?" he asked.

"Miami," I said to Marcia, "is quite a place." Then I said to Paul, "Yeah."

"He's cutting a serial," Paul told the girl. "When he gets through, they'll pay him about five years of my salary for it. A month's work, for him. A story about how some college football player married the Daisy Queen, I imagine. For that, he gets sixty bucks to my one. All I do, though, is make atom bombs. You can see the public would rather—"

"—have its ego blown up than its cities."

She laughed. "What is it really about?"

I gave them an outline of the story. "You see," I said, "it's just the way Shaw put it. If you're going to tell people the truth, you've got to make them laugh, or they'll kill you."

"Why will they?" Marcia asked.

"Because the truth doesn't seem amusing to them at all. However—they have a feeling life should be amusing. So—if you can make them laugh, and still occasionally set down a fact, they assume it's possible for somebody to know a few truths and still laugh. This permits them—in the long run—to ignore the truth you set down and go on laughing."

"Does the truth seem amusing to you, Phil?" she asked.

"Infinitely."

"It seems ghastly to me."

"Infinitely ghastly, too. You have to approach it in both moods at once—or else, and this is commoner—in first one and then the other."

"There is an unwritten law in this country," Paul reminded us dryly, "that everything is just dandy all the time—and anybody who says different is a communist!"

I nodded. "There is also a superstitious belief that the act of stating an unpalatable truth will increase its danger to the folks. What you don't know won't hurt you. Innocence is bliss. Boost, don't knock. If you haven't anything good to say, don't say it. This is the folklore of advertising. This is the theme song of radio. Everything has to be on the up-and-up. Criticism is regarded as un-American and un-Christian. The nation was founded by a rebellion of the early fathers against British tyranny. Christ was the most passionate critic man ever had. But it is considered the essence of patriotism and the chief tenet of the Master to be anticritic. So the whole meaning both of our nation and of its principal religion have been thrown overboard—and we are all riding on a roller-coaster where no track inspectors are allowed."

"Goodness!" Marcia said.

"Where," I went on, "nobody is even sure that the tracks were ever laid to the end: looking ahead realistically also is forbidden."

The drinks came.

Paul lifted his glass to the girl. She smiled at him warmly—with love, I suppose. What kind? It was a look of gratitude. A certain composition of her features. I compared that expression with the casual, collegiate, young-woman-of-the-world wave she had once given me from Dave Berne's double bed. A high-spirited, working-prostitute salute.

Some part of her conscience was grateful to Paul for taking her out of professional circulation. She was, I presumed, a girl with a good deal of courage—and one with taste. A sensitive girl who could—still—accommodate her mind to the objective risks of her trade. But the attitudes of many men toward her would not be acceptable. To face them, she would have to sell pieces of her inner person. Paul had rescued her from that and her eyes thanked him.

But, far more, Marcia's face expressed a maternal sentiment—warm and enveloping. He was, in a sense, her baby. Emotionally immature, romantic, and hence naïve, he had taken her for what she was not. She had played up to his assumption as an older woman to a child. In seducing him, she had seduced herself. She had adopted him as the symbol of the values she had discarded, the values that were now most precious to her because they were lost.

When I thought that over, I realized it was the point of extreme hazard in their relationship. Not social pressures, but the pressures of emotions—of instincts of which neither was conscious—would be the explosive condition of their two lives. The dangerous day would be the day when he matured sufficiently to dissociate the need to love from the need to be loved. In her case, the time would come then, too—when he demanded no more mothering in bowels or brain or heart. But it might come sooner—when she tired of that one function, or extended it, or spoiled its object, or devoured it, or cast it out for its own good.

For neither man nor woman can possess without being possessed, or consume without being consumed, and whether the process involves an object or another person, not to know the way of it and not to abide by the way is to be destroyed by it.

The lunch went along badly.

My habit of apostrophe and tirade, which usually fills such hollows as occur in talk—and forces its way, sometimes, beyond those decent opportunities—seemed inappropriate here. They had been depressed by what I had already said about the world. I guessed that, along with worries, they had hoped the visit would elicit an avuncular gaiety. They were young and in love, they thought, and should get from their elders the jocose disposition reserved for young love. I felt some of their expectancy, at any rate, and it only inhibited my rhetoric.

We talked of the news, of the airlift to Berlin which, by its very existence, constituted an immense Appeasement. We discussed the presidential candidates. We talked awhile of women's clothes, of the veterans' organization currently holding a convention in the city, and I described the house Ricky and I were building south of Miami, drawing a diagram on the tablecloth with a knife.

The effort to keep talk going—to find topics and to change them before attempt was disclosed—made me restive. Paul wasn't helping any. He'd eaten hungrily enough and then sat back—jerking and fidgeting about, making faces, pulling his nose, simpering, and smirking moonily.

She'd held up her end.

The trouble was, of course, that none of us was engaged in honest behavior.

Paul wanted to say: What do you think of her—and us?

Paul wanted me to say: She's lovely—and I'm sure you'll be happy.

I had become doubly certain—without yet entirely appreciating why—that it would never turn out. I had been generically sure, even before—just as Ricky had been sure: Paul wasn't constructed to marry a harlot and live happily ever after.

I wanted to say: For God's sake, cooky, send her back to her trade; she'll find some other guy, eventually; she's not for you.

Then I wanted to go up sixteen floors to my apartment with my troubles, my work, no women, no nephew.

What did the girl want to say?

I looked at her again—at her opalescent hair and her blue eyes.

And she looked back.

For a moment, the shadow stood still—stood still, and dissipated.

A wanton expression, brief and Lilith-like, reshaped the sharp, carmine edges of her mouth. She saw me not as the uncle of her now-beloved, but as the detached person—another man—and in this seeing me, she involuntarily recalled her long affair with lust. I have heard a woman say that, by merely quivering her underlip in a certain fashion, she had been able to change the tone, attention, and interest of nine men in ten with whom she'd ever talked—and there was nothing in her history to make me doubt the statement. And I have heard another woman say that all there was to Rudolph Valentino was the dilation of his nostrils. Watching Marcia's mouth, I could understand the sense of such matters.

So I was sure of still another thing.

Hattie Blaine had been dubious of her. Hattie had made the suggestion—the to me profoundly immoral suggestion—of tempting this girl.

Hattie had done it out of an unconscious notion that Marcia had some point in her nature which could not be lent to the kind of marriage Paul would need.

It wasn't money.

It was mood.

Marcia caught me making this observation. She blushed a little, glanced at the table, and then raised her eyes—but whether anxiously or in a repetition of the look, I could not tell.

Passionate women are seldom ashamed of their passion.

What she felt was not bold; it was not arch; it was not mercenary; it was—simply—an essence of her own responses. A belonging, like the curved shape of her eyebrows or the narrowness of her red nails—which she accepted as no more and no less than that, and revealed as naturally.

I wanted to go, even more.

One can pick patterns in one's life—rhythms, cadences, aggregates, cross sections, events that occur in pairs and threes—and the phenomenon is undoubtedly the result of chance. But one notices, one superimposes the pattern subjectively—and decides it is not chance but some obscure order, because one likes to feel that obscure orders occur in life. It is difficult to keep the ego perpetually lined up with statistical reality.

In twenty-four hours I'd looked at, talked to, explored, and somewhat learned three different, very handsome young women. Mrs. Yvonne Prentiss. Gwen Taylor—at Hattie's. And Marcia.

They come in threes, I thought. I thought it had been a long time since I'd met even one girl so pretty as all these. I reminded myself not to be an ass—to keep the view that grouping and variation in no way warp mathematical principle. The obsessive quality of all such ideas weighed on me. I hardly heard her account of their junket, on the preceding Saturday, to Jones' Beach.

I began to invent an excuse for present departure—to think ahead about apologizing—my work—the check, please—

Then the busboy dropped the tray.

He had tripped, it proved, on a napkin.

There were heavy stacks of plates and side dishes on the tray—glasses of water—metal domes.

The boy staggered—and the wild gesticulation of his free arm was caught by my peripheral vision. So I saw the tray slant—saw its burden slide and crash onto the heads of a pair of buttressed dowagers, a few tables away. The noise seemed to continue for a long time and a scream permeated it as the boy lost hold entirely on his tray, fell against a chair-back, and dish after soiled dish cascaded onto flower hats, bright blouses, fat shoulders, and freckled necks.

A rush of waiters masked the scene. Guests stood to see better.

A bull-voiced beldame roared, "Send the manager!"

Her less hefty companion burst through the waiters, daubing at the stained area of her bosom and throwing bits of lettuce with every swipe. She made a beeline for the ladies' room—followed by her smeared, stentorian colleague, whose hat was full of dill and parsley.

This commotion had hardly died down—Jay had no more than managed to clear the carpet, dispatch the wreckage on the table, send out the chairs for purging, and bite back the last traces of his mirth—when another oddity got under way.

"I want," said a man seated beside Paul, "a baked apple."

"But there are no baked apples." Fred, the waiter, said this.

"Go and tell the chef I want a baked apple."

"I did, sir. There are none."

"Explain to him that I always have a baked apple, here."

"There is applesauce—sir."

Fred is Viennese. His sorrowful, wise eyes meandered over to meet mine. They were expressionless. But the fact that they had moved toward me was, in itself, communication.

"I do not like applesauce. Slippery pudding! Go and tell the chef I want my usual baked apple."

The churl who spoke was familiar to me by sight. An Englishman—a VIP during the war—who had often stayed at the Astolat. A medium-sized man of sixty with a red face and eyes like gray gas. A brittle British voice, snotty in every particular. An iron-gray Kaiser Wilhelm mustache and a way of smacking his lips underneath it, when he was in a temper, that shook its points.

He was always accompanied by his wife. As a rule, they ate quietly—talking together now and then, and more often just swilling in food. She was a lank, vapid woman with a toadstool's complexion, a chin like a fist, and hair tormented into little knobs—as if she absent-mindedly had cooked it, rather than coiffed it—and burned it in the process. Lumpy, burned hair, a disgusting dish of it—and a voice like claws, to match her master's.

She stared, now, at her empty plate, and said nothing. She did not seem to be ashamed, or embarrassed, or to be waiting for a storm to subside. She was a woman born without the knack for yielding or apology. She merely looked at her plate because she would be God-damned if she cared to look at anything or anybody else.

Fred came back. He put on a sympathetic expression. "The chef says he is very sorry. He says that this is not the time of year for baked apples."

"The stands are loaded with apples," the Englishman snorted. "Seen 'em myself!"

"I know. But they're eating apples. Not baking apples. They come later in the fall."

The Englishman doubled his fist and lightly thumped the table. "I said I wanted a baked apple! All I wanted was a baked apple."

"I have explained."

"With cream. A baked apple with cream."

I have seen Englishmen by the dozen go through this sort of routine. With the exception of certain Germans, some of them are, I believe, the rudest people on the earth. Badly brought-up babies—these empire builders.

This one was insulting the waiter and his wife, in the bargain—but I have rarely seen an Englishman who minded insulting his wife by making scenes. When crossed in matters like baked apples they seldom consider wives, children, strangers, decorum, or the reputation of Britannia. They merely behave like twirps.

Fred had said nothing.

"I suppose," the Englishman at last went on, shivering his mustache, "you mean to tell me I am not to have a baked apple—?"

"Perhaps for dinner—one of the eating kind could be baked—"

The Englishman suddenly hurled his napkin on his plate. He stood. "No baked apple," he said. "Well!"

He intended to stalk from the room.

However, Paul—who had at first been chortling over the slow-spilled tray and later watching the Englishman with intent, even exaggerated, care—now interposed, to my great surprise.

He sat next to the Britisher—on the same banquette. Thus when the infuriated man surged upright he stood alongside Paul and between our two tables.

Paul stretched out his foot, rested his shoe on the corner of the Englishman's table, and untied the lace.

The man, barred by the long leg, said, "Good Gad!"

Paul retied the lace. He looked dimly at the Englishman—who, I honestly believe, had not so much as noticed or recalled a single person in the room but himself all during the baked apple affair. It is a kind of concentration peculiar to the British.

"Put down your foot, man!"

"Quintod!" Paul said, as if using rare syllables of opprobrium: "Quidhetch! Vassenoy!" He moved his foot this way and that, eying it. Even the Englishwoman was staring at it now, in some shock. After all, it was on her table, twenty inches from her picklelike nose, and not a victual.

Paul turned again to the standing man and hissed, "Kittenpitches!"

"Waiter!"

Fred was still standing there—still fairly impassive. He had the wit to say, "Yes, sir?"

"This person is drunk!"

Paul came to his feet then—and towered over the Englishman. He bent close. "Pomadiant nocrot," he said harshly. "Cantapunce. Cabulate geepross. Dreek!"

The Englishman opened his mouth and emitted a thin, high, frightened squeak.

Paul scowled. "Nikerpole," he said, sadly now. "Oose."

Quite suddenly, Paul sat down. He spoke to Marcia in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone—but a tone loud enough to carry around the respectfully quieted room. "Never did understand why people came here without first learning the language. And the manners. I dare say my Japanese surprised him! Probably an admiral in civies, spying out the next war. Got a camera in his mustache, I presume, clever devils!"

The Englishman then left the room, shaking from head to foot.

His wife, however, remained staring at her plate. By and by Fred brought her a stewed fish with which she began to fill her baleful gizzard.

I would have thought—I would have bet—that this was the end of such things. The tray, alone, would have done as the month's quota for this proper restaurant.

I was wrong.

Hardly had the Englishman departed—hardly had his wife commenced to make slushing sounds with the cream sauce on her fish—hardly had I dried my tears—when the corner of the eye opposite the one that had caught sight of the teetering tray drew my attention in its new direction.

This was toward the bar.

Here Mrs. Doffin was sitting at her regular table.

She had been sitting there, lunch and dinner, when I had first entered the Knight's Bar in 1937. A tall, narrow woman with dyed red hair, who was given to wearing witches' hats—such hats as women wore in Merlin's day—round and pointed. A stovepipe of a woman with a face on which a bleached fuzz grew, and eyes that resembled spoon-backs.

Year in, year out, the four seasons through, Mrs. Doffin had five Martinis for lunch, five for dinner, five in the evening after dinner, and refreshments in her room, between-times. Some ten million dollars lay to her account in various banks, I understood, but, since the death of her husband in 1932, she had devoted herself entirely to one form of enjoyment, if the pointed hats be excepted.

Never soused, noisy, or shot—she was never remotely sober. Sometimes, late at night, if you came into the bar, you would see her lips move as she communed voicelessly with whatever shades or hallucinations accompanied the thirteenth or fourteenth Martini. Occasionally, in a moment of clarity, she would recognize this person or that—a waiter, the manager, Ricky, myself. She would nod regally then, wish you good morning, afternoon, or evening—approximately according to the time—and flick her fingers flirtatiously.

She never bothered anybody.

She was not bothering anybody now.

She was sitting at her regular table, wearing a bright, vacant smile, and stuffing matches into her nose.

She had placed twenty or thirty when I spotted her.

She picked up another and delicately inserted it, pressing it up until its pink tip came even with the rest.

"Curious," I said.

Marcia and Paul craned their necks. They watched awhile.

"I wonder how many it will hold," Paul said.

"Another half dozen, I should think. She has a bit more room on the right side."

"Does she light them when she gets a snoot full? Make quite a firework."

"It's new," I answered. "First variation in ages."

"Somebody should stop her!" Marcia said urgently.

Paul's head shook. "On what grounds?"

"Good heavens, Paul—!"

Mrs. Doffin reached the point where neither nostril would contain another match. She tamped them pensively and nodded to herself. They protruded, I would say, the best part of an inch—all neat and even.

Mrs. Doffin then removed her hat. It was the first time I had seen the full billow of her hair. It looked like excelsior on which paprika had been sprinkled. She set the hat on the seat at her side and glanced with a bright smile and opaque eyes at the whole earth. I suppose the waiters had failed to notice her new gambit owing to the fact that she, and her soundless palaver, were fixtures in the place, like the intruding girders and the gaudy horsemen on the walls. All the waiters ever saw was her glass, when she emptied it. She could have breathed fire, or come in tattooed, and they would have observed no change.

From her hat, Mrs. Doffin withdrew a hatpin, long and as black as any of her garments or their accessories.

This, with the utmost aplomb, she thrust through both her cheeks, hesitating only momentarily at the midpoint, evidently in order to get her tongue beneath the line of direction. One does not—her pleased look seemed to say—absurdly and clumsily impale one's tongue, in these little maneuvers.

"Fred," I called at this point. "Mrs. Doffin needs you."

He looked. His eyes bulged and his brows shot high. He hurried toward her.

She flirted her fingers at him.

He signalled to Jay.

Together they escorted Mrs. Doffin from the room.

Nobody ever saw her again.

There are homes for the rich to do such things in.

5

"The heat is getting people," Paul said, as he and Marcia bade me good-bye in the lobby.

Marcia gave me one last look. She knew she hadn't passed.

She ascribed the wrong cause to the fact.

She thought that, since I'd seen her sensual impulse was not confined to one person, I'd written her off as a slut.

Whose sensual impulses have ever been confined to one person?

Were they so limited, human breeding would be the rarest of activities and marriage almost unheard of.

I didn't mind Marcia's libido.

All I objected to was its orientation.

I rode up to my room and began dilatorily to strip once again.

6

I am told the female of ruff is reeve.

I am told the energy of one of the early atomic bombs is about equal to the energy that falls on a mile and a half square of the earth in a single day.

I am told that a bishop in Philadelphia ordered two motion-picture houses to close down their shows.

I am told that common goldfish will survive under winter ice while the fancy sorts will not.

I am told the kurbash is a whip.

I am told that Soviet fighter planes are buzzing our airlift.

I am told that Paris is unchanged this summer.

I am told that a committee is being formed to censor as un-American all books which, in its opinion, are sacrilegious or immoral.

I am told that no creature can travel faster than a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour, or thereabouts.

I am told that Truman reads Keats.

These are things I had not known before.

I subtract myself from them and find life going on as usual—the land I love deteriorating, the world I adore growing ever more miserable.

I throw the papers and magazines on my coffee table and go to work.

7

Once, I laughed.

Not at the slapstick landslide of dirty dishes on the dowagers.

Not at the weird vanishing of Mrs. Doffin.

But at the matter of a baked apple.

O England—culture uncultivated!

Brave boors.

8

Toward half past five I got my nose bloodied.

It happened this way:

I went down to the newsstand for a typewriter ribbon; the energy of my sentiments had worn holes in the incumbent tape.

While I was waiting for a red light on Madison Avenue I heard band music and saw people scurrying toward Fifth. I went over to see the parade.

It was a listless marching—veterans on gummy asphalt all along the limp trees by the Park. The older men from the older war rode in mimic locomotives that bucked their front wheels, hooted sirens, clanked bells. Some current soldiers marched—carrying rifles with hot metal parts, and behind them came a show of mechanized equipment, with bands interspersed. I listened to the bands and thought of Shakespeare's reference to men who couldn't contain their urine when they heard the bagpipes play. Brass bands, as much as anything, had undone the loose hold of the Germans on sense. Songs about rolling caissons and lifting anchors were flaring the eyes and dropping the chins of the street-lining crowds here, too. I studied these people, remembering all philosophers and the scientists and their faith in reason. Man's monumental Thought—his pride—was silly in these surroundings. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Kant, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, James, and a hundred more—compartments of order in a chaos of shining orbs and panting tongues. Pretty compositions, real in themselves, and true enough—but floating in a flood their owners did not observe or—if they saw it—ruled irrelevant, nor realized they rode it, too. What old classic premise could stand the test of a brass band? None.

I watched the bright horns and the dull guns.

I stood at attention when the flags went by—feeling, as I always do, the aspiration in those white stars and those red stripes.

We would continue to aspire—some of us—while breath stayed in us.

But this stirring—this patriotic thrill—did not debilitate my sphincters. Tightened them, rather, against the multimillion goons who would as soon sell all of liberty down any creek as their own two-bit integrity. What patriots remain these days must battle harder against their countrymen for truth, for dignity, for honesty and love than ever against an outside foe.

It proved a misfortune to be moved to lofty sentience, at that time.

The tiresome military iron clanked by as it has clanked through every city on the earth for thousands of years.

More men of the newer war came, canoe-shaped hats worn cock-eyed, bellies lean still, faces blank in the scalding sunshine.

I noticed, now, that many paraders were moving among the spectators—marchers who had been dismissed some distance up the Avenue. These men, from other states, ticketed like parcel post, badge-thick and boozy, shoved among the ordinary citizens, cawing and singing, carrying pails, and shooting water pistols. Occasional cops watched them with the fixed, tolerating smiles taught in the department—proper address toward large political groups. The men, in what they thought of as boisterous glee, peed out their pistol streams at any pretty girl, blotting blouses, stippling skirts with dark dribbles, and evoking, as often as not, coaxing screams.

I wandered through a block or two of this nickering infantilism, this petty and symbolic repayment for a thousand lacks and ten thousand wretched frustrations. Men will be boys, I thought. Boys, I knew, will hardly ever be men.

I came to a lamppost where a dozen pistoleers were singing, "I want a girl just like the girl who married dear old dad." Their mouths yearned it and the sun sparkled on the gold fillings in their teeth. This song, so far as I recall, is the only legitimate outlet for the Oedipus complex permitted in twentieth-century U.S.A. So I watched gents from Oklahoma and Idaho and Nebraska sing their incest, get their backs in it, and I wondered how much effort it would take to elicit from even one of them an acknowledgment of that emotion which, hidden deep inside him, gave him his particular inflection and look while he sang that particular song. I have wondered before while viewing luncheon clubs as they yearned for a girl like mother. To a face, every here and there, the anthem does memorable things. I supposed they would all rather be dead than have to admit the possibility of the truth. I supposed that the recognition of the baby alive in us all would require the hurdling of yet more dead bodies—billions, at least—to bring them to a happy acceptance of such affairs.

American babies are not allowed to be Freudian.

Not till they grow up, anyhow.

I pushed along.

There was a clearing in the crowd ahead. Out of it came such blats of laughter, animal calls, and whistlings as mark the approach to a feeding zoo—the same sound that is emitted by the amused radio audience.

I reached the edge.

Here the canoe-hats had formed an open oblong between the curb and an apartment front. It was necessary for anyone who went by to cross this area. On its rim stood a man with a stick, and heavy batteries. He wore a sergeant's chevrons and his breast was a blaze of heroism. Men crossed the vacated cement untouched—and middle-aged women, also. But whenever a young girl made her way through the hem of the crowd and came unexpectedly into the hollow oblong, the sergeant sneaked forward with his stick, got behind her, lifted the rear of her skirt, poked, and applied the juice.

The girls, shocked electrically, without warning, in this delicate and private part of their anatomies reacted frantically. Most of them screamed. All of them leaped—thrusting their hips forward convulsively. Some then ran—and dove into the crowd on the other side. One, a girl with long, dark hair, slipped after she leaped, fell, and tore a hole in her stocking. Another jumped, turned, and cursed. One tried to hit the sergeant with her pocketbook. Most endeavored to recover some shred of composure—to laugh—or to slip away without showing what they felt. Some wept instantly.

But the response of the delighted—the ecstatic onlookers, was always the same: a jarring salvo of catcalls, guffaws, finger whistles, ribald yells, mirth's paroxysms.

I watched this business for quite a while—the bands going by behind me—the flags—the guns—and the sweating people standing all along the curb for miles of Fifth Avenue.

Finally, a fair-haired girl of about sixteen came innocently into the open place, looked about to find the reason for it, saw none, and began to cross. The sergeant slipped swiftly behind her. Quickly, with his stick, he lifted the little pink cotton of her skirt, bent as he walked, with ogling pool-room pantomine, took aim, and thrust. This girl did not leap but stood transfixed on the point of the electric stick. A great grin broke on the sergeant's face and he thrust, now—again and again. Her head turned in slow horror. Whatever fantasy had seized her brain was shattered by the sight of the lewd man jabbing at her. The crowd roared like all the pottery on earth falling over a precipice. A look of the most pitiful terror came over her. At last, she found the nerves and muscles for running and escaped into the yapping multitude.

The sergeant straightened up. When he straightened, I stepped out and hit him on the mouth as hard as I could.

The approving roar stopped as if a noose had tightened on its throat.

The sergeant stared at me with addled menace. Blood trickled from between his lips, where I had felt his teeth loosen.

Then one of his buddies hit me from the side.

My nose blazed with pain.

The hollow lost its shape. Different—yet not much different yells were raised.

Someone cracked the back of my head.

I saw a place between two fat men, lunged at it, looked back. The sergeant was slowly sitting down, fumbling for his handkerchief.

Blows fell on me. A man in a navy uniform grabbed my arm. I hit him and he let go. The crowd closed around me.

When, after long minutes of pushing and weaving, I emerged on a side street, my nose was bleeding.

I wiped it and went, somewhat shakily, to the hotel.

The nosebleed stopped in a few minutes.

I turned on my radio and found a cello solo amongst the predinner music.

Ave Maria, as a matter of fact.

9

Tom Alden—Tom-the-doctor—had been thinking about me, off and on, for more than thirty hours, now.

He is the kind of person whose thoughts give birth more to inquiry than opinion.

We went to a Longchamps for dinner—the gold and vermilion decorations made bearable by air conditioning. Traffic was light; only a few people were about—people going tiredly in the heat-choked night. After dinner, we rode back in a cab to the Astolat and strolled over to the Park where we sat together on the Mall, listening to the concert. Thousands of people had spread out newspapers in the lamplit dusk and lay upon them, asleep, talking, making love. The police had suspended the bans that one night. Tenements and penthouses were ovens; their refugees gasped on the grass. Kids played in the fountains and no one interfered. The city itself had an evacuated feeling; all who were able had fled the heat wave and the rest were in parks, in cool restaurants, or in the movie theaters. Stars shone hazily above the trees and the stagy skyscrapers. Music, coming down the Mall, was distorted by invisible eddies that still rose from the sun-baked cement; it soared and fell and wobbled through the furnace atmosphere.

Tom, as I said, is given to inquiry. This is not surprising in a man who practices several sciences. If we were old friends, we were also dedicated, in different ways, to the examination of all that surrounded ourselves and each other. Our sensibilities were tuned to the fact; they lacked the common diffidences of most such attachments.

"How's it going?" That was his first question, when he arrived at my hotel rooms.

"Okay."

He put down the black bag that lies within easy reach of his whole life.

"Jittery?"

"Not that I know of."

"Tell Ricky?"

"No."

"How is she?"

"All cured—we hope."

His pale eyes fixed on me. "Let me have another look at the throat."

He had another look—rearranging lights.

"I did a little reading on it, Phil. I can't say for sure what it is."

"I'm going on the assumption that it is—what-for."

"Yes. You would. Most people would take the opposite attitude—until the last possible fraction of the last possible second."

"Why?"

He shrugged and put his tools away. "Wishful thinking."

"More fun to know than wish—look than dream."

"Not many agree with that."

"They don't know enough—look far enough. If you're going to get yourself free—you've got a lot of illusion to hack through first."

"Do you feel really free?"

I shook my head. "Not free at all. But I do feel I know what freedom is—what it means—what it's for. Maybe that's as near as you can get—these days."

He went to the toilet and washed—in an absent-minded, habitual manner. "Hot night."

"Hot."

"You've been told your number was up before now. I've been considering that. You know what it's like."

"Sure."

"What's it like?" He asked it eagerly, and yet academically, as if there were a formula for the reply.

"Changes from minute to minute."

"I suppose so." He seemed disappointed.

That was when we started for Longchamps.

He took the bag along. He always does....

He ordered one Tom Collins. The tall glass was sweating even before the waiter could bring it from the bar.

"How are you—fixed?"

I told him that.

He peered at the room, the other diners, the gaudy colors. "Funny. I remember back in high school in Montclair when you were the class poet. Everybody thought you'd be a writer, sure. The last will and testament of our class left your pen to the juniors. Remember that?"

I remembered.

"But I don't suppose anybody—including yourself—ever thought you'd rip out magazine serials like logs going through a circular saw. Get to be a popular writer. And then set people on their ears by writing about psychology. We all thought you were destined for the garret—a lot of reputation, maybe—but not Florida houses and—fifty thousand dollars' worth of insurance—"

"No."

"Did you?"

"Yeah."

"You did!"

"No harm in daydreaming, was there? Back then?"

Tom meditated on those distant high school years. "You realized the daydream."

"A person like me has a good many daydreams. When one comes true—he automatically starts on the next."

"Do you consider yourself happy?"

"Enormously, Tom."

"So do I. Why? How come? When you spend about ninety per cent of your time considering the unhappiness of the world?"

"Somebody has to collect the garbage or we'd all die of plague. And a born garbage collector loves his job."

"There's more to it than that."

"Yeah. It's not garbage. It's what we discard, ignore, repress. The green fertilizer of the next crop. The yin to the coming yang. My contemplation of what you call the unhappy aspects of life is really the substance of what I find to be hope."

"Jung changed you a lot, Phil."

"I dunno. I got thinking—some years back—of a poem I wrote when I was twenty-one. Threw it away—lost it—haven't any idea what happened to it. But in that poem was the fundamental Jungian idea—the idea that instinct directs human affairs—and that it's a force in action which always has equal and opposite reactions—"

"Still—Archie—"

I thought of Archie—the psychiatrist to whom Tom had sent me for analysis. "Archie taught me psychology—Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian—and let me work out my own problems, aloud. He was a great teacher."

"He died of cancer," Tom mused.

"'—too'?"

He looked at me and grinned gently. "Masochism takes funny forms in you."

"In us all." I went back a little way in the discussion. "When I was a young guy, I formed the habit of listening to, and looking at, everything that happened in my mind. Ruling out nothing. Trying to relate everything to everything else. That's a good habit. That's the natural mind. There are too God-damned many prohibitions and taboos in the life of a Presbyterian minister's son to keep track of. So I started—as a game—ignoring all of them, in my head. Plenty of people do. I arrived—in that poem—at a pretty complete formulation of instinct and the laws of instinct—as Jung sees it working. As Toynbee sees it working collectively, on civilizations. As Northrop glimpses it. As Jesus tried to define it. As Aristotle didn't even guess it."

"So you think you really never underwent a philosophical change?"

"No. I lost sight of what I'd felt—when I was a dizzy, drunk Hollywood writer. But when Archie taught me Freud and Jung—I got back the insight—in contemporary terms and scientific formulations. That's all. And it isn't very much."

"Are you ever frightened?"

"I'm protoplasm, for God's sake!"

He chuckled. "That's a relief! I've wondered what are you scared of. Sometimes—you seem haunted. Most of the time, I could swear you were afraid of nothing."

"The shadow of the ego—the black streak behind it that it never looks around to see."

"And what does that mean?"

"What I'm scared of. Inhumanity. Cruelty. To man—to me, also, I guess.''

"People get more humane."

"Like hell!"

"If you lived a thousand years ago—or ten thousand you'd believe it. The trouble is, you're supersensitive."

I took a long breath.

"What do you read?" I asked. "What do you want to hear? A list of German concentration camps? An account of the cremation of some six million innocent people by Germany? A survey of conditions in Russian slave labor camps? A discussion of physical torture as it is used by modern police in America? Or by military men? Or as a political instrument in Europe? Or as a diplomatic measure, by, let us say, the English, in their colonies? Do you want to hear a discourse on the behavior of Jap troops in war? On our own troops? Would you like to have me run over the treatment of people in American lunatic asylums? Shall I touch on lynching details—and other minor unpleasant experiences of the American Negro? Would you like me to talk about how we Americans disposed of the Indian problem? Would you be interested in some studies of corporeal punishment as it is administered in American slum homes and on American farms? Shall I recite the prison methods and jail practices common amongst our agents of law enforcement? Or would a review of the various effects of intense radiation on the human body, as well as its genes, coupled with the fact that about every other American is sitting around these days asking why in hell we don't atom-bomb Russia, tend to persuade you that we are not, essentially, humane people? Shall I discuss brutality in sports? Are you interested in considering our annual million smashed in automobiles as evidence of a certain basic scarcity of the humanitarian impulse? There are various business practices I could go into, in documenting the matter. Not the ruination of widows and orphans. Not the adulteration and poisoning of products. Just the little results of the basic premise of business which is that making money is the whole object, without reference to kindness or love. Or would you like to review the various sorts of crimes committed by the people in our fair land? Would you like to contemplate the interesting and vicious psychology of many of the victims of these crimes? Shall we look at the degree of obliviousness, smugness, or rejection which Americans held toward the atrocities before the recent war—or hold now toward massacre and famine in India—famine in China—ruthless dictatorship in a dozen nations—Spain, for instance—Argentina—a lot more? Or shall we, on the other hand, investigate a whole field of cruelty as large as the one just hinted at: the psychological cruelties of modern men? It would double the scope of the survey. The teachers—devising torments to sweat off their frustrations on their pupils. The common office techniques of the average man-of-affairs. The torments of the soul written into the class structures of society. The awful havoc wreaked on man whenever a minister preaches hell-fire and damnation. No fooling! We are not humane. We are—per capita—the cruelest people who ever lived, because, unlike the poor thieves on the two other crosses—we do know what we do!"

Tom took off his fogged spectacles and wiped them. I pushed the advantage. "Cruelty among doctors. An interesting little sidetrack. I recall, for example—"

"Skip it." He looked sorrowfully at me. "You win that one."

"All I want," I said, "is for people to be truly humane. Truly loving. But, to gain that, we'd be obliged to give up a great deal we now cherish dearly."

We had lemon ice.

Later, we walked into the Park and sat down....

The people on the newspapers on the grass, the silo smell of trees at night in heat waves, lamplight and music—as I have said....

"Cruelty in doctors," Tom repeated musingly, after we found a bench on the Mall, where we could feel the breeze if one came.

"Last night," I responded, when he didn't go on, "I was reading a book that suggested the whole philosophy of medicine was cruel. Saving babies—increasing the life span—only so people will go hungry by millions."

"Vogt? Osborne? I read them. What's true humanity? I don't know—except sometimes, in individual cases. What about old people, for instance?"

"What about them?"

He looked back over his shoulder as if he could see through the night, the trees of Central Park, and the blocks of buildings, to the East River. "Out on the Island—I take care of a ward filled with them. Chronics. Sixty years old. Seventy. Eighty. Ninety. Some been in bed for twenty years. No cure. No hope. No chance—in a high percentage—of doing a thing, ever. An organ's shot—ruined beyond repair. Half of them touched with senile dementia; a quarter, sunk in it. Mess their beds. You feed 'em with spoons. And yet they go on—year after year after year."

"I've seen the ward."

"America has millions of such people. Only a fraction of 'em in hospitals. Moms and pops, grandmas and grandpas, hanging on to the last, sick gristle of existence. Spoiling the lives of other millions of people. Taking their time and their energy. Absorbing funds that young kids desperately need. All for nothing. Wheedling and whining and complaining if everything isn't soft and easy for them. Reminding sons and daughters and grandchildren of their 'duty.' The duty to be enslaved by meaningless, useless senility. The food and the clothes, the beds and the service, the tax money, the energy, the topsoil, if you go for Vogt—and the metal—pours down their gullets and is worn out by their worn-out bodies—and not one single, solitary useful thing is accomplished."

"You're stealing my act," I said.

Tom laughed ruefully. "It's an easy act for a doctor to crib! Tell me, why in hell do people look forward so much to old age? Nine times out of ten, it's a mess. Even proud, independent people, when they get old, usually lose their pride and their independence—and go down begging for handouts."

"The best reason I can think of," I said, "is that they're disappointed in life as they've lived it up to middle age."

"The whole country grows older," Tom went on, after nodding to himself. "The American landscape will soon be cluttered with human antiques. Pension-seeking, vengeful, dogmatic, persecuting, bloc-voting, parasitic millions. An ocean of wasteful protoplasm—Old Men of the Sea—and old Women—riding on the backs of everybody. Is a thing like that humane?"

"It is richly sentimental."

"In the labs, thousands of my colleagues are sweating to bring it about. Studying the degenerative diseases. Trying to lick cancer and heart trouble and hypertension. Trying to lick aging itself—to keep the old, old indefinitely! Geriatrics—a whole science for the maintenance of second childhood! Sometimes, Phil, I actually think the world is as crazy as you say it is. Sometimes—when I run into a bright kid whose parents can't afford to have its legs straightened—and then when I visit my ward—I'd like to sweep the place clean with a Thompson gun and move in the kids who need it."

"There is the Townsend Plan," I offered. "Two hundred dollars a month for everybody who's old, if they spend it right away—and millions are too stupid to see the catch. In fifty years—Pensioned Old Age may be the great goal that progress and prosperity are today. Of course, there isn't enough stuff to go around, and there will never be, so two hundred bucks, if you gave it to the gaffers to spend, soon wouldn't buy a good-sized roast. But they may try for it."

Tom laughed somberly. "They are trying. You should see the pension literature in my ward. The letters they write. The voting they do. Should I shoot them? What the hell do you really believe about it?"

"There is the death wish," I said.

"They don't want to die! Not one in a dozen! Even if they're blind, vomiting on the hour, spoon-fed, and in pain—they want to go on living—and are proud of it."

"It's Jung," I answered, "who keeps talking about the law of opposites. The death wish is subjective. But we translate it into its opposite form—in this case, the objective. We want other people to die—to suffer—to bear our load—to take our responsibility. We hate. What did you say about your old folks? Vengeful and persecuting and parasitic? That's the death wish turned wrong-side-out. Or—take this pair of opposites. We have applied reason to extending life. So we have automatically obliged ourselves to apply reason to death. That is a psychological consequence of administering life—stretching it, maintaining it—of baby-saving and so on. Only—being egoists—blind to the basic laws of instinct—we won't kill anybody. Millions of Russians, maybe, but not one American. It's even against the law for a person to kill himself, for whatever merciful and laudable a reason. So what? We insist on our right to save and maintain every life. We also insist on dodging the resultant duty at the other end of the natural spectrum: death. The living have no recourse left but to extravert their death wish. To hate others because of the hatefulness of the trap they're in."

"How do you work it out?"

"In the better world," I said, "a person who had enjoyed the long conscious control of his life would feel somewhat responsible for controlling his death. When he got useless, he would give up. He would regard it as rational—and as part of that 'greater love' that almost no man, these days, hath a sign of."

"Voluntary euthanasia?"

"Why not? And if you came a header and couldn't do it for yourself—the state would do it."

"Do you think," Tom said with asperity, "that the people would permit anything like that? Or think of it as idealism? Why—it's a sin—!"

"Sure. Sin. It's one of the sins that keep the churches full and the heads and hearts of the folks empty. Vested interest."

"How many people would do it?"

I shrugged. "Couldn't say. You've seen cases. You'll likely witness another—my own—before long—"

"Good God! I'm sorry—Phil—!"

I laughed and he relaxed—visibly.

"The mass of humanity," he went on after a time, "hasn't that kind of insight, education, nerve—"

"No. Maybe not. Hasn't—as I'd put it—even that much access to its own instincts. Doesn't know even that clearly the relationship of ideals to acts. Of material gains to inner responsibilities. That's the trouble with the mass of humanity. It decides to use atom bombs—the work of a few geniuses who, left to themselves, might not."

"Appalling," Tom said.

"Sure. But the moldboard plow is just as deadly as the bomb in the hands of the common mass. And the implications of plows are much easier for the common jerk to understand than the implications of nucleonics. But he doesn't. So why worry about atomic bombs? Merely another aspect of the same, deep, and ubiquitous nonsense."

We sat awhile.

"What," Tom finally said, "will the better world be like?"

"Woodsy," I answered.

I could hear his grin in his voice. "To restore and shore up the topsoil?"

"Yep. To maintain the ecology that maintains man. And besides, woods are pleasant."

"The rivers would be clear. The factories would dump their wastes in the desert. And the sewage would go through processing plants and then be put back on the land."

"Not many factories, anyhow," I said.

"No? Why?"

"Not nearly so many people, for one thing. People would—people did—cherish each other more when they were scarcer. That's a psychological aspect of overpopulation thus far hardly observed. There are so many of us getting in each other's way and making life tough by merely being that we tend to hate each other just from congestion. Then—the people in the better world wouldn't be so crazed over junk. A tenth of the factories we've got now would probably furnish all the junk they'd want."

"Cities, do you think?"

"Maybe a few small ones—where people put in a few years before going back to the open country."

"Villages? Small towns?"

"Sure. Lots of schools and colleges. Everybody would be pretty bright—and pretty anxious to learn. Everybody would be artistic. Everybody would want to do a certain amount of work with his hands."

"Why?"

"That's the instinct of the critter, isn't it?"

"How come they'd all be bright?"

"Because the biggest fun we're going to have—when we get that wise, if we ever do—is breeding bright people. Living for the sake of future generations—and having some happiness doing it. Happiness with sex, amongst other things, when it ceases to scare us to pieces."

"Maybe," Tom's tone objected, "you might finally convince the folks that knocking themselves off when they got useless was evidence of a great love—an assimilated employment of the death wish. I can even see certain remedial effects in the idea—if that were the common philosophy: people would want to make a bigger effort while they did live, for example. But you can't get dumb babies to knock themselves off."

"You could start—though—at the other end. Clamping down on the people who overproduce and are least qualified to do so."

"Birth control for the morons? The Jukes and Kallikaks?"

"Yeah."

"Too difficult. They fornicate when drunk."

"Then set your lab wizards to find an easy, lasting system. They ought to work toward stopping the output of predefeated babies—of society-defeating hordes of nitwits—as a compensatory duty for working on longevity and the diseases of old age. Fill the drugstores with something you take a sip of that'll sterilize you for five years straight. Chocolate flavor. And back it with national advertising."

"Try to sell that idea! Every church would say it would mean the suicide of the race."

"Suicide of church members, maybe! Kidding aside, the more intelligent specimens of mankind, who do use birth control, still do have offspring—on purpose. It's just that they're outnumbered—and the net result is genetic decline."

"What else—in the better world?"

"No mummery about sex. No mysteries. The young allowed to develop according to their impulses—without shame or restraint so long as they aren't hurtful. The sex manners and aesthetics of the mature built upon that background of unashamed, free experience."

"And what would those manners be?"

"Don't ask me! I'm a shame-produced human gimmick, myself."

"You're welching!"

"Not exactly. I suspect—in the better world—sex would be such a different set of ideas and acts and experiences and feelings that we can't even imagine them."

"Nobody would dare bring up kids that way."

"People already have dared. A school in England does it. A school for difficult kids—not the socially elite specimens. And they turn out fine. Normal; and nice people. Which is something you definitely cannot say of the kids turned out by our own reform schools."

"It's hard to believe," Tom said.

"Isn't it! That's the trouble with truth—these days."

We went on talking for a long while about the better world.

As we designed it, that hot night, I kept thinking how much of our envisioned heaven-on-earth was constituted of what are now considered to be mortal sins.

By and by, Tom said, "Half the doctors in the Utopia would be psychiatrists—right?"

"No."

"Doesn't it follow—in your idea of the state of things? Half the people who go to doctors, you say, have psychological causes for their physical symptoms. And I'd just about agree. Half the hospital beds are occupied by nuts."