"It was my last run," Mr. Heggener said. "The last run of my life. It was a day like this. Blue sky, cloudless, perfect snow, no wind. Just about two years ago. Maybe to the day. I have it jotted down in a diary someplace. I was feeling up to anything, like a young boy. I always made a point of being in good shape to start the season. I respect the mountains, one must not take them lightly. Before the season started, I climbed, did an hour of calisthenics a day, ran. . . . For a man my age-I don't like to boast-but I was considered a formidable skier." But there was no self-pity in his voice. It was a modest statement of fact. "Oh, I had a little cough. Nothing. Maybe a little cold coming on. I had a favorite guide. A small, solid Swiss who'd been bom in Zermatt, who read the snow the way you would read a book. A slightly different color, a wind ripple, and he'd know where an avalanche could come down, where a snow bridge might not hold your weight. You could follow him safely anywhere. I was not a daredevil. I loved the mountains, but as I said, I respected them. I never believed that any ran was worth a death." He looked keenly over at Michael, as though what he had said had a special message for him. "We went up to the Theodul Pass, the whole world beneath us, except for the great slab of the Matterhorn, with little white wisps of cloud around its crest. As you must remember, the ran down is one of the longest in Europe. Great open slopes above the timber-line, it seemed that you could ski and ski forever, sailing over the planet, unattached to it, its problems not your problems. Nourishing illusions for a few glorious hours. You've heard of Cousteau, the French underwater explorer . . . ?"

"Yes. I do a little scuba diving myself . . ."

"Then you know his phrase-'the euphoria of the depths.' "

"Yes."

"Trust a Frenchman to come up with a phrase like that." Mr. Heggener smiled. "That day, under the Matterhorn, I felt the euphoria of the heights."

"I know what it's like," Michael said, thoughtfully, engaged with his own memories now, diving through the air, going down to the limit of his oxygen to where sunken ships lay on the bottom of the sea, with multicolored shoals of fish swimming in and out of the broken wrecks. "Hang-gliding, free-falling."

"Euphoria," Mr. Heggener said. "Even the word, the word alone, sends a tingle up your spine. It is a wilderness word-you wouldn't ever think of using it to describe anything that might happen to you in a modern city. Joy, perhaps, ecstasy, but euphoria never. Euphoria is a word that needs silence." As if speaking the word had hushed him, he walked on silently another twenty paces, the only sound the crunch of their boots on the snowy path.

"Cousteau caught something there," Heggener said finally. "The relationship between exaltation and danger. The prerequisite, you might say. The danger of drowning in the depths, the danger of uncontrolled speed, daring the mountain, outrunning avalanches." He laughed lightly. "I'm older now, I no longer can ski, I can speak wisely about a run not being worth a death, but I have ridden avalanches down precipices in my time. I had a friend when I was a young man, a friend my own age, a magnificent skier, and he died that way-going into an avalanche slope. It took twenty-four hours to find the body. Still, when we did find him, I swore there was a smile on his lips. It had been a powder avalanche and he must have died almost instantly, suffocated, almost before he could have realized he was in peril. Well, young men die with less reason. . . ." He had spoken softly, elegiacally. Now his tone shifted abruptly. "As I was saying," he said matter-of-factly, "on that day I had a slight cough. When I got back late in the afternoon, coming down to Zermatt after a marvelous Italian lunch, the cough became more annoying. My wife insisted upon my seeing a doctor. The doctor insisted upon x-raying me. They are neurotic about lungs in the Alps. He diagnosed tuberculosis. Not an advanced case, the doctor assured me, I'd be skiing again the next year. It happened he was wrong. Not the first doctor to make a wrong prognosis." Mr. Heggener shrugged, made a little, uncharacteristic dandyish wave with his cane. "So here I am on foot, plodding along."

Michael stopped walking. "How far is it from the hotel to here?" Mr. Heggener stopped, too, and looked at him, puzzled. "A mile and a half, maybe a little more. Why?"

"And you walked all the way?"

"It was such a fine morning. I walk slowly, as you see."

"Not as slowly as all that," Michael said. "If you can walk more than a mile, what's to prevent you from skiing? Slowly, of course." Mr. Heggener laughed. "My doctor would refuse to see me again." "He's not doing you any good as it is, is he?" Cruelty was to be preferred to manners today.

Mr. Heggener made a balancing, ambiguous movement with his gloved hand. "No," he said.

"Then what have you got to lose? That's what I asked Rita just now when Cully offered to put her in a race."

"Is she going to be in it?"

"Yes," Michael said.

"Good girl," Mr. Heggener said. He stared reflectively down at the beaten snow of the path before him. "It's possible," he said, "that I could do a little mild skiing. As long as there was someone to pick me up when I fell. I'm not strong enough to struggle up by myself." "Look," Michael said. Although the man had for all intents and purposes just about threatened to shoot him the first night they had met, he could not help but admire the candor and courage and grace with which he was facing his fate. And the stoical finality with which Heggener had described his last run down the mountain touched him. Somewhere in the future there was going to be a last run for him, too, and he knew he would seek for consolation then, just as the man beside him, without asking for it, was seeking consolation now. "Look-I'm being paid for a whole day's work by the ski school," Michael said. "Your wife usually skis only in the afternoon and not every afternoon, at that. I'd be delighted to take you out. You know how skiing is-it takes your mind off everything else."

Heggener nodded. "Yes, it does. Sitting around day after day with a blanket over your shoulders and making sure there are no drafts in a room smelling like a hospital doesn't take your mind off anything but the grave. As you said, What have I got to lose?" He spoke almost gaily. "If it's a nice day tomorrow, I'll take you up on your offer. I still have some skis and a pair of boots somewhere in the basement. I didn't know what I was saving them for, but maybe I was saving them for this." He sighed. "A man my age in my condition is apt to be pessimistic, but one must always remember that unexpected things can happen, unexpected people come into your life- that not all hopes are inevitably dashed." He looked up at the sky. "Sun," he said, "shine tomorrow." He laughed, sounding young and full-bodied. "Eva will be in despair."

"Why?"

"If it were up to her she would put me in a hothouse and keep me there. She is desperate about preserving me as long as possible. I am not quite as desperate."

They were in the town now, walking through it to get to the road that led to the hotel. With his cane Heggener saluted the shopkeepers standing out in front of their establishments and tipped his hat to two ladies who were wheeling baby carriages. Everyone seemed to know him and smiled warmly at him and told him they were glad to see him back. "In America," Heggener said, "small towns are the last bastion of civil behavior. The feuds run deep and from generation to generation, but everybody knows he must live with everybody else and people conduct themselves accordingly. They are not strong on art or culture, perhaps, but they are careful about form and manners. One could argue that the village volunteer fire brigade, with its trucks manned by men whose families have not spoken to each other since 1890, is one of the finest institutions of American democracy." He chuckled at his conceit.

They passed the last few houses of the town proper and walked through a tangled forest of second-growth birch and scrub pine. In the sun, the snow was melting off the branches of the trees, falling with soft irregular plops onto the snow beneath.

"Contrary to most people my age," Heggener said, brushing some snow off his mink collar, "I do not applaud the approach of spring. Winter is my season. Luckily, we are far from spring. Which brings up another point, Michael." He used his companion's Christian name naturally, as though the conversation they had had on their walk could only be between friends. "Do you really intend to stay the entire season?"

"As of now, yes."

Heggener nodded. "Eva told me that you had not yet said yes or no about the offer of the little cottage on our property. I sincerely hope you will accept it. I gather that you can afford to stay at the Al-pina as long as you like, but living in a hotel, for three months at a time, even one as spectacularly comfortable as mine"-he smiled, dep-recatingly-"can finally be dreary. I must admit that Eva and I are not being completely unselfish. I have to go out of town on business, or to Boston to the clinic, sometimes for weeks at a time. I worry about leaving Eva alone, just with our seventy-year-old maid, who is so deaf she would not awaken from sleep if they shot off a cannon outside her window. To add to her virtues, she does not speak anything but German. During the season, as you may have heard, the town is visited by some extremely undesirable young people-ski bums who live by stealing when they can't make money any other way, and sometimes even if they can-and recently, whole groups of young people, and some not so young, who smoke marijuana, shoot up on heroin and indulge in other modem amusements of a similar kind. There have been some nasty evenings in the last few years and jail sentences and one case of arson. Has Eva happened to tell you why we had to have the house redone completely?"

"No." '

"Last spring," Heggener said, "we were in New York for a few days and only the old lady was in the house. A gang of young men and girls, too, according to the police, broke into the house. The dog must have been barking, so they shot him. Shot him. Bruno is a replacement. Then the gang tore up the house, ripped every cushion, broke all the china, smashed the doors to the cupboards, sliced the clothes hanging in the closets, everything. Then, as a final touch, they shat on the floor. The old lady slept through it all. Incidentally, they were never apprehended. You can understand that I was reluctant to move back into the ruins. The house needed remodeling anyway, it was dark and a little old-fashioned. But now I keep a pistol in a drawer, a useful Smith and Wesson thirty-eight. Having you nearby would tend to discourage any further depredations. If you do move into the cottage I will show you where I keep the pistol. Have you ever used one?"

"No."

"No matter. You never use it at more than ten feet if you want it to be effective. At ten feet it's almost impossible to miss."

The idea of using a pistol at ten feet did not make Heggener's offer of a place to live any more attractive, but Michael felt that it was impossible to refuse. He had been tested by Cully for speed and endurance on the hill and now he was being tested, he felt, for cowardice.

"I'll move in when you tell me it's ready," Michael said, without hesitation.

"I'm sure you'll be happy there. And it will be convenient when you want to play a game of backgammon. I assure you, aside from the backgammon, we will not interfere with your life." Suddenly, Heggener stopped and began to cough. It was a racking, nerve-rasping sound. There was a bench in a little clearing off the road and Heggener sank onto it and, with a handkerchief to his mouth, continued coughing. Slowly, the seizure ended. Heggener looked at the handkerchief. "No blood," he said calmly. "The season is beginning well." With the aid of his cane, he pushed himself to his feet. "Shall we continue?"

Michael wanted to take his arm so the man could lean on it, but knew that Heggener would resent it. They walked, not briskly now, the last few hundred yards to the hotel.

As they neared the front steps, they heard the sound of a piano from within. "My friend," Michael said. "He's a professional. If there's a piano anywhere, he'll find it."

Heggener cocked his head appreciatively, listening. "Schubert. He plays very well."

"Poor bastard. He got into a ruckus in New York in the bar he was playing at and the police came in and they found out he didn't have a work permit in America and the boss fired him and he can't work in New York anymore."

"What times we live in," Heggener said sadly. "You have to have the permission of the government to play the piano."

They went into the hotel together. At the bottom of the staircase, Heggener said, "Thank you for a most pleasant promenade." He smiled wryly. "I, as usual, talked too much. My social opportunities have been limited recently. Until tomorrow morning, if the sun shines . . ." He climbed the stairs with effort.

Michael went down the flight of steps to the bar, which was located in the basement. Antoine was bent over the piano, playing intently, a cigarette hanging from his lower lip, his sad, dark eyes squinting against the smoke. He was wearing baggy green ski pants and a sweater that was at least three sizes too large for him, of an indeterminate color that looked as though it had been lying out on the seashore, with the tide running over it at regular intervals. On his feet he had a pair of low, laced leather ski boots that Michael had seen on no hill for fifteen years.

"Antoine," Michael said, loudly enough to be heard above the music.

Antoine stopped playing and bounded up and embraced Michael, without losing his cigarette.

"Mon vieux," he said, "you look like a god."

"You look like a horse's ass," Michael said. "Where did you get those clothes?"

"I have had many splendid days racing down the Alps in these clothes," Antoine said with dignity, "and I am attached to them. I made a very good impression with them at the ski school office." "What were you doing at the ski school office?" Michael asked suspiciously.

"I took one look at this town and decided I was going to remain. To remain, I reasoned, would take money. So I went down to the ski school . . ."

"Was the boss there, a big man named Cully?"

"No. Only a charming young girl. I explained to her that I was French and that I was an expert instructor, registered with the French Federation and a friend of yours and did they need any instructors."

"You didn't," Michael said disbelievingly.

"I did." '

"Do you know how to ski at all?"

"Do not be cynical, mon ami," Antoine looked hurt. "I have played the piano at Megeve, at Courchevel, at Val d'lsere, stations that would make a place like this look like a retreat for rheumatic pensioners."

"Playing the piano is one thing," Michael said. "Skiing is another."

"That reminds me," Antoine said. "This piano is definitely out of tune. I would bring up the subject to the management if I were you." "Can you really ski?"

"That is beside the point at the moment. The charming girl said they get many Canadians here who like to be taught in French, especially children. I said I am a specialist in children, patient and wise. Beginners, I said, especially beginners. They won't be able to tell the difference."

"The first time they see you in those baggy pants and laced boots, they'll bust a gut laughing and then they'll come after me with a club." '

"If necessary," Antoine said resignedly, "I will outfit myself in the absurd regalia you seem to find comme il faut. As for the skiing, that is where my good friend Michael will come in."

"What do you mean by that?"

"There is no need to start immediately," Antoine said. "The charming girl explained that to me. The crowd doesn't start coming here until the Christmas holidays. Between then and now, my good friend Mike is going to take me to a secluded place, away from prying eyes, myself dressed d la mode de Green Hollow, and will brush up my style and instruct me in just how one teaches children and grown-ups, if that is unavoidable, who have never been on skis before, so that if anyone puts me to the test and they happen to find any fault with my pedagogy, I can merely say, 'That is the new French technique.' "

Michael couldn't keep from laughing. "You know, Antoine," he said, "you might just get away with it. I'll fit you out after lunch and then we'll go behind the hotel, there's a little slope there, and we'll see what we'll see. Remember, a mountain is not a piano. You can't improvise while you're falling off into space."

"I am convinced that with you as my teacher, everything will be possible," Antoine said. "I am young." Then he qualified that with a shrug. "Young enough. I have a sense of rhythm. I do not mind the cold. I actually have skied from time to time. I have watched good people, the best in the world. As a musician, for example, there is nothing original in the way I play, but I am an accomplished mimic. I can play in the style of Arthur Rubinstein, Fats Waller, Joplin. After a few lessons with you I'm sure I'll have your style, if not your speed and reputation. I am sublimely confident. And I have the nerve of a burglar. And . . he said, pathetically, "I need the money. Mon Dieu, do I need the money. And I have to make it someplace where the Immigration isn't poking its nose into corners. In New York I had the feeling they were circling around me, like Indians around the covered wagons in Western movies. Mike," he said, with absolute seriousness, "I love it in the States, I love this country. I can't go back to Paris. . . . I've tried everything in Paris and I've failed."

"Okay," Michael said, touched, but still reluctant. "We'll give it a try. I don't guarantee results. I'll finance you till Christmas."

"I knew I could depend upon you," Antoine cried and bounced down to the piano stool and hit three resounding triumphant major chords.

"Ah, shut up. I'm going upstairs to take a shower and change for lunch. By the way, where's Susan? Sleeping off the ride last night?" "Not a bit of it," Antoine said. "She is a woman of demonic energy. She's skiing. She couldn't wait."

"How is she?"

Antoine sighed. "Elusive."

"I thought you told me you were just friends."

"She may think that," Antoine said darkly. "I am more demented about her than ever. She is a glorious and infuriating woman. I am not like you. One look and here is the key to my room. Ah, there are those that have it, like you, and the ones who do not have it, like me. And the ones that have it think nothing of it and the ones that don't think of nothing else."

"Will she be back for lunch?" Michael asked, refusing to engage in this particular philosophic discussion with Antoine.

"Who knows?" Antoine said. "She never tells me her plans."

"Well, if she comes back," Michael said, "we'll have lunch together. The food here is very good."

"I will never leave here."

"We'll see about that," Michael said and started upstairs as Antoine swung the stool around and began to improvise on the sad theme of "Send In the Clowns."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

Michael was drying himself off after the shower when there was a knock on his door. Still dripping, he threw on a terry cloth bathrobe and opened the door. Eva was standing there, looking businesslike in a plain skirt and sweater. "May I come in?" she said.

"I'm not exactly dressed to receive company," Michael said, using the towel on his wet hair.

"It won't take long." She came into the room and Michael closed the door behind him, feeling guilty, as he had the first time she had come to his room, that the room was messed up. His ski clothes were strewn all over the place, with one sock on the bed and the other on the floor.

Eva faced him, unsmiling. "You're doing something unforgivable," she said.

"What are you talking about, Eva?" Having one sock on the bed and one on the floor might be careless, but it could hardly be called unforgivable.

"Tempting my husband to believe he could ski again."

"If he can walk the way he did . . ." Michael began.

"You ought to see him now," she said accusingly. "He's stretched out on the bed as pale as a sheet gasping for breath."

"I'm sorry."

"You should be. I forbid you to mention the subject again."

"Eva . . Michael said. "Nobody forbids me anything. Not even you."

"You'll kill him," she said flatly.

"I doubt it. In any case, he's a grown, highly intelligent man and he knows how he feels better than either you or I and it's up to him to make decisions that concern him. I happen to think that a little easy skiing will help him, if not physically then at least psychically." "Up to now," Eva said sardonically, "you have successfully hidden the fact that you have a degree in psychiatry. You've talked to him twice and you think you know him. I've been married to him for twelve years and I assure you, you don't. You talk about a little easy skiing. That's because of your ignorance. He does nothing easily and never has. At his age he isn't going to change. Are you going to tell him that you've thought about it and he'd best listen to the doctors and his wife or . . . ?"

"Listen," Michael broke in. "Maybe I was wrong to suggest it, but now that he's got the idea, he's going to ski, whether he does it with me or with somebody else. I may not know him as well as you, but I have the impression that when he makes up his mind . .

"Foolish man," she said, not speaking of her husband. "Fool. And I thought, after what's happened between us you would feel you owe me something, not much, but something."

"You don't owe me anything," Michael said, angry now, "and I don't owe you anything."

"I'll remember that," Eva said wamingly.

There was a soft rap on the door. "You have company. We'll discuss this some other time," Eva said.

Michael went over to the door, leaving Eva standing rigidly in the middle of the room. He opened the door and saw Susan Hartley standing there, in ski clothes, her hair blown from her morning on the mountain.

"Hi, lover," she said and kissed Michael before she saw Eva Heggener behind him. "Oh."

"That's all right," Eva said. "I was just leaving. I hope you had an enjoyable morning on the slopes." She had transformed herself in the flick of an eye to the mistress of the establishment, but her voice was cold. "That's a pretty outfit you're wearing." Susan was in an all white ski suit. "The color becomes you." The manner in which she said it made it plain that she did not think that the color became Susan at all. "I'll leave you two now. I'm sure you have many things to talk about."

She marched stiffly out of the room. Michael closed the door behind her gently.

"Did I interrupt anything?" Susan asked.

"A medical discussion," Michael said. "Nothing."