"No, not that!" He threw the ma.n.u.script aside to seize a copy of the London Times off the mantel. "This! A brilliant review of your new book of stories!"

"What?" I jumped.

"Easy, kid. I'll read this grand review to you! You'll love it. Terrific!"

My heart took water and sank. I could see another joke coming on or, worse, the truth disguised as a joke.

"Listen!"

John lifted the Times and read, like Ahab, from the holy text.

" 'These stories may well be the huge success of American literature-"' John stopped and gave me an innocent blink. "How you like it so far, kid?"

"Continue, John," I mourned. I slugged my sherry back. It was a toss of doom that slid down to meet a collapse of will.

" '-but here in London,' " John intoned, " 'we ask more from our tellers of tales. Attempting to emulate the ideas of Kipling, the style of Maugham, the wit of Waugh, he drowns somewhere in mid-Atlantic. This is ramshackle stuff, mostly bad shades of superior scribes. Young man, go home!' "

I leaped up and ran, but John, with a lazy flip of his underhand, tossed the Times into the fire, where it flapped like a dying bird and swiftly died in flame and roaring sparks.

Imbalanced, staring down, I was wild to grab that d.a.m.ned paper out but finally glad the thing was lost.

John studied my face happily. My face boiled, my teeth ground shut. My hand, struck to the mantel, was a cold rock fist.

Tears burst from my eyes, since words could not burst from my aching mouth.

"What's wrong, kid?" John peered up at me with true curiosity, like a monkey edging up to another sick beast in its cage. "You feeling poorly?"

"John, for Christ's sake!" I burst out. "Did you have to do thatl"

I kicked at the fire, making the logs tumble and a great firefly wheel of sparks gush up the flue.

"Why, kid, I didn't think-"

"Like h.e.l.l you didn't!" I blazed, turning to glare at him with tear-splintered eyes. "What's wrong with you?"

"h.e.l.l, nothing, kid. It was a fine review, great! I just added a few lines, to get your goat!"

"I'll never know now!" I cried. "Look!"

I gave the ashes a final, scattering kick.

"You can buy a copy in Dublin tomorrow, kid. You'll see. They love you. G.o.d, I just didn't want you to get a big head, right? The joke's over. Isn't it enough, dear son, that you have just written the finest scenes you ever wrote in your life for your truly great screenplay?" John put his arm around my shoulder.

That was John: kick you in the tripes, then pour on the wild sweet honey by the larder ton.

"Know what your problem is, son?" He shoved yet another sherry in my trembling fingers. "Eh?"

"What?" I gasped, like a sniveling kid, revived and wanting to laugh again. "What?"

"The thing is, kid ..." John made his face radiant. His eyes fastened to mine like Svengali's. "You don't love me half as much as I love you!"

"Come on, John ..."

"No, kid, I mean it. G.o.d, son, I'd kill for you. You're the greatest living writer in the world, and I love you, heart and soul. Because of that, I thought you could take a little leg-pull. I see that I was wrong-"

"No, John," I protested, hating myself, for now John was making me apologize. "It's all right."

"I'm sorry, kid, truly sorry-"

"Shut up!" I gasped a laugh. "I still love you. I-"

"That's a boy! Now-" John spun about, brisked his palms together, and shuffled and reshuffled the script pages like a card-sharp. "Let's spend an hour cutting this brilliant, superb scene of yours and-"

For the third time that night, the tone and color of his mood changed.

"Hist!" he cried. Eyes squinted, he swayed in the middle of the room, like a dead man under water. "Kid, you hear?"

The wind trembled the house. A long fingernail sc.r.a.ped an attic pane. A mourning whisper of cloud washed the moon.

"Banshees." John nodded, head bent, waiting. He glanced up, abruptly. "Kid? Run out and see."

"Like h.e.l.l I will."

"No, go on out," John urged. "This has been a night of misconceptions, kid. You doubt me, you doubt it. Get my overcoat, in the hall. Jump!"

He jerked the hall closet door wide and yanked out his great tweed overcoat, which smelled of tobacco and fine whiskey. Clutching it in his two monkey hands, he beckoned it like a bullfighter's cape. "Huh, torol Hah!"

"John," I sighed, warily.

"Or are you a coward, kid, are you yellow? You-"

For this, the fourth time, we both heard a moan, a cry, a fading murmur beyond the wintry front door.

"It's waiting, kid!" said John triumphantly. "Get out there. Run for the teaml"

I was in the coat, anointed by tobacco scent and booze, as John b.u.t.toned me up with royal dignity, grabbed my ears, kissed my brow.

"I'll be in the stands, kid, cheering you on. I'd go with you, but banshees are shy. Bless you, and if you don't come back . . . I loved you like a son!"

"Jesus," I exhaled, and flung the door wide.

But suddenly John leaped between me and the cold blowing moonlight.

"Don't go out there, kid. I've changed my mind! If you got killed . . ."

"John," I shook his hands away. "You want me out there. You've probably got your stable girl out there now, making noises for your big laugh-"

"No!" he cried in that mock-insult serious way he had, eyes wide, as he grasped my shoulders. "I swear to G.o.d!"

"John," I said, half angry, half amused, "so long."

I ran out the door, to immediate regrets. John slammed and locked the portal. Was he laughing? Seconds later, I saw John's silhouette at the library window, sherry gla.s.s in hand, peering out at this night theater of which he was both director and hilarious audience.

I spun with a quiet curse, hunched my shoulders in Caesar's cloak, ignored two dozen stab wounds given me by the wind, and stomped down along the graved drive.

I'll give it a fast ten minutes, I thought, worry John, turn his joke inside out, stagger back in, shirt torn and b.l.o.o.d.y, with some fake tale of my own. Yes, by G.o.d that was the trick- I stopped.

For in a small grove of trees below, I thought I saw something like a large paper kite blossom and blow away among the hedges.

Clouds sailed over an almost full moon and ran islands of dark to cover me.

Then there it was again, farther on, as if a whole cl.u.s.ter of flowers were suddenly torn free to snow away along the colorless path. At the same moment, there was the merest catch of a sob, the merest door hinge of a moan.

I flinched, pulled back, then glanced up at the house.

There was John's face, of course, grinning like a pumpkin in the window, sipping sherry, toast-warm and at ease.

"Oh ..." a voice wailed somewhere. "G.o.d ..."

It was then that I saw the woman.

She stood leaning against a tree, dressed in a long, moon-colored dress over which she wore a hip-length heavy woolen shawl that had a life of its own, rippling and winging out and hovering with the weather.

She seemed not to see me or, if she did, did not care; I could not frighten her, nothing in the world would ever frighten her again. Everything poured out of her steady and unflinching gaze toward the house, that window, the library, and the silhouette of the man in the window.

She had a face of snow, cut from that white cool marble that makes the finest Irish women; a long swan neck, a generous if quivering mouth, and eyes a soft and luminous green. So beautiful were those eyes, and her profile against the blown tree branches, that something in me turned, agonized, and died. I felt that killing wrench men feel when beauty pa.s.ses and will not pa.s.s again. You want to cry out: Stay. I love you. But you do not speak. And the summer walks away in her flesh, never to return.

But now the beautiful woman, staring only at that window in the far house, spoke.

"Is he in there?" she said.

"What?" I heard myself say.

"Is that him?" she wondered. "The beast," she said, with quiet fury. "The monster. Himself."

"I don't-"

"The great animal," she went on, "that walks on two legs. He stays. All others go. He wipes his hands on flesh; girls are his napkins, women his midnight lunch. He keeps them stashed in cellar vintages and knows their years but not their names. Sweet Jesus, and is that him?"

I looked where she looked, at the shadow in the window, far across the croquet lawn.

And I thought of my director in Paris, in Rome, in New York, in Hollywood, and the millraces of women I had seen John tread, feet printing their skins, a dark Christ on a warm sea. A picnic of women, dancing on tables, eager for applause, and John, on his way out, saying, "Dear, lend me a fiver. That beggar by the door kills my heart."

I watched this young woman, her dark hair stirred by the night wind, and asked: "Who should he be?"

"Him," she said. "Him that lives there and loved me and now does not." She shut her eyes to let the tears fall.

"He doesn't live there anymore," I said.

"He does!" She whirled, as if she might strike or spit. "Why do you lie?"

"Listen." I looked at the new but somehow old snow in her face. "That was another time."

"No, there's only now!" She made as if to rush for the house. "And I love him still, so much I'd kill for it, and myself lost at the end!"

"What's his name?" I stood in her way. "His name?"

"Why, Joe, of course. Joey. Joseph!"

She moved. I raised my arms and shook my head.

"There's only a Johnny there now. A John."

"You lie! I feel him there. His name's changed, but it's him. Look! Feel!"

She put her hands up to touch on the wind toward the house, and I turned and sensed with her, and it was another year, it was a time between. The wind said so, as did the night and the glow in that great window where the shadow stayed.

"That's him!"

"A friend of mine," I said gently.

"No friend of anyone, ever!"

I tried to look through her eyes and thought: My G.o.d, has it always been this way, forever some man in that house, forty, eighty, a hundred years ago! Not the same man, no, but all dark twins, and this lost girl on the road, with snow in her arms for love, and frost in her heart for comfort, and nothing to do but whisper and croon and mourn and sob until the sound of her weeping stilled at sunrise, but to start again with the rising of the moon.

"That's my friend in there," I said again.

"If that be true," she whispered fiercely, "then you are my enemy!"

I looked down the road where the wind blew dust through the graveyard gates.

"Go back where you came from," I said.

She looked at the same road and the same dust, and her voice faded. "Is there to be no peace, then?" she mourned. "Must I walk here, year on year, and no comeuppance?"

"If the man in there," I said, "was really your Joe, your Joseph, what would you have me do?"

"Send him out to me," she said quietly.

"What would you do with him?"

"Lie down with him," she murmured, "and ne'er get up again. He would be kept like a stone in a cold river."

"Ah," I said, and nodded.

"Will you ask him, then, to be sent?"

"No. For he's not yours. Much like. Near similar. And breakfasts on girls and wipes his mouth on their silks, one century called this, another that."