Even at moments like this one, when the late evening quiet has fallen on the house, she moves restlessly around, moving bits of furniture, clipping dead flowers out of the vases, thumbing through books and magazines and throwing them down impatiently. She plays the piano only during school hours when the boys are out of the house and she has no classes. When she has any time free she goes out to paint, but returns home with canvases smeared savagely in disgust with what she has done.

Our apartment still looks bare and temporary. Leslie has not as yet put up any of her paintings. She says she is shy about having any of the boys or faculty think that she considers herself an artist, although I don't believe that is the reason. To me she seems poised for flight, although I'm sure she does not think so, and her paintings on the walls would be symbols of unwanted permanence.

On one of her visits to New York she had lunch with Linda Roberts, who told Leslie she might be going to France for a week or ten days and invited Leslie to accompany her. I told Leslie I was sure the school would allow her the leave and that the trip would do her good, but she said it was out of the question. When I tried to persuade her, she became impatient and asked me if I was trying to get rid of her. I denied this as nonsense, but, and I hate to admit it, her brief absence now is soothing. It presents an opportunity, which I am taking, to reflect at leisure for once, to sit at my desk here in the room and reflect upon the small events of the autumn.

The evening after the game in which Romero made his first appearance on the field for Dunberry we all went to dinner at the inn at which Hazen and Conroy were staying. Romero, neatly dressed and wearing a tie, sat next to Caroline at the table. They seemed interested in each other and Hazen, while regarding them intently at certain moments, left them to their own conversation. The next morning, before he left for New York with Leslie and Caroline, he told me he was favorably impressed with Romero's manners and asked me to sound out Caroline about what she thought of the boy. I had no chance to talk to her before they left, but told Leslie to speak to Caroline and find out what she could.

We had our furniture from New York by that time, and so Leslie and I could sleep in the same bed, but after what had happened in Tours we slept stiffly as far away from each other as possible. We said nothing about it, although we both knew we would have to come to some final decision on the subject of our sexual appetites and the impossibility of pretending that abstinence had not changed the character of our marriage. With all that, we woke in the morning lying in each other's arms.

He put down his pen. He had been writing for more than an hour at the old desk in the light of the student lamp. Weary, but knowing he would not be able to sleep, he sat, slumped in his chair, staring out the window.

The first snow of the season was beginning to drift down in the November darkness. The lights were out in the rest of the house and the noise of the radios and cassettes and the thunder of the boys' feet above the Strands' quarters finally was stilled. When Leslie was home she could not wait for the blessed moment when riot turned into silence. Usually during those hours Strand merely sat in a big easy chair reading or staring into the fire that took the bite off the autumn nights, as the house cooled down with the fire in the furnace banked for the hours of sleep.

He heard what he thought was the sound of a car arriving outside the house. It sounded like the engine of the old Volkswagen Leslie drove. He jumped up and went to the window and looked out, thinking that perhaps Leslie had changed her mind about staying overnight in New York. But there was no car, just the snow and the dark windswept campus. With a sigh, he went back to his desk.

He had heard that sound the evening that Leslie had returned from Arizona and had almost run to the door to greet her. They had thrown themselves into each other's arms, he remembered, not caring if there were boys watching them or not. She was glowing with pleasure at seeing him again and he could tell by her expression that all had gone well on her trip.

They had sat on the couch, his arm around her, until well past midnight as she told him what it had been like in Arizona.

"Caroline is sure she'll love it there. She likes the college-it's very pretty and certainly not anything like City College-and the other girls on her dormitory floor were nice and friendly. We talked and talked-endlessly. Just being alone together for a few days, with no one else in the family to get my attention, seemed to have opened some sort of dam. Maybe we should have done more of that, both of us, with all three of the children."

"What did she have to say?"

"Well, for one thing, she was very impressed with your Mr. Romero."

"Russell will be pleased to hear that." Strand was not so sure that he was equally pleased. "What impressed her? That crazy run he made in the football game?"

"She didn't even mention that. She said he seemed gentler and shyer than most boys."

"That will come as news to Romero," Strand said dryly.

"She said that she sensed that he had no desire to be like the other boys in his classes."

"There's hardly any danger of that."

"It was impossible for him, anyway, he told her. He was going to amount to something, he said. He didn't know just what it was going to be, but it was going to be something. Just about every other boy in the school was on rails, he told her...Caroline said his tone was scornful...they had everything all mapped out-go to Harvard or Yale, then to business school and into their daddy's firm, be a lawyer, be a bank president, get into the big bucks and retire at the age of fifty-five and play golf. They're all in for big surprises, though, he said. He had one big advantage over all of them-nothing was going to surprise him. They were going to teach him all the tricks..."

"Who're they?" Strand asked.

"He didn't tell Caroline that. He just said that he was going to beat them at their own game and his own game and any game that was going. Caroline said he was very intense about it all, as though he'd been thinking about it for a long time and she guessed it was the first time he'd had a chance to talk to anyone about it."

"She guessed wrong," Strand said. "I got a little dose of it, too. Not exactly the same, but close enough." He remembered the conversation about the Goths.

"And he thanked them for it, he said. They were educating him. Just like the fellahin in Algeria who got educated at the Sorbonne and then kicked the French out of the country and the smart Arab kids who got educated at Harvard and Oxford and turned around and made the British and Americans bleed for oil like stuck pigs when they took off their business suits and put on their desert robes."

"And what did Caroline think about that pleasant piece of information?"

"She told him she thought he was just trying to put on a show for her benefit-that he'd read it all someplace and he was just sounding off to be a big shot."

"That must have flattered him," Strand said.

"Caroline said he glowered at her and she thought he was just going to get up and leave. But he didn't. He said, sure he read it someplace, he'd written it himself after he'd been at the school for a week and asked himself what the hell he was doing there. He sure wasn't there to run back kicks."

"He probably wasn't lying," Strand said. "About writing it himself. It sounds like him."

"Then he asked her where she was going to school and when she told him about her athletic scholarship, he laughed. Two accidental jocks, is what he said. He knew what he was running away from. What was she running from? Then he said, even after the touchdown that after noon, he would have quit the team, but was only staying on for his friend Rollins's sake. Games were for kids, he said."

"Johnson will not weep into his beer if he quits," Strand said.

"Who's Johnson?"

"The football coach. Romero kept telling people he didn't have any imagination and the word got back to him."

"I know you think he's a difficult young man," Leslie said, "but I never heard Caroline go on like that about anybody. She said it was the most fascinating evening she'd ever had in her life and when she got back home here after dinner she sat down and wrote out everything she remembered about it."

Another keeper of journals in the family, Strand thought. Perhaps it was a hereditary disease. "She seems to have remembered every word," he said.

"There's more to come," Leslie said. "When Caroline told him she wanted to be a veterinarian, he said that she was trying to save the wrong species. He knew where she should practice when she got her degree-in his old neighborhood in Manhattan. It was teeming with animals, he said, herds of them, on two legs, all of them sick. He said she'd be a lot more useful there than giving pills to de-worm Pekingeses. Caroline thought that he was making fun of her, but then he asked her, very seriously, if it would be all right if he wrote her. Caroline asked what he would want to write her about, and he said politics, murders, graft, poverty, the color of peoples' skin, the lies of history, napalm and the hydrogen bomb, running back punts.... When you were his age, did you ever hear talk like that from anybody that young?"

"No," Strand said. "Times were different then."

"He said that he'd also practice writing a love letter or two."

"The bastard," Strand said.

"Oh, Allen, it's just a boy trying to show an attractive girl that he's more sophisticated than he is. And by the time they ever see each other again they won't even remember each other's names."

"What did Caroline say-about the love letters, I mean?"

"She told me she said she didn't think it would do any harm." Leslie smiled as she said this, as though reassured that her shy daughter had finally caught on to the rules of the female game. "The boy wasn't kidding," Leslie said. "When we got to the college there was a letter from him, waiting for Caroline. She read it and gave it to me. It didn't have a date or start with Dear Caroline or Dear Anything. It was just word for word the speech he'd made to her about the Algerians during dinner. It wasn't even signed. Caroline said it was the first love letter she'd ever received. Of course she laughed at it, but she said she was going to keep it and show it to the other boys to improve the level of their conversation if they ever said any of the usual stupid thing to her." Leslie scowled a little then. "I do hope she isn't turning into a coquette. Just about every male on the campus stared at her every place we went."

"You were the one who said she should have the nose job," Strand said.

"Those are the risks you run," Leslie said, but not lightly. She shook her head, as though to get rid of fears about her daughter. "She'll probably change ten times before we see her again. With or without us."

"You haven't said a word about how Eleanor is doing," Strand said. Leslie had flown to Georgia for a few days after Arizona to visit the young married couple. "Is she happy?"

"Very," Leslie said, "as far as I could tell. Although the town is stultifying."

"Leslie, darling," Strand said, smiling, "that's what you say about just about anyplace that isn't New York."

"I don't say it about Boston or San Francisco or even Atlanta," Leslie defended herself.

"Anyplace under a population of a million. I didn't ask about the town. I asked about Eleanor and Giuseppe."

"Well, they seem to be delighted with their work," Leslie said grudgingly. "They feel they've improved the paper a hundred percent and they seem to devote sixteen hours a day to it. They have a big old house which looks as though it's falling down. It's like a cross between Tobacco Road, cleaned up for the movies, and an antebellum plantation. Eleanor says it's perfect for newlyweds. When they have an argument they can sleep in bedrooms so far apart they have to communicate with each other by shortwave. I only got to talk to them in fits and starts. Whenever we sat down to a meal, the telephone rang and one or the other of them would have to charge out and do something. It would drive me crazy, but they both seem to be thriving on it. When I tried to find out if they were making or losing money they immediately changed the subject. They seemed to be crazy about each other and I suppose that's the main thing." She wriggled out of his encircling arm and said, "Goodness, it must be past midnight. Is there any hot water? I must take a bath, I've been traveling all day."

"There's hot water. At least I think so. Don't you want a drink first, to celebrate being home?"

"Maybe after the bath. I'll signal when ready." She bent over and kissed him. "Did you miss me?"

"What do you think?"

She laughed and went in and in a moment he heard the water running.

When he went in a few minutes later, she was already in bed, her hair brushed and shining. He undressed and got into the bed and snuggled up to her. He began to caress her, but she pulled away gently. "I'm afraid, darling," she said. He didn't have to ask what she was afraid of. Dr. Prinz had warned him. Even obeying Dr. Prinz's orders, pampering and denying himself at the same time, he was still subject to sudden fits of fatigue when he could hardly make himself walk across the campus or face a class.

"Of course," he said, and moved to the other side of the bed. This is impossible, he thought. Tomorrow night I'll sleep in the other room.

From then on, without discussion, Jimmy's narrow old bed in the other bedroom was made up for him each night.

Well, he thought, as he sat at his desk, remembering in front of the fire, that was a good night in our marriage, considering everything.

He sighed, stood up, stretched, put a log on the dwindling fire because he was not yet ready for sleep and went into the kitchen and poured himself a drink of whiskey and water.

He went back into the living room, carrying his drink. Above him he heard the sound of footsteps. The old wooden house creaked and groaned and all movements were betrayed through its beams; He was sure that there was a certain amount of prohibited visiting after hours among the boys. He did not wish to learn what the nocturnal traffic meant. An illegal cigarette perhaps, the passing of a marijuana joint from one hand to another, homosexual experiments, the sharing of smuggled liquor, a more or less innocent rap session. A dedicated and conscientious teacher, he thought, would steal upstairs as quietly as possible and catch the culprits at their teenage crimes and bring down upon their heads appropriate punishment. What appropriate punishment was for any crime in this day and age would be difficult to figure out. At least in the public school system he hadn't had to worry about what his students did once they left his classes. As always, you had to live in consideration of a balance between profits and losses. As long as his charges didn't burn the house down, a benevolent blind eye was a useful piece of equipment. He hadn't asked the other teachers what their systems for maintaining order were and nobody had volunteered any advice to him. He wondered what a teacher from Eton or Harrow, schools where caning, as far as he knew, was still practiced, would think of his conduct. Would such a pedagogue march boldly up the stairs, uphold the law, grimly mete out so many strokes of the cane for smoking, so many for drinking, so many for talking after hours? How many for buggery? None, from what he had read. Go, and do thou likewise. Strand grinned at the thought. His own son was no older than some of the boys in the house and Strand had never punished him except by a sharp word, rarely spoken. If Jimmy had gone to Dunberry or Eton or Harrow instead of to a public high school, would he now be immersed in the world of bearded guitarists and orgiastic millionaire rock stars doomed to die before the age of thirty from overdoses of heroin or uppers and downers?

He put his drink down on the desk, seated himself, hesitated, then picked up his pen and began to write.

I have been musing upon the differences between the old-time system of education in the English language and the permissive order we have now in which students are awarded degrees for some of the most inconsequential dabbling the tutorial mind can imagine. When one thinks of the poets, philosophers, statesmen, and soldiers turned out by the old British system and by the church-oriented colleges of the United States that have endured since colonial times, it is difficult to believe that we are doing as well for our children as our ancestors did for theirs. We live in the most curious of times, where at the same moment liberalism has gone amok in our educational systems while discipline and repression have gone amok in most of the world's political systems. The two things must be somehow linked, although it is too late in the night for me to find those links. The English schools found place for eccentrics: do we find place for scholars? Gentlemen? Poets? It is a nice subject to bring up with Romero. Or should I merely go to the headmaster and tell him that the boy is dangerous and a threat to us all and have him dropped from the school immediately? But I know I won't do it. I am affected as we all are here, as Russell Hazen is, too, by the liberal superstition which, with all that has happened, still impels us decently or guiltily to spend our treasure and our goodwill in educating and even arming our own Arabs, our own fellahin, our invited Iranians. I will not discuss this in the faculty common room over tea. I am the odd man out among them, as it is, and when they ask me about my career in the public schools they sound as though they were asking questions of a man who has spent the best years of his life in a combat zone.

On the whole, though, they are good people, lacking in that quality, ambition, which so often makes people repugnant.

The word ambition itself leads to endless speculation. Just last week Hazen telephoned me, ostensibly to apologize for not being able to come and visit us and to find out how I was doing. I told him, not completely candidly, that everything was going along splendidly. Then he said he had a little problem to talk to me about. It was not about his divorce problems or the pretty lady lawyer from Paris, as I half-guessed it would be, but about Eleanor and Gianelli. I told him that when Leslie had visited them she thought they were doing very well. Hazen was of a different opinion. He had talked with his friend the publisher, who had warned him that the two young people were too ambitious by far, changing routines that had made the paper prosper for almost a half century, firing old hands, bringing in know-it-all kids from eastern schools of journalism, antagonizing the townspeople by their high-handedness. Eleanor, it seems, was being blamed even more than her husband. "They say she's leading her husband around with a ring in his nose," Hazen said the publisher told him. "And he complains that they treat him as though he's a fragile relic from another century. He may be exaggerating," Hazen said, "but it wouldn't be amiss if you could advise them to show a little patience."

I promised to do what I could. I didn't tell him that I didn't have much hope of influencing Eleanor and felt that I would have to get Gianelli off to one side in a private conversation if I wanted to try to do anything with him. Besides, they have no plans that I know of to visit here and a trip to Georgia would only be a useless expense.

When I put the phone down, I sighed involuntarily. When one is poor in one's youth, even if later on one is quite comfortably fixed, thinking about money is an activity which can send one into a state that borders on anything from a slight uneasiness to terror.

I had never had any illusions about being rich and I hadn't longed for the toys and choices of wealth. I was never a gambler and knew that the windfalls of luck would never be mine. I had chosen a profession for love of teaching, for the opportunities of scholarly leisure, for the assurance it had seemed then to offer of a decent if modest style of living. As I rose in the school system my salary increased proportionately and met all our reasonable needs, with the prospect that when I was forced to retire the blows of old age would be softened by an adequate pension. Like most Americans I was not prepared for the spiraling realities of inflation. The disasters it had caused for the middle classes of the countries of Europe could not descend, we thought, upon America. As a historian I knew we were not immune to change, but I shared the common belief that if America was no longer a fortress in military terms, our monetary system, at least, would resist invasion in our lifetimes. On a more personal level I had never imagined that at the age of fifty a nearly mortal illness would make me alter my entire mode of life and force me to earn my bread in a different place and under radically different rules.

If I had continued working until retirement age in the public school system, my pension would have been fair enough. Under ordinary circumstances, although we would have had to move to a smaller apartment, I could suppose that we could survive comfortably, even a little better than comfortably, with enough left over to be able to visit a child who lived a thousand miles away from us, when the necessity arose. My salary here is much less than I was earning in the city and even though we get the house rent-free, if I had to buy a new suit or Leslie needed a new coat, it would mean some close and anxious planning on our part. Leslie of course doesn't complain, but I would be fooling myself if I thought that some of the tension reflected in her face is not...

The phone rang. He stared at the instrument stupidly. Calls that late at night were frightening, especially since Leslie was not in the house with him. He let the phone ring two more times before he picked it up, trying to control the shaking in his hands.

But it was only Russell Hazen. His voice was reassuringly normal. "I hope I'm not waking you, Allen," he said.

"Actually," Strand said, "I was sitting at my desk catching up on my work."

"Don't overdo it," Hazen said. "One heart attack is enough."

"I agree with you there," Strand said, relieved that there were no accidents to report, no crises to be attended to.

"It's just that I've been so busy," Hazen said. "I've just gotten in from a conference. And I wanted to catch you as soon as I could."

"What is it, Russell?" Strand asked. "Have you been talking to your friend in Georgia again?"

"No. I haven't heard from him, so I guess things have been going better down there. Actually..." He hesitated for a moment. "Actually, it's about me. It's nothing very important, but it just possibly might involve you, too." He laughed a little oddly. He sounded embarrassed, Strand thought. "You remember that oil man-at least that lobbyist I met at lunch when I was up at the school...?"

"Yes," Strand said.

"Something a little unpleasant has come up. He's been called before a Senate committee down in Washington that's investigating the use of improper influence on legislators..."

"I haven't read anything about it in the papers."

"It hasn't reached the papers yet. But a friend who's in a position to know has given me some private information."

Strand couldn't help thinking that once more, as always, Russell had a friend who was in a position to know or do something useful for him.

"The man's in hot water," Hazen went on, "and he's trying to shift blame. They haven't anything definite to load on him, but some drunk at one of those goddamn Washington parties was overheard babbling that he'd heard the oil man boasting that he'd persuaded a certain senator to switch his vote on a big offshore exploratory drilling proposal and that a company my firm happens to represent had promised to put up an important sum of money to make sure the senator saw the light. And he mentioned my name. According to my information he told the committee that we had met by design at the school-his kid is in one of your classes, I think-Hitz is his name..."

"C scholar, verging on D. Actually, he's in my house. Not likable. A big fat oaf of a boy, given to bullying the younger ones."

"Anyway, aside from saying-or at least he was reported as saying-that we had planned the meeting at Dunberry, Hitz said I had taken him aside and discussed the deal with him, the lying sonofabitch."

"I'm sorry to hear this," Strand said, "but why're you telling it to me?"

"Because, Allen," Hazen said, "if anybody comes around to ask you questions or if you have to testify, I'd like you to swear under oath, if necessary, that I was with you or someone in your family at all times when I was at the school and nobody ever heard anything at all about votes or deals or law firms..."

"Russell," Strand said, as quietly as he could manage, "I wasn't with you every minute and neither was Leslie or Caroline."

"You don't think I'd be capable of anything like that, do you?" Hazen's voice on the telephone was getting loud, with a hint of anger in it.

"No, I don't," Strand said honestly.

"It's a vendetta," Hazen said. "Against me. You don't know what the infighting is like in Washington. In my work, there's no avoiding rubbing some people-powerful people-the wrong way and if they see even the smallest, most ridiculous chance of getting me discredited, they'll jump at it."

"What can they possibly do to you? There's no proof of any kind, is there?"

"Of course not." There was no questioning the sincerity in his reply. "But you have no idea of how it can look in the newspapers and how delighted some of my colleagues in the Bar Association would be to have my scalp. Probably nothing will come of it, Allen, but if you do by some chance come up for questioning I'd be most grateful. Well, I've said enough. You do what you think fit."

"Russell..." Strand began.

"I'd rather we didn't talk about it any longer." His tone was decisive. There was a short silence which Strand was not tempted to break. When Hazen spoke again the usual friendliness was in his voice. "Oh, by the way, I saw Leslie last week. I called the school in New York and invited her out to lunch. There's a young boy, the son of a friend of mine, who shows some talent and I wanted to talk to her about the chances of her taking him on. She looked splendid. Has she said anything to you about the boy?"

"No," Strand said. The truth was that she hadn't told him about seeing Hazen at all.

"Ask her about him. The father is waiting for an answer. Well, it's been great talking to you. And please don't worry about me. Probably the whole thing will dry up and blow away in the next week or so. Take care of yourself, friend. And I promise, I'll come out and pay you a visit, probably on Thanksgiving, if not before. I miss you, old friend, I miss you a lot."

When Strand hung up, he sat staring at the telephone. Slowly, he finished his drink and turned off the lamp and went to the back of the apartment, where the bedrooms were. He looked into Leslie's room, where the wide old-fashioned bed he had shared with Leslie since the early days of their marriage looked comfortable and comforting. Jimmy's bed was narrow and his sleep there was haunted by dreams in which he felt tied down, imprisoned. He nearly decided to sleep in the big bed this one night, then thought better of it and went into his own room and slowly undressed and got in between the cold, shroudlike sheets.

He was awakened by a sound in the next room. He rubbed at his eyes wearily, automatically looking at the fluorescent dial of the clock on the bedside table. It was after four. The sound in the next room was steady and for a moment he just lay there, puzzled, wondering what it was. Then he realized it was a woman sobbing. He threw back the blankets and jumped out of bed and ran into Leslie's room. She was sitting in the dark, bent over on the big bed.

"Leslie," he said, "Leslie, for the love of God..." He switched on a lamp. He couldn't see her face.

"No lights," she cried, "please, no lights." Suddenly she seemed small to him, shrunken. He turned off the lamp and kneeled in front of her and put his arms around her waist. "Leslie," he said, "what is it?" Then, worriedly, "What are you doing here? I thought you were staying overnight in New York. What happened? Did you just get in? It's past four o'clock..."

"Don't scold me," she said. "I can't stand being scolded tonight. I'm home. Isn't that enough?"