Dan took up cigars that summer, always carrying a cluster of them in his shirt pocket, chewing and smoking them all day as he bent over his work. It seemed to me that he didn’t really enjoy them much—they sometimes drove him into coughing fits—but it was as if they were a necessary part of his preparation for the thick, premature middle age he had assigned himself at twenty-five.

“You know this guy in the office I’ve told you about?” I said to Eileen one night. “The artist? Dan Rosenthal? I think he’s getting into practice for being an old man.”

“Oh? How do you mean?”

“Well, he’s getting so—ah, I can’t explain it. I’m not even sure if I’ve got it right.”

She could seldom explain anything to me about people in her office, either. Our conversations often dissolved into admissions that we weren’t even sure if we had it right, and then there would be silence until a quarrel broke out over something else.

Even so, when I brought Dan Rosenthal into the house and upstairs that afternoon, I found I was doing my best to slouch and mumble and squint for him. And Eileen couldn’t have been more helpful if she’d tried: we discovered her reclining on the big studio couch, wearing her black turtleneck sweater and black slacks. I had always loved that outfit because it was vastly becoming, with her long red hair, and also because it seemed to loosen all her joints. She had worn it to the acting class sometimes, and she nearly always wore it on evenings when we’d sit quietly for hours in the San Remo or some other locally famous bar, trying to conquer our uneasiness among young men who slouched and mumbled and squinted with their pale, long-haired girls, whole crowds of them erupting now and then into roars of laughter over matters we were fairly sure we would never understand.

If you’re young enough, there can be exhilaration in pretending to be something you’re not. And if I’d been nimble in vaulting the fence, if I’d been a little hip on the stairs, it was time to be rugged now. Crouching, and with a good deal more force than necessary, I smashed and split those boards over the ringing iron knob of an andiron hauled from the fireplace; then, when they’d been reduced to manageable sticks, I broke each stick in half, or into thirds, one after another, against one straining knee. Some of the lumber had held rows of rusty nails, and Dan said, “Watch those nails,” but I told him without words that I could look out for myself. Hadn’t I done stuff like this all my life? Hadn’t I been a rifleman in the Army? Did he think I’d always been some indoor kind of business-office guy in a white shirt? Hell, there wasn’t much you couldn’t learn in knocking around the world; how else did he think I had won this stunning girl, from whom he seemed almost wholly unable to take his eyes?

This tense gathering was what I’d heard Eileen describe on the phone a few times as “our little shipboard soignée”—I didn’t think that word was right but didn’t know enough French to correct her. There was plenty of liquor flowing, but most of it seemed to be going down my mother’s throat. She wore a nice spring suit, with a rich little feathered hat that had probably been bought for the occasion.

“… Well, but you see we’re the only national organization in the country; our membership is up in the thousands how, and of course each member has to submit proof of professional standing as an artist before we’ll even consider their application, so we’re really a very…” And the deeper she settled into her monologue the farther she allowed her knees to move apart, with a forearm on each one, until the shadowy pouch of her underpants was visible to all guests seated across from her. That was an old failing: she never seemed to realize that if people could see her underpants they might not care what kind of hat she was wearing.