Hesitating about continuing such revelations, he rocked back and forth for some moments, then braved it: 'I think you'll understand, Mrs. Varney.'

'You don't have to tell me if you don't want to. You backed away from the one fine young woman in your life.'

'Coward, I played the coward. With her I could have gone to the stars and, damn it all, I knew it all the time. Jesus, what an ass I was. In college I thought: I've left her behind. She'll never catch up. If I'm to find a place in one of the big law firms I'll need a wife with a college education. I got such a wife, and she put me in touch with her good friend Windy Wilson.'

'What happened to Edith?'

'Graduated from high school with honors, couldn't go to college, girls from backwoods Mississippi didn't go much in those days. So she went into social work, became a force to reckon with in the South and wound up as one of the United States representatives at the United Nations.'

'You mean that Edith Baxter Jackson?'

'The same. The little high school girl who wouldn't fit in as my wife at a prestigious law firm.'

Nora laughed, not at Judge Noble but at herself: 'I sometimes look back on the young men I might have married and ask myself: Of that wonderful lot why did I pick the world-class loser? None of us is vaccinated against that malady.'

The two friends laughed at the disasters that so often overtook worthy members of their race, and although Nora could see that Noble wanted to remain and talk further, she had to excuse herself: 'Judge, I have to check on Assisted Living and Extended Care. That's what they pay me for,' and she left him sitting in her office.

After about ten minutes of mournful reflection, he rose, placed his chair in its proper position and wandered into the kitchen to collect whatever scraps the cooks had saved for his birds. With a bagful of bounty he strolled down to the channel where two noisy gulls aloft signaled to their colleagues: 'Here he comes again, loaded!' and almost instantly a swarm of gulls appeared to pester him for food. Next came the three graceful herons; they looked exactly like the three judges who used to enter the Louisiana courtroom together in their black robes. He liked those birds.

Then from the south came half a dozen snowy egrets, those poets of the marshland, and they had become so accustomed to the judge and so assured that he would have something for them, no matter how small or scarce the fragments from the Palms, that they clustered about him as if they were his children coming close to feed from his outstretched hand. They were his family, each with its distinct merits. None flew faster or with more grace than the gulls, those white bombardiers of the sky; none were more beautiful than the big snowy egrets or more delightful than the small cattle egrets. But, as from the first days with the birds, he reserved his chief approbation for the dark, stately blue herons, with whom he identified in an almost nonpersonal way: They're noble birds. Would that I could be like them.

Then, as his supply of food dwindled, he noticed with regret that the bird he loved the most was missing. Rowdy, the tame pelican, was nowhere to be seen, not in the sky lumbering along in his heavy, slow pace, nor in the water swimming awkwardly toward the shore. 'Rowdy!' the judge shouted, 'where are you?' When there was no reply, he left a few scraps in the bottom of his bag and muttered: 'Dinner's here whenever you're ready.'

Then, as his birds slowly drifted away, the egrets first, then the herons, and finally the swiftly darting gulls, he was left alone with the heavy thoughts that had assailed him in Nurse Varney's office: 'I did everything wrong. I wasted the grandest opportunity a black man of my day could have had placed before him. In my first days on the bench I should have written those legal essays I had so clearly in mind. Four or five of the points I could have made then, they'd have positioned me at the head of my generation. Why didn't I do it? The issues I could have helped to clarify are the ones that perplex us so much today. I saw the light but turned down the wick.'

The metaphor pleased him, reminding him of how in college he had caught the attention of the professors because of the originality of his expression when arguing a legal point, but his gratification was brief, for his own words 'turned down the wick,' summoned visions of the moral darkness into which he had stumbled.

'Why did I allow myself to get mixed up with Windy Wilson? His nickname should have sounded danger signals and it did, but I wasn't listening.' Lowering his head until his chin rested in his cupped hands, he forgot the birds and the beauty of the channel and saw only Windy Wilson, that fast-talking black man who had a score of ways to earn a quick illegal dollar here and there. Normally he would have remained miles away from such a trap, even if he had not been a judge, but Windy had been a friend of his wife's, had even dated her briefly before her marriage, and when Ellen had insisted on inviting the fellow to dinner, or had taken the judge to affairs at which Windy was present, Noble had complied, even though his better judgment advised against it. Several times, when invitations were either issued or received, he remembered the warning of a respected judge on New York's superior bench: 'Always bear in mind that if your butcher gets a bloodstain on his trousers, it's an excusable consequence of his perfectly honorable profession, but if you, as a judge, get a stain on your gown, it's a major offense which all the world can see and which will, if the stain cannot be erased, destroy your reputation and your career.' He had elaborated: 'You do not even have to be responsible for getting the stain on your robe. Mud may have been accidentally spattered on you, but the stain is there. You shouldn't have been where mud was being thrown around.'

When the FBI obtained a court order allowing them to wire-tap Windy Wilson's very busy phone, they taped two separate discussions of two court cases in which cohorts were involved. Windy had boasted that the men had nothing to fear 'because I have Judge Noble in my pocket.' This charge was so egregious that it had to be investigated, and even a cursory round of discreet questioning revealed that Windy Wilson and Judge Lincoln Noble were frequently seen together. The FBI men did not have to resort to hidden cameras. Numerous photographs had appeared in the national press.

It was never determined who leaked the news of the judge's pending indictment, but the hideous boast 'I have Lincoln Noble in my pocket' swept the country, and several senators who had never approved of promoting black lawyers to the federal bench saw Noble's case as their chance to halt or at least slow down the process of appointing black judges to the federal courts.

Impeachment proceedings were proposed, and although they never occurred, for further investigation proved that Windy Wilson was nothing but a loudmouthed petty hood, the damage was done. Judge Noble was allowed to remain on the bench, for there was no reason to depose him, but any promotion was now out of the question. He did compile an honorable record and recovered some of his reputation for honesty, but he knew the opportunity for any advancement in his career was over, and without making any protracted effort at self-defense, he retired, his pension enabling him and his wife to live at the Palms. Ellen's death shortly thereafter had reinforced his propensity for solitude.

Now, as he sat alone in the autumn sunlight that had so often graced the next step in his orderly progress up the ladder, he had the deepest regrets, regrets he could not disclose to anyone: If I'd written those essays and built a growing reputation and stayed clear of Windy Wilson, I'd have been a leading candidate to follow in the footsteps of Thurgood Marshall. To keep the black dream alive. To lend a voice of reason to the Supreme Court. I could have done it, I know it.

Then came the grinding, soul-searing truth: I might have been the one to be moved forward instead of Clarence Thomas. How preposterous it was for George Bush to claim that in selecting Thomas he was choosing the best-qualified judge in America. How utterly ridiculous. I can name half a dozen other black judges infinitely better qualified, Leon Higginbotham up in Philadelphia, to name one.

Then, when he was feeling most bitter, he came to the real reason why he despised Thomas: that interview Thomas gave years before his Supreme Court appointment. When he made fun of his sister for being on welfare, and added that her children had grown to expect the welfare check as their due. He denigrated the very sister who had stood by him. To have abused her was an act so shameful that he must regret it late at night, when he can't sleep. He befouled his race and his family, who had supported him.

The judge was gentle in the analysis of the Anita Hill affair because he was himself so vulnerable. Could it be that my behavior was worse than his? That last date with Edith Baxter. I'd come home from college with those two law-school scholarship offers. Stars were in my eyes, and with their help I could see years ahead, the honors that might await me. And I said, to my eternal damnation: 'Edith, I won't be seeing you anymore. Law school will be demanding, and there'll be many new responsibilities. There's no chance we would ever be married, so don't wait around for me.' I can hardly believe I said such a thing. In those words. With those implications. Well, I did, and if I were to die tonight I'd go a lesser man than I could have been.

The remorse was cutting, like an errant winter wind blowing down the channel and ruffling the feathers of the birds and his conscience. Slouched in his chair he passed into a kind of amnesia, lost between a scarred past and an uneventful future. He was jolted from his mournful reverie by a welcome sound. Rowdy was back, belatedly, for his dinner and was making his customary rumpus in the channel. Judge Noble, looking at him beating his big wings in the water, thought: Poor Rowdy, what a clumsy bird he is. But looking more carefully at the pelican, he saw to his horror that Rowdy had got himself tangled in a long piece of the extremely tough nylon filament used by fishermen. The strands were twisted tightly around the bird's neck and not only were close to choking him to death but also trailed so far behind that they threatened to drag him down until he drowned.

As soon as the judge detected his friend's peril and realized that Rowdy had used his last bit of energy to work his way painfully upstream to where he knew the judge would be waiting to help him, he jumped up from his chair and eased himself down into the cold waters of the channel. Calling words of encouragement to Rowdy, he moved out cautiously to release the bird from its filament prison, but he lost his footing and fell into deep water. Twisting himself in the filament that was stronger than steel wire, he dragged both himself and his cherished friend to a watery death.

The three blue herons, marching like robed judges, returned to the unopened brown bag on the ground by the chair and began pecking at the paper until it split open. Unaware of the double tragedy a few yards from where they stood at the edge of the shore, they feasted.

On a brilliant moonlit November night, Ambassador St. Pres waited till midnight, then walked quietly to the improvised shed at the edge of the narrow landing strip that had been mowed and smoothed. There the plane was tethered. Looking at its sleek contours, the sturdy wings securely attached to the fuselage and the shimmering propeller, he started the procedure he had been taught by air force men when they served at the embassy with him in Africa. He checked the fuel with a measuring stick that showed the gasoline level. Then he crept under the plane to open the petcock at the very bottom of the gas tank; this allowed any water that might be in the tank to drain off, whether it got there by contaminated gasoline from the pump or by condensation within the tank. Smelling the last drops to be certain that they were gas and not water, he closed the petcock, checked the two tires for proper inflation, then tried to revolve the propeller to be sure it wasn't drifting loose. Walking to the end of each extended wing, he tried to push it up and down to test its stability and finally unleashed the plane and pushed it out to the takeoff line. When it was positioned, he went to the telephone that had been rigged into the shed and called the air controller at Tampa International Airport: 'I'm Ambassador Richard St. Pres of the Palms, south of Tampa. You may have heard about the five of us building our own small plane, everything but the engine. Within a few minutes I would like to take off on a test flight, and remain aloft about half an hour. Have I your permission?'

'Ambassador, I'm honored that you bothered to call, but if you remain under twelve hundred feet you need no clearance from me. If you go higher into our airspace, all hell will break loose.'

'Then I'm free to take her up?'

'Are you cleared for night flying?'

'When I worked in Africa. I keep my papers in order.'

'It's OK, then, but I must warn you about one thing. Our Coast Guard planes monitor these shores looking for small planes like yours, pirates sneaking in with cocaine. No fancy maneuvers or they might shoot you down.'

'Can you alert them that I'm in the air?'

'Can do. Will do. It's a beautiful night for a flight.'

Satisfied that he had played by the rules, he returned to his car and moved it into position so that its headlights illuminated the first half of the strip. Leaving the car with its lights on, he walked to the plane, climbed in, fitted himself into the solitary seat and muttered a prayer: 'Safe skies and safer landings.' Then he turned on the ignition, waited for the engine to turn over, checked the gas and the various instruments and mumbled to himself: 'Here we go!'

When he released the brake and jockeyed the plane onto the head of the strip, he experienced a moment of immense excitement, but once the plane started down the runway, his nerves steadied and he was again a pilot taking off over the great African veldt. When the required speed was attained, he eased back on the controls, felt the nose of the plane tilt upward as required, listened for the last bumps from the runway and soared into the air. No plane, no matter how skillfully built by professionals, could have behaved better, and with this assurance and the land below illuminated by the radiant moon, he turned to the right and made a full-throttle run back over the channel, past the string of building lots with the expensive houses and out over the Gulf of Mexico. Only then did he admit to himself the reason for what he was doing at midnight in November, flying solo over the gulf: I talked them into building this plane. Whenever I saw them flagging, I told them: 'It can be done.' When my own fears assailed me I bit my tongue. So it was my moral responsibility. I knew it was a sound job, checked every detail and, thanks to Lewandowski, who has that critical eye, we did it right. But if it was going to go up in the air, sputter and then fall to the ground, I could not afford, I simply could not afford'-he gripped the throttle with both hands-'to have it crash with everyone looking on in horror, and maybe the television cameras recording the disaster. I could not let that happen.'

Now, safely aloft and with the gulf below him to smother his failure if it did occur, he was satisfied that his friends had done a thoroughly competent job. The engine throbbed, the wings held fast, the compass turned with the nose of the plane, the gas tank was nearly full, and the grandeur that he had sought when he launched this enterprise was at hand, so he headed far out into the gulf where the tips of waves glistened in the moonlight and silence threw a cloak about the soft rhythms of the engine, muffling its sound. He was free, aloft in the sky again as he had been decades ago when he flew for his life over the vast areas of Africa. He had been a novice then, brave and determined to aid others, and tonight he was again a beginner, recovering the skills he was afraid he had lost. How magisterial the night sky was, ahead an unbroken sweep to the hills of Mexico, behind the invisible coast of Florida, and he was a free power floating between them.

Then a careful turn on the dropped tip of the left wing and a heading back to land, with the dark sea behind and slowly the appearance of lights ahead. How deep in the experience of mankind it was to come back at night across the sea, or the desert, or the snowbound tundra and to see light in the distance and the promise of home! 'How strange,' he said to himself as he headed toward the airfield and the shed that housed the plane, 'that I should have come a stranger to the Palms and allowed it so quietly to creep into my heart that now I call it home. I spent so little to acquire so much! And there it is, waiting in the moonlight.'

In his euphoria he allowed himself a few bars of the gallant song the air force men had taught him in Africa, the part about living in fame or going down in flame, and his spirit soared. Winging in at the proper altitude and adjusting his flaps to serve as a brake, he descended in what seemed like a roar, touched down exactly as planned, turned slowly so as not to place strain on the outer wheel and taxied back to the crude hangar.

He was met by Senator Raborn, who greeted him with the same kind of reserve that St. Pres showed as he climbed out of their plane: 'I could guess what you were going to do. I had more or less planned to do the same thing next week, if you didn't. You wouldn't want a lot of gawkers on a holiday staring at you if the thing went down. That wouldn't be fair to the Palms.'

St. Pres nodded as he helped push the plane back into its parking place, and when it was tied down, Raborn asked: 'How did it handle? Light on the controls or heavy?'

'You know, Stanley, I haven't much to compare it with, so I don't know. But it flew well, and the instrument panel lighted up nicely. I think we've done a good job, the others and Lewandowski. I think his extreme care gave us a margin of safety.'

'So we'll take it up publicly right after Christmas?'

'As planned,' St. Pres said as he and the senator tied the plane to its wooden-stake moorings. It would have been unthinkable for the two grizzled veterans to walk back to their cars arm in arm as a gesture of their fellowship in this bizarre project, but St. Pres did allow himself to say: 'Stanley, I did appreciate it when ...' He found the words difficult-'I mean, when there was doubt about the project ... when the engine arrived and I could see that some wanted to draw back. I appreciated your vote of confidence, forthright and loudly delivered.' When Raborn said nothing, the ambassador said as they reached their cars: 'An equally loud voice against ... it could have come from anyone, even you.... It would have destroyed the fabric ... and I might have joined the nays. I'm sure you must have seen it in the Senate when the fates of some enterprises of great moment depended on the first speaker and the volume of his voice.'

'In that case the trick is to be sure who speaks first. You should have tipped me off that evening, Richard. In my committees I always organized it.' He smiled, recalling important incidents, then said as they reached their cars: 'So it flies? And three days after Christmas you fly in it with the public cheering?'

'That was our plan from the start, wasn't it?' And the two veterans of many battles said good-night.

Nora Varney, as self-appointed surrogate mother to both Dr. Zorn and Betsy Cawthorn, knew that the time had come for her to act again, so she invited the two young people to her house in Tampa for a Saturday-night dinner. They had grown so attached to Nora and so dependent on her, each in his or her own way, that they were delighted to accept.

When they reached the parking lot Andy headed for his car, but Betsy said: 'No. I want to see if I can handle my own car at night,' and he said rather tentatively: 'I suppose you have to start sometime.' She chided him for being a defeatist: 'Yancey would have said: "Let's have a go!" and he'd have cheered me on.'

'But I feel responsible for you. Your father put you in my hands.'

'Are you ordering me not to drive?'

'I'm cautioning you to be very careful with the car.' And then he added words he immediately regretted: 'We've seen what dangerous things cars can be.'

She pivoted on her cane and faced him: 'Andy, with Yancey's constant cheerleading, I've recovered a confidence I feared I'd never have again. And now I'm on a roll. So please don't stop me,' and she kissed him.

Assisting her into her specially equipped sedan, he helped her seat herself behind the wheel and saw that she had positioned her feet in a neutral spot away from the brake pedals, which would be of no use. He then reviewed with her the clever adjustments the car manufacturers had made to the steering wheel with its brake activator, its turn signals, its improved gearshift indicator and its simplified light controls.

'This is really quite marvelous,' Betsy said to strengthen the confidence that Andy had diminished. 'On the run this afternoon things went so easily. The mechanics of this world are geniuses.'

Since neither Andy nor Betsy had ever been to Nora's, the nurse had given them a detailed map, and with this in Andy's lap so that a dashboard light could play on it, they eased out of the parking lot and headed east toward the intersection with Route 78 and the highway into Tampa. Andy gave turning instructions well in advance, and Betsy cried: 'This is a piece of cake!' as they left the main highway and eased slowly into the smaller streets that led to Nora's. They could not imagine what they were going to see when they got there. All that Andy knew about her living arrangements was that the Palms paid her a good salary, that she was reasonably frugal, and that she had had a husband and two children, but whether they still lived with her he did not know.

As they drove through a depressed area of Tampa Betsy said: 'How strange. We know Nora so well and rely on her so much, but except for this we'd never know where she lived or how. Two worlds so near, yet so far apart.' At Andy's reply: 'We don't know how the billionaires live either,' Betsy retorted rather sharply: 'Since there aren't so many of them, there isn't the same obligation,' and Andy chuckled: 'I like it when you fight back. Very promising signal, that.'

The house was a small, neat one in the black section of Tampa proper and appeared from the outside to be carefully tended. He helped Betsy out of the car and gave her his arm so she could negotiate the two steps leading to the small porch just as Nora opened the door to welcome them. The first thing he saw inside was a big black-and-white basketball poster showing Jaqmeel Reed, Nora's talented nephew, full-length in uniform in those days when he had been a nationally known star. It must have been taken well before he was stricken with AIDS but Andy thought: Can you imagine it? Already carrying HIV, yet there he stands, invincible. And then the swift decline. Betsy, on Nora's arm, saw tears in his eyes.

The ensuing conversation recalled Jaqmeel's glory days on the basketball court and then the tragic story of his irreversible disintegration. 'He didn't decline,' Nora said. 'He climbed on the white horse of death and galloped straight down the hill and over the cliff.' When they spoke in glowing terms about Dr. Leitonen, and the crucially needed work he performed so tirelessly, Betsy cried: 'I'd like to meet a man with that kind of heart!' and Andy assured her: 'It could be arranged. We still see him now and then.'

She was also fascinated by the shadowy figure of Pablo, the agent of death, but as they spoke of him she shivered and said: 'I don't think he should be allowed to roam.' Both Andy and Nora rebuked her, pointing out the salvation he brought to young men who were in the last stages of an inevitable, agonizing death. 'Don't they deserve a decent going away?' Nora asked and Betsy replied: 'I wasn't thinking of them. I was thinking of me. In the days following my accident the bandages about my knees were so huge and lumpy I couldn't even close my legs, or go to the bathroom, or see any hope in the years ahead. I was in such despair that I considered suicide, a quick, painless exit. It was good that your Seor Pablo wasn't available. I'd have been tempted and it would have been terribly wrong. Who could visualize in those dreadful days that before Thanksgiving I'd be dancing.' She shook her head: 'How awful it would have been to surrender to that momentary impulse!' and Nora said flatly: 'You had an option. With lost legs people have a chance to recover. But Jaqmeel-' Her unfinished sentence bespoke his unfinished life, so that tears came to Betsy's eyes.

The two guests had noticed, when entering, that five places had been set at the table, but they had not asked who else might be coming. Now came a rapping at the door, and when Nora opened it Andy saw with pleasure that it was the Tom Scotts whom he had met at their Pelican Refuge. They looked bright and almost Christmasy, for they were bringing Nora two gift-wrapped boxes which she placed in a corner of her living room.

There was animated conversation about doings at the refuge, and the Scotts wanted to know how affairs were progressing at the Palms: 'We heard the terrible news about our good friend Judge Noble, who was drowned,' Scott said and his pretty wife added: 'How unfair! To have died trying to save an innocent creature-he could even have been one of our own pelicans.'

This observation caused some surprise, but Scott confirmed what his wife had said: 'Yes, those birds that congregate at feeding time on our beach do roam as far north as this.... I'm sorry he died this way. He was a fine judge who was done in by his friends.'

Nora absented herself from much of the conversation to attend to pots simmering on the nearby stove, for the social part of her snug home consisted of one all-purpose room, and now she announced: 'Tonight I'm serving a dish my grandmother taught me to make: "Poor folk better learn to cook the reeblie stew," she used to say.'

'What could that be?' Scott asked. 'Possum, maybe?'

'Chicken. Reeblies, and I've never heard the word since I left home, are little salted flour dumplings that you make when you rub a spicy dough real fast on a board and stringy little bits fly off. They're so small they soak up the flavor much better than ordinary noodles, and here's your reeblie stew.' It was delicious, a tasty chicken dish thickened with the stringlike reeblies and seasoned with just a little pepper.

When the supper was well under way, Nora, from her seat at the head of the table, rapped for attention and said: 'This is like an Agatha Christie mystery. The owner of the decaying mansion says: "I'm sure you must have been wondering why I invited you here tonight, you four in particular." Well, I did it for a very special reason, one long overdue. I wanted Betsy Cawthorn to meet Gloria. Shake hands,' and although they had done so when the Scotts entered, they now shook hands again, then looked at Nora for an explanation. What she had to say, delivered in a low, almost musical voice, was so bold and unanticipated that the four listeners were stunned: 'If there has ever been a couple who ought to get married, who could be said to have been ordained by God to marry, it's our beloved Betsy and our Doctor Andy. But each is afraid to speak, and for reasons anybody would understand. He's afraid to risk marriage again after his first one was such a disaster, and she can't believe any fine young man like Andy could love a girl with no legs. So they look and wonder and spar like two boxers. Well, I wanted them to see you,' she said, turning to the Scotts, 'because if there ever was a couple who must have gone through mental hell before they were brave enough to get hitched, it must have been you. That took the kind of courage few peoples have.'

The two couples sat flushed with embarrassment, but she boldly plowed ahead, letting the emotional sparks fly: 'The important fact about tonight is that I've been told by spies that Mrs. Scott is pregnant.'

This stopped the monologue, for Gloria confirmed the rumor as her husband smiled shyly, and both Betsy and Andy welcomed the break to congratulate them effusively, glad to have the spotlight shifted from themselves. Nora came to the salient point of the evening: 'I don't want to know by what gymnastic or medical miracle our boy Tom, dead from the waist down, got his wife pregnant. But there the wee thing is in her womb, and each day it grows bigger.'

The room was silent, each of the four visitors driven to an emotional frontier where darkness and indecision reigned, and sometimes a distant, flickering light. But Nora, who had connived to create just such a moment, utilized it in a brazen way: 'So Betsy and Andy, your case is child's play when compared to their case. You really don't have no problem, two healthy, normal people, bar a couple of legs.'

This was such a brash way of putting it that all four listeners had to laugh, a reaction that Nora had hoped for, and this gave her the courage to move on to her next point, the burden of the affair. 'So, Betsy, the ball is in your court. You wonder if you can ever have a normal life, babies and all. You can, the Scotts prove it. And you wonder if Andy will ever muster enough nerve to ask you to marry him. He won't, he been badly scarred by his first disaster, takes the whole blame on hisself.' The nostalgic effect of cooking a reeblie stew again after some years and her mixing in the lives of two couples were causing Nora to revert to more black dialect than she usually employed, but it made her observations sound more basic.

'So if you wants to do a good thing for yourself, Miss Betsy, and an even better one for him, you gots to do the proposin'.' In the silence the two people from the Palms looked at each other, Andy struck dumb by what he was hearing, Betsy trembling at this crucial moment in her life. But then came Nora's strong, reassuring voice: 'It's simple, Miss Betsy. The words is: "Andy, will you marry me?" '

In the silence that followed, Betsy was more than prepared to ask the question, for she had often framed it in her mind during those first bad weeks in Chattanooga, and almost constantly since her arrival at the Palms. But as she was about to speak, Andy interrupted and said in a low, trembling voice: 'Those are words that I should speak, Betsy. I've tried to help you recover. Will you now help me to do the same?'

In response she reached across the table, took his hands, drew him to her and gave him a long, loving kiss.

The rest of the evening was anticlimactical, and talk fell easily into a random discussion of courtship, marriage, life and associated wonders and disasters. Gloria confided what the others might have guessed: 'I had to ask Tom to marry me, it was too big a leap for him to take alone. He said "Yes," thank God. Think how I'd have felt if he'd turned me down.'

'I been turned down,' Nora said, 'and it ain't pleasant. One day my man just up and left, no words, nothin'. Me and the kids never saw him again.'

'What happened to him?' Betsy asked, and Nora said: 'Who knows? He might be out there somewheres kickin' around like he did with me. Raisin' two kids alone does present problems.'

'Where are your children now?' Andy asked and she said: 'Both married. Doin' pretty well. I insisted on marriage, especially the boy. Didn't want him to run around havin' babies he took no responsibility for.' Turning to Zorn, she asked: 'Tell everybody what happened in your case. It was bad to make you clam up like you have.'

'It was epic,' he said in a way that indicated he wished no further questioning, but Betsy dug in: 'I think that with what just happened at this table, I'm entitled to know what epic means.'

Reflectively, looking down at his thumbs as they massaged each other nervously, he said: 'Let's start with the fact that whatever happened was seventy percent my fault. Young doctor, pretty nurse, he was straight-A average after grammar school, she was from the country. She was adorable, and during the years of my internship and then establishing my practice when I often worked all night, she discovered a couple of guys who were more her style, and one of them showed her how, with a good lawyer, she could work it so that the burden of the divorce would fall on me and she could net a pretty good settlement.'

'You call that seventy-thirty?' Scott asked and Andy said: 'I had often left her alone at night-women do have their babies at the damnedest hours. It really was my fault because, strange as it may sound, I never even knew it was happening. Young, dumb, obsessed with my own problems at the clinic and further study to keep up in my field-' He could not continue, but Gloria asked: 'She took you to the cleaners?'

'Totally.'

'Did she marry the other guy?'

'I preferred not to know.'

'But you do know?'

'I don't know, and if you do, don't tell me.'

Mrs. Scott chortled: 'Watch out, Betsy, damaged goods! Psychologically crippled.'

As soon as she said this unfortunate word, so inappropriate when both her husband and Betsy were present, she looked stricken and put her fingers to her lips, as if to erase what she had said, but Betsy came to her rescue: 'If Bedford Yancey can cure me of my affliction, which seems less damaging each week, I'm sure I can cure Andy of his,' and the guests in the room applauded, but Nora said sardonically: 'Betsy, that's the chorus of us black women: "We can cure the guy of whatever is eatin' him," but when we try, we find it's eatin' us, too.' And Betsy said: 'Come visit us six years from now. This man has saved my life. I can afford to take a risk in trying to save his.' And they wished her luck.

But Nora had not yet finished with the subject into which she had been accidentally led: 'I'm not afraid to use the word crippled. I carry a set of scars you'd need a surveyor to diagram.' She shook her head in disbelief at what she had undergone with her man, then said philosophically, addressing the two women: 'You white girls can't appreciate the difference. When you go to your school's senior prom you see a dozen boys there that would be pretty good bets. Of course, at that age you can't pick the all-time winners like him'-she pointed to the portrait of Jaqmeel-'but you can reasonably expect that at least one or two of the boys are going to grow into significant manhood. And if you're lucky, you'll catch one of them.'

She became much more serious: 'But with us black girls, we go to the same dance at our school, and our speculation is: Which one of these clowns is goin' to find a job? And if he gets a job, will it ever pay enough to take care of our kids? And we can look around us at the black women in their thirties or forties who never solved that problem and had no chance to do so in the first place.'

She was speaking with great bitterness: 'Now in my high school group there was maybe only two black boys seventeen years old who was goin' to tear the world apart, as good as any white kids in town, but girls sixteen and seventeen cannot identify those winners. All we can do is stand back and marvel at them when they're in their forties and we are too. They were the transatlantic liners that pulled out to sea, leavin' us watchin' from the dock.'

'But white girls can also make very bad choices,' Betsy said. 'You see it in a southern city like Chattanooga. The Deep South can produce some real male losers, and nice girls seem to gravitate toward them.'

'Yes, but the odds are so much more favorable for you white girls. Don't you understand?' Nora asked, her voice becoming almost a plea: 'At a black girl's graduation, when she looks at six black boys, four of them are not goin' to get jobs in those important years when they need them and two of them are probably goin' to be dead by twenty-two, shot in street brawls. That's what we black girls see.'

'But you survived,' Betsy insisted. 'You have a fine job. Everybody in the Palms loves you because you're a wonderful, caring woman.'

'I was determined to make it that way when I moved in. I'd had enough of the horse manure this nation throws in the faces of us black women. I had to succeed.'

Betsy, with tears in her eyes, asked Zorn to help her, and she pulled herself up, reached across to the head of the table and embraced Nora: 'You did more than succeed. And, Nora, you did a damned good thing tonight.'

One morning before the Thanksgiving holidays, a trio of agitated widows descended upon Ken Krenek, demanding that he summon Dr. Zorn for an important meeting. With the two men listening intently, for the women were obviously serious in their protest, they heard an impassioned rendition of a complaint that they had heard before. At first they were inclined to laugh at what seemed a situation worth no more than an amused dismissal, but as Zorn was about to handle it that way, Krenek, who had learned to take the grievances of widows seriously, said: 'Now, tell us again, what exactly is your complaint against Muley?'

'Last night at the long table he went too far.'

'In what respect?'

'His jokes. He went way beyond the bounds of decency.'

'Now, ladies, you know that Muley is a rough-cut diamond. He livens up the place with his jokes.'

'But they've been getting more and more vulgar, and this one was just too much.'