The walk into town in the summery dusk, with the first touch of autumn spicing the air, was a pleasant one and the little cafe in which he ate a simple meal was clean and welcoming. A new life, he thought, as he drank his coffee in the nearly empty restaurant. Aged fifty and I'm starting all over again.

God be with you, Jimmy had said.

He ordered another cup of coffee and thought back on what would probably be his last week in New York for a long time. Hazen had called him from his office and told him that he had Romero in his office and that the boy was looking forward to going to Dunberry.

"I don't think you're going to have any trouble with him. We had a nice talk and he listened carefully as I told him how we expected him to behave once he got to the school. He's in the outer office now. I told him to wait until I finished talking to you. I told him he'd be assigned to your house, so you can keep an eye on him."

"Charming," Strand murmured. He half wished that Romero would change his mind.

"He seems meek as a lamb," Hazen said. "He's obviously highly intelligent and motivated. I think he's going to be a credit to us. Anyway, it's certainly worth taking the chance. I told him I'd stake him to a set of new clothes and he was pleased. He needs every advantage we can give him and he certainly can't appear at the school in the kind of clothes he's wearing today. I've made up a list of the sort of things the other boys'd be wearing. I have an account at Brooks Brothers and I wonder if it would be too much bother for you to meet him tomorrow and outfit him."

"Of course not," Strand said. "Leslie wants me out of the house as much as possible these days."

"Good. Ten o'clock, in front of Brooks Brothers. Okay with you?"

"Fine."

"I'll give him the list. My secretary's typed it up and I'll give it to Romero to show you. Of course, you can use your discretion, too. I've just put down the fundamentals. I think five hundred dollars should take care of everything, don't you?"

"I have no idea."

"If you have to go over that, don't hesitate."

"Just tell him that if he packs in that damn football jersey he wore every day to school, I won't acknowledge that I've ever seen him before in my life."

Hazen laughed. "I'll tell him. Well, when I have the time, I'll come down to the school to see how you're both doing. I'm sure it will be a welcome change for you if not for Romero."

As he hung up Strand was not so sure.

The next morning Romero was waiting for him at the Brooks Brothers entrance, which was a surprise in itself. At school Romero was almost invariably late for classes. To Strand's relief, the boy was reasonably presentable. He had had his hair cut and wasn't wearing the football jersey, but instead a battered jacket that was much too large for him.

"Here's the list, sir," he said as they entered the store. It was the first time, Strand noticed, that the boy had called him sir, and he took it as a good sign. "Mr. Hazen said your word would be law." He didn't sound hostile. Perhaps, Strand thought, Hazen had been right in his estimate of Romero's new attitude.

In the store he had the air of a tense and watchful hunting animal as Strand ordered a large traveling bag and Romero was fitted for pants, jackets, sweaters and shirts, shoes and socks and an overcoat. He made no suggestions and accepted what Strand chose without a word. He had grown a little over the summer, but would never be a tall man. Strand hoped that the other boys in the house would not be football players or wrestlers.

Strand was shocked at what everything cost, but managed to keep the bill just under five hundred dollars. However, he doubted that five hundred dollars or even five thousand dollars worth of Brooks Brothers clothing would ever succeed in making Jesus Romero, with his dark, sardonic face and wild, resentful, wary eyes, look as though he belonged in a sleepy New England school which had prepared boys to go to Harvard and Yale and Williams and Dartmouth for over a hundred years.

While the clerks were making up the bill, Romero said, "I got a favor to ask you, sir. Do you think you could tell them to send everything up to your apartment, so I could pick them up on the day I leave for the school?"

"Why?" Strand asked, puzzled.

"If they're sent to my house either my mother or my brother'll steal them and sell them." He said this without criticism, as though this was to be expected in all families.

"I suppose that can be arranged," Strand said and wrote out his address and told Romero that he'd make sure his wife would be expecting the delivery.

"Thank you, sir."

When they had finished in the store it was time for lunch. Strand thought it was as good an opportunity as any to see how Romero behaved at the table. Fearing the worst, he took him to a small, dark restaurant which seemed to be patronized by clerks and stenographers from the big office building in the neighborhood. In the dark, Strand thought, only he would be able to see just what Romero's manners were like. But his fears turned out to be groundless. Romero ate like a hungry boy, but he didn't wolf his food or mangle it or use the wrong knives and forks. From what he had said about his mother, Strand doubted that it was because of his mother that he ate decorously. Probably, Strand thought, it was the result of watching hours of television, where actors were always sitting down to meals and pretending that they had eaten at "21" all their lives. Score one for television, he thought.

He had to make most of the conversation. When he asked Romero what he had done during the summer Romero merely shrugged and said, "I hung around."

"Do any reading?"

"Some. Most of it crap."

"What books, exactly?"

"I've forgotten the names," Romero said. Strand was sure he was lying. "The only thing that stuck with me was The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. By a guy called Gibbon. You ever hear of him?" He was glancing across the table at Strand with an expression that on an ordinary boy his age would have been mischievous.

"Yes, I've heard of him," Strand said, not giving Romero the satisfaction of showing that he was annoyed at the taunt. "What did you like about it?"

"I didn't say I liked it. It just agreed with some of my ideas."

"Like what?"

Romero took a package of cigarettes out of his pocket and what looked like an expensive lighter. He offered Strand a cigarette, but when Strand shook his head, he said, "Oh, I forgot. You don't smoke. My ideas...well, that nothing is permanent. Those old Romans, they thought they had the world by the tail, they lorded it over everybody and went around telling people how wonderful they were and thought they were doing the poor dopes in other countries a big favor by making them Roman citizens and thought they were real tough bastards and would last forever. So the real tough bastards, the barbarians, the Goths, they didn't take baths or use vomitoriums and they didn't write poetry and waste their time throwing people to the lions and making big speeches and putting up triumphal arches to themselves and they didn't wear purple togas and they came from the wrong side of the railroad tracks and all they knew how to do was wipe out Romans. They were my kind of cats and I rooted for them all the way. And Mr. Gibbon wasn't just writing history. Two centuries before the shit hit the fan he was really writing about the English Empire, where the sun never set, whether he knew it or not, and the fat-ass bastard Americans and it made me realize that when the time comes I'm going to be one of the Goths. And a lot of people who live in my neighborhood and neighborhoods like mine are going to find out they're tough-bastard Goths too, and do their own wiping out even if some of them like me get up and disguise themselves in purple togas from Brooks Brothers."

It was the longest speech Strand had ever heard him make and he couldn't say he was pleased with it, despite the logic and despite the fact that many older and more erudite men than Jesus Romero had written more or less the same thing about Gibbon, although in somewhat politer terms.

"My advice to you, Romero," he said, "is to keep ideas like that to yourself when you have to write essays in your history classes."

He grinned at Strand malevolently. "Don't worry, Professor, I'll wear my purple toga at all times. I wouldn't like to see you kicked out of your job."

Strand stood up and paid the bill and told him he'd see him at the school and that he knew there was a rule there that the only place boys could smoke was in the basement of the main hall. And they had to be seniors at that.

God be with you, Strand thought.

He went out into the balmy night.

Back in the Malson Residence he saw that the maid, whom he had not yet met, had been in and made the twin beds and drawn the curtains. He would have to make sure that Leslie sent their big double bed down with the rest of the things. Since the terrible night in Tours, they had slept together. He wasn't going to start sleeping alone at his age.

Then he sat down at the desk in the living room under the glow of the student lamp and began writing in the student's copy book that he had brought with him from the city.

I am starting a new life and I intend to keep a diary from now on. Perhaps if I put everything down in writing, or at least bits and pieces that may eventually form a pattern, I will better understand what is happening to me. Everything is changing and I am being overtaken by events. Time is pressing me and I feel my age. If history is a means of understanding the past, a small, everyday record of the present may help make some sense of the future.

It is a season of departures. First Eleanor, happily driving off to her new husband and a new profession, leaving the city in which she was born and reared with a brisk kiss and a wave of the hand. Then saying good-bye to Caroline; no happiness there. She is progressing well, the doctor says. Progressing toward what? Since she still is wearing bandages, there is still no telling what she will look like when they are all finally taken off. She is outwardly composed about the whole thing and I heard her humming cheerfully to herself as she went about packing, getting ready for her trip to Arizona. Leslie is going to accompany her and help settle her in, although Caroline is impatient with the idea.

Although I am not happy about having to go off to Dunberry by myself, I am convinced that Caroline should not make the trip alone and have told her so. Her ostentatious humming and her composure seemed false to me from the beginning. My fears were confirmed in the worst possible way when I passed her closed door one day when Leslie was out and heard sobbing from behind it. I opened the door and saw her crouched on the floor in the corner of the room beating her head against the wall and weeping. I bent down to her and held her in my arms and after a while she calmed down. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hands and essayed a smile. "It's just only once in a while, Daddy," she said. "Maybe it's the rain."

I am also almost equally worried about Leslie. Although on the surface she is matter-of-fact and in control of herself, there are little things that have changed in her. She has always been competent and sure of herself, but in the last days I spent in New York I caught her in moments when she was remote, irresolute, floating from room to room with a few books in her arms or carrying sheets of music as though she didn't know what to do with them and putting them down in odd places, then hunting for them distractedly later on, only to put them down again a few minutes later in unlikely corners.

I haven't spoken to Leslie or Caroline or anyone else about how Caroline had her nose broken. I imagine Caroline would like to forget about it and about lying to us. And I dread to think what Leslie would do if she knew the truth. I am still not so sure about myself, either. If I were to happen to see the boy who hit her and there were a murderous weapon handy I'm afraid I might use it.

Strand's hand trembled and he stopped writing and stared at the last paragraph. His usual neat handwriting had suddenly degenerated into an almost unreadable scrawl. He put the pen down and pushed away from the desk. Time, he realized, had not immunized him against the almost intolerable rage that had first swept over him in the hospital corridor when Hazen had told him about Caroline's confession to Dr. Laird.

Jimmy would say he was overreacting. Parents are made to overreact. He stood up and went to the French door that opened onto the garden. He went out and breathed deeply, trying to calm himself, taking in great gulps of the fragrant night air. He wished he had had the foresight to buy himself a bottle of whiskey.

He looked up at the sky. The stars in the pure darkness above him were bright. A crescent moon was rising and the old trees at the bottom of the garden, their foliage rustling in the light breeze, cast flickering shadows on the dew-damp lawn. If I can forget the past, he thought, or at least manage it, I can be happy in this gentle place.

The next morning he woke early enough to have breakfast in the dining room at the main hall with the rest of the faculty, but he didn't want to try fitting half a hundred faces to the names he had heard the evening before. He walked into town, enjoying the freshness of the morning and the sight of children playing with dogs on the lawns of the neat houses he passed on the way. He bought a copy of The New York Times, but a glance at the headlines made him fold the paper and keep it for later reading. The morning, with its sunshine and nature's profligate promise of hope, was no time for this year's news. The evening, with the melancholy of growing darkness and its hint of mortality and endings, was more suitable for the reports from Washington, Iran, Moscow, Jerusalem, and the southern hemisphere.

When he got back to the Malson Residence, trying to curb his natural fast lope out of deference to Dr. Prinz's advice, he found a huge black man sitting on the front steps. The man-no, he thought, he couldn't be more than eighteen, despite his size-stood up politely. "Mr. Strand?" he asked.

"Yes."

"I'm Alexander Rollins," the boy said. "I'm assigned to this house."

They shook hands and Rollins smiled shyly. "I'm on the football team and I've been sleeping in the Worthington Dormitory with the rest of the team, but I thought, if you didn't mind, I'd move in a day earlier. It gets pretty riotous on moving day, they tell me, with mamas and papas messing around and all." He had a rich, slurry voice and a proper New England enunciation and it occurred to Strand that perhaps he should be encouraged to take up singing seriously. He would tell Leslie about him.

"Of course," Strand said. "You're in room number three on the top floor." The registrar had given him a list of nine boys who would live in the house and had paired them off, two to a room, alphabetically, the ninth boy in a small room to himself. Rollins would be sharing the room with Romero. The registrar hadn't told him Rollins was black, or rather, a deep, glowing brown. "I hope you'll like it here."

"I'm sure I will," Rollins said. "I'm new here, too. I'm on a one-year football scholarship. I played for my high school in Waterbury and I wasn't the smartest kid in my class"-he grinned-"and everybody figured that no matter how many times a season I sacked the quarterback, another year at the books would help if I wanted to get into a place like Yale."

"My daughter is on an athletic scholarship to a little college in Arizona," Strand said, suddenly and for the first time proud of that fact. "She's a runner."

"That's more than can be said for me," Rollins said. "I'm a defensive tackle. Mostly I just try to stand my ground." He laughed. "I'll bet your daughter could beat me down under a punt every time. Girls these days..." He shook his head humorously.

"I hope she stands her ground, too," Strand said. "In other ways."

Rollins looked at him very seriously. "I hope so, too," he said. "Well, I won't take up any more of your time, sir. I'll just move in my stuff after the morning practice session."

"I'll leave the door open for you."

"There's no need to worry. Nobody steals anything around here."

"I come from New York," Strand said. "Everybody steals everything there."

"So I've heard." The boy shook his head. "Waterbury is bad enough and it ain't a pimple compared to the size of New York. I hope you're happy here, Mr. Strand. Everybody says this is a right nice friendly place and I hope it turns out that way for both of us. If you and your wife ever need some heavy pushing and hauling, furniture and stuff like that, please call on me. I may not be smart"-he grinned again-"but I've got a strong back. Now I have to get over to the field and run my poor sagging butt off." He moved off with an athlete's easy walk, his close-cropped head looking too small on the great trunk of neck which jutted up out of his sweater.

Strand went into the house, thinking about the two R's-Rollins and Romero. A black boy and a Puerto Rican. Would Romero, with his street cynicism, think "Of course, keep the black brother and the not quite white brother segregated in their nice genteel way"? Would he accept that it was just an accident of the alphabet? The registrar had told him that if any of the boys wanted to change rooms and nobody objected it could be done. But what if all the other boys were satisfied with the arrangement as it was and no changes could be made? He didn't know how many blacks were included in the student body or how they were selected. Rollins because he could play football, although Strand was a little shocked that a school with the reputation of Dunberry would recruit its teams so openly. After all, Dunberry wasn't Notre Dame or Alabama. And Romero because, by a fluke of random conversation, a powerful man had become interested in him. What of the others? He would have to ask around discreetly what the school's policy actually was.

He went into the big common room, where there was a radio and a television set and some bookcases with volumes stacked haphazardly on the shelves. He started putting them in order and realized he was looking for a copy of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. If he was going to have to argue for a year with Jesus Romero he would have to start by rereading Gibbon and very carefully, indeed. But the only books he found whose authors began with G were Inside Africa, by John Gunther, and The Affluent Society, by John Kenneth Galbraith, neither of which he felt would be of much use to him in a debate with Romero. He could imagine the hoots of laughter if by chance the boy, with a mother on welfare, picked up the Galbraith book. He took the book off the shelf and carried it into his apartment and put it on the table in the bedroom. If he had found The Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru, although they were two of his favorite volumes of history, he would have hidden them, too, as additional fuel to Romero's smoldering assortment of resentments.

He knew that Caroline had an appointment that morning at eight o'clock with Dr. Laird; before he began his day's operations, and while he didn't expect there would be any important developments to report in her condition, he decided to telephone, admitting to himself that he was doing it more to hear Leslie's voice than for information about his daughter. As he dialed he told himself that he would have to ration his calls. At his salary long distance telephoning was a dangerous luxury.

It was Caroline who answered the phone. "Oh, Daddy," she said, "I'm so glad you called. Dr. Laird has turned out to be Santa Claus. He looked at my nose and took some more X rays and he said in a week I can take off all the bandages and I'll look like a human being again. Mummy says we'll have time to come and visit you for a couple of days before we go west. Isn't that something?"

"Santa Claus is right," Strand said. "The next time you see him tell him it's Christmas for me, too. And when you come wear the ugliest long dress you own. There'll be four hundred boys here from tomorrow on."

Caroline giggled. "Oh, I don't think it's going to be that startling. But wouldn't it be nice if it was?"

"No," Strand said. "Now let me talk to your mother."

Leslie's voice, too, was cheerful. "Caroline told you," she said. "Isn't it wonderful? And how are you doing?"

"As well as can be expected. The people are nice and while the house is an old barn, a woman's touch will do marvels for the place. And you're the woman whose touch is needed."

"All in due time, dear." But she sounded pleased. "Is there anything special you need that we can bring when we come down?"

"Only our bed."

"Incorrigible." But she sounded even more pleased. "By the way, your young friend, Romero, came by just a few minutes ago for his clothes. He said he thought he'd come down today instead of tomorrow. He seemed very eager. I think you're wrong about that boy. His manners were perfect."

"He's a consummate actor. What did Caroline think of him?"

"She didn't see him. You know how she is these days. When she heard the bell ring she locked herself in her room. He asked if he could get dressed in his new clothes in the bathroom. When he came out he looked quite handsome in his small way. He made a strange request. He said he'd left all his clothes in the bathroom and he asked me to burn them."

"If he was dressed the way he usually is, it's not so strange. Enough about him. How are you?"

"Fine." She hesitated. "I have a confession to make to you. Mrs. Ferris, you remember her, she's the headmistress of Caroline's school, called last week and asked me if I could arrange to come in one day a week and give private lessons to the students. She said I could use the music room. There won't be many. I'd only keep the best of my students."

"Why is that a confession?"

"Because I didn't tell you. You had enough on your mind as it was."

"Do you want to do it?"

Leslie hesitated again. "Yes," she said. "Do you think the people at Dunberry would mind?"

"I'm sure it could be fitted into your schedule. I'll ask today."

"Don't do it if it's any trouble, dear."

"It's no trouble at all."

"It would mean I'd have to stay over in New York someplace for the night."

"I guess I can survive one night."

"Are you taking things easy?"

"I'm not doing anything. I drank tea with the faculty members yesterday and the boys don't arrive till tomorrow. And I've already found a big hulk of a football player who volunteered to move the piano around for us. I think we're going to love the place," he said with all the sincerity he could muster.

"I'm sure we will." Leslie didn't sound absolutely convincing, "It's beautiful in New York today. Indian summer." She didn't say why she thought it was necessary to report on the city's weather.

"Have you heard from Jimmy or Eleanor?"

"Out of sight, out of mind. But I'll try to get Jimmy to come down to the school with us. This call must be costing a fortune. We'll save all the news for when we see each other. Good-bye, dear."

"Good-bye, my love," he whispered. One night a week, he remembered, as he hung up.

There was a knock on the door and he called, "Come in."

A plump woman dressed in baggy black slacks and a sweater stretched tight over an enormous, pillowy bosom entered. She was carrying a large shopping bag and had a rosy complexion and dyed blond hair. "Good morning, Mr. Strand," she said. "I'm Mrs. Schiller. I'm your housekeeper here. I hope you found everything in order."

"Fine, fine." Strand shook her hand. It was soft, but strong. "You only have to make up one of the beds. My wife won't be coming along for some days. And two of the boys will be arriving today. Their names are Rollins and Romero and they're assigned to room three."

"The boys take care of their own rooms," Mrs. Schiller said. Her voice was gruff, as though she smoked too many cigarettes. "I occasionally straighten up the common room for them when the disorder reaches a certain point. And once in a while I take a peek upstairs to see if any of the walls have been torn down." She smiled. She had a warm, motherly smile. "I passed through the dining room this morning and noticed you weren't there for breakfast. My husband works in the kitchen, he's a baker, and I help out until the full staff is on duty. Would you like me to buy some things to put in the refrigerator? Snacks, fruit, things like that? Until your wife arrives?"