Building Seven was a world of its own. It held out a daily choice between its own kind of virtue—staying in bed—and its own kind of vice: midnight crap games, AWOL, and the smuggling of beer and whiskey through the fire-exit doors of its two latrines. It was the stage for its own kind of comedy—the night Snyder chased the charge nurse into the fluoroscopy room with a water pistol, for instance, or the time the pint of bourbon slipped out of old Foley’s bathrobe and smashed at Dr. Resnick’s feet—and once in awhile its own kind of tragedy—the time Jack Fox sat up in bed to say, “Chrissake, open the window,” coughed, and brought up the freak hemorrhage that killed him in ten minutes, or the other times, two or three times a year, when one of the men who had been wheeled away to surgery, smiling and waving to cries of “Take it easy!” and “Good luck t’ya, boy!” would never come back. But mostly it was a world consumed by its own kind of boredom, where everyone sat or lay amid the Kleenex and the sputum cups and the clangor of all-day radios. That was the way things were in C Ward on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, except that the radios were swamped under the noise of Tiny Kovacs’s laughter.

“Well, very nice,” he said. “I won’t take time to read this other one now, but this first one’s very nice. ’Course, naturally, as you said, this is a very different kind of material you got here, so it’s a little hard for me to—you know—” and he dismissed the rest of this difficult sentence with a wave of the hand. “I’ll tell you what, though, Bob. Instead of just reading here, let me ask you a couple of questions about writing. For example.” He closed his eyes and delicately touched their lids with his fingers, thinking, or more likely pretending to think, in order to give added weight to his next words. “For example, let me ask you this. Supposing somebody writes you a letter and says, ‘Bob, I didn’t have time to write you a short letter today, so I had to write you a long one instead.’ Would you know what they meant by that?”

Don’t worry, I played this part of the evening pretty cool. I wasn’t going to let twenty-five bucks get away from me without some kind of struggle; and my answer, whatever sober-sided nonsense it was, could have left no doubt in his mind that this particular writing candidate knew something of the difficulty and the value of compression in prose. He seemed gratified by it, anyway.

There was the roof and there was the chimney top of it; there were all the windows with the light coming in; there was another approving chuckle from Dr. Alexander Corvo and another submission to the Reader’s Digest; there was another whisper of a chance for a Simon and Schuster contract and a three-million-dollar production starring Wade Manley; and there was another five in the mail for me.

Then she asked me if I wanted to know something, and without waiting to find out whether I did or not, she told me. She told me I was just about the biggest snob and biggest bully and biggest all-around loud-mouthed jerk she’d ever come across in her life.

One thing led to another after that; by the time we were on the subway for our enjoyable get-together with the Silvers we were only barely on speaking terms, and I can’t tell you how grateful I was to find that the Silvers, while staying on ginger ale themselves, had broken out a bottle of rye for their guests.

“I will! I will! I’ll certainly do that for you, Bob,” he said, and so I was glad I’d put it that way. “And now, what I called you about is this.” And he chuckled. “Oh, don’t worry, no politics. Here’s the thing. I’ve got this really terrifically talented boy working for me now, Bob. This boy’s an artist.”

And great God, what a sickly, intricate thing a writer’s heart is! Because do you know what I felt when he said that? I felt a twinge of jealousy. “Artist,” was he? I’d show them who the hell the artist was around this little writing establishment.

But right away Bernie started talking about “strips” and “layouts,” so I was able to retire my competitive zeal in favor of the old, reliable ironic detachment. What a relief!

“Oh, an artist, you mean. A comic-strip artist.”

She was a storekeeper’s daughter from a small town in Ohio; she had probably grown up hearing the phrase “good Republican” as an index of respectability and clean clothes. And maybe she had come to relax her standards of respectability, maybe she didn’t even care much about clean clothes anymore, but “good Republican” was worth clinging to. It would be helpful when she met the customers for her garden figures, the people whose low, courteous voices would welcome her into their lives and who would almost certainly turn out to be Republicans too.

“I believe in the aristocracy!” she often cried, trying to make herself heard above the rumble of voices when her guests were discussing Communism, and they seldom paid her any attention. They liked her well enough: she gave parties with plenty of liquor, and she was an agreeable hostess if only because of her touching eagerness to please; but in any talk of politics she was like a shrill, exasperating child. She believed in the aristocracy.

Then it was March. The new President promised that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself, and soon after that his head came packed in wood and excelsior from Mr. Nicholson’s foundry.

It was a fairly good likeness. She had caught the famous lift of the chin—it might not have looked like him at all if she hadn’t—and everyone told her it was fine. What nobody said was that her original plan had been right, and Mr. Nicholson shouldn’t have interfered: it was too small. It didn’t look heroic. If you could have hollowed it out and put a slot in the top, it might have made a serviceable bank for loose change.

All she had to look forward to now was her romance with Eric Nicholson, and I think she may have known even then that it was faltering—his final desertion came the next fall.

She was forty-one, an age when even romantics must admit that youth is gone, and she had nothing to show for the years but a studio crowded with green plaster statues that nobody would buy. She believed in the aristocracy, but there was no reason to suppose the aristocracy would ever believe in her.

And so he had walked right into it, like a comedian walking into a thrown custard pie.

He knew she might not really have meant it, even if she’d thought she did. Girls of that age were so busy being overwhelmed by romance and sex that they didn’t even know what they were saying half the time. Still, there it was—the last thing he had ever expected to hear from his favorite child.

And he was ready to crumple up and cry all over again as he held the car down to the speed limit on the Interstate, but he fought back the tears because he had to keep his eyes clear, and because his wife and the younger girls were waiting at home, and because everything else that made sense in his life would be waiting there too; and besides, no civilized man would go to pieces twice in the same day.

David Clark was neither strong nor handsome, but the bewildered look that had blighted his boyhood was long submerged now in a face that suggested intelligence and humor. For years he had made it a point of honor not to mess around with the girls in the classes he taught. “There isn’t any sport in it,” he would explain to other teachers. “It’s taking unfair advantage. It’s shooting fish in a barrel.” It was shyness too, and a terrible fear of rejection, though he didn’t usually mention those aspects of the matter.

But the whole of that argument had vanished some months ago when he found he could get through a lecture only by letting his gaze go back time and again, like that of a man seeking nourishment, to Miss Andrews in the front row.