Four Quarters Volume 14 Number 3 Four Quarters: March 1965 Vol

Four Quarters Volume 14 Number 3 Four Quarters: March 1965 Vol. XIV, No. Article 1 3

3-1965 Four Quarters: March 1965 Vol. XIV, No. 3

Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/fourquarters

Recommended Citation (1965) "Four Quarters: March 1965 Vol. XIV, No. 3," Four Quarters: Vol. 14 : No. 3 , Article 1. Available at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/fourquarters/vol14/iss3/1

This Complete Issue is brought to you for free and open access by the University Publications at La Salle University Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Four Quarters by an authorized editor of La Salle University Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. foiir Quarters

Amy Evans Street • Page 1 A Short Story by Victor Chapin

Paradox • Page 22 A Haiku by Francis Lehner

CO Fictional New England: Empire 9i> in Dissolution • Page 23 An Article by John J. McAleer

Epiphany • Page 29 13 A Quatrain by John Fandel

Three Winter Scenes: • Page 30 The Land s»^ The Room The Heart Poems by Brother Fidelian, F.S.C.

Rose Garrity • Page 31 A Fictional Narrative by David Kelly

Dr. Jekyll's Music Lesson • Page 39 A Poem by Charles Edward Eaton 8-4 CO Lines for Bruce Mitchell • Page 40 A Poem by John Wheatcroft

BQ March, 1963

vol. XIV, no. 3 • fifty cents Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2010 with funding from Lyrasis IVIembers and Sloan Foundation

http://www.archive.org/details/fourquarters91unse .

Amy Evans Street

Victor Chapin

The Wordsworth School stood half- waited eagerly to give us pictures way up on a street that began in one and books. Our young minds were of New York's bad neighborhoods very well served, and any ideas that and ran gradually up a hill to one of came into birth on our lips were its better ones. The school building pounced upon and cherished; they faced a park that lay sideways on were dissected and analyzed accord- the hill and stretched away down- ing to the prevailing standards of town for many blocks. Over the tops "individual" education. We were of its prim looking trees you could prodded, gently but firmly, by famous see the Cathedral of St. John the scholars who recorded our reactions Divine. At the top of the park was in books. We lived on the topmost a long line of fashionable apartment level, getting more than our share houses, and below it was another line of the sun rays of care and atten- of less fashionable ones. Down below tion. We absorbed a great deal of was Harlem, and up above was Col- warmth, but we were very very ten- umbia University. Only the park der. came between them. We came to school in the mornings Some of us who were growing up in buses, streetcars, subways, or between the two World Wars went private automobiles. I got the Fifth every day to Wordsworth School, Avenue bus at the Eighty-sixth Street where our adventurous parents sent corner every morning at eight-fifteen. us to enjoy the benefits of progres- I took the same bus home every after- sive education. We did not know it noon at approximately three o'clock. then, but we were the luckiest teen- I traveled back and forth with many aged children in the city. We were of my schoolmates who lived on the the offspring of the liberal tradition; upper East Side. The even-numbered clothed, fed, and loved by the men streets where the bus stopped took on who had come home from the war to names in our minds, for we associated be inspired by Eugene V. Debs and them with the students who got on the women who had found their and off at them : Ninetieth Street was freedom at Vassar, Wellesley, and Hugo Street, Ninety-fourth was Edna Smith. Street, Ninety-sixth Valerie Street, We were well-mannered, unathletic and so on to One Hundred and Sec- adolescents at whom no one ever ond Street, where Fifth Avenue shouted "no." We were free to ask stopped being nice and Wordsworth what questions we liked, and some- students stopped hailing the bus. We one was always nearby to answer did not have a name for Ninety-sec- them according to the latest concepts ond Street until October 1934, when of right and wrong. We were sur- Amy Evans began going to our rounded by men and women who school. —

Four Quarters

I saw her standing at the Ninety- were walking away up the street. "Are second Street stop the first morning there enough seats?" of the new term, but since she did "Milhons." not climb to the upper deck, I We began to walk. Our book bags thought she was an ordinary traveler. bumped against our thighs. When we got off the bus, however, "Do you like Wordsworth?" I she followed behind us, all the way asked. to the school building. I did not see "I don't know yet." her again that day, as she was in "It's not bad." the tenth grade and I was in the We came to the entrance of the eleventh, but next morning she was school building. I stopped on the at Ninety-second Street as she had street before we went in. been the day before. She stayed on "I don't know your name," I said. the lower deck and lingered far be- "Amy Evans—I know your name." hind us as we marched from the bus "You do? How?" to school. This happened every morn- "I found it out. You see, Fve ing for two weeks. Then one morning, known you before." while we were all jumping off the "You have? Where?" bus, I decided to wait for her. She "This summer—in Switzerland was the last one to come through the Montreux. I saw you in a restaurant." door and step down to the sidewalk. "You did?" She blinked when she saw that I was "Yes." standing beside her. I looked closely "I was there this summer—but at her face. From a distance she how did you remember?" looked plain, but now I saw that her "I remembered because you look eyes, though small and withdrawn, like the King of Rome." were bright blue and sparkling. Her "Who?" nose and chin were small but delicate- "You k n o w—L'Aiglon—Napo- ly modeled. Her hair was blonde, leon's son—in the play." thin, and wispy. I saw that she was "I look like him?" lovely, not so much for her looks, "The way I think he looked." but for her air of unwilling shyness. "That's funny." She was slightly stoop shouldered, as "I was very surprised that first I was, and I immediately felt that I morning when I saw you get off the shared with her the fear of all the bus." voices that told her to stand up "Why didn't you speak to me?" straight. "I didn't want to." I spoke to her. "Why don't you "Oh." sit on the upper deck with us?" "I didn't want to find out that She lowered her eyes and rubbed you're not really like the King of her leather book bag against her Rome. I didn't want to spoil it." knees. She didn't answer me. "It's too late now." "Are you afraid of heights?" "I don't think I care now." "Oh, no," she said quickly, "it We smiled at each other and went isn't that." inside the building. "Then you'd better come up tomorrow." I was sixteen that year. My parents She was looking at the others, who did not let me stay out late in the "

Amy Evans Street evening except on Fridays and Satur- When the intermission came, I days, when I was allowed to go to a went up to look for her. I found her theatre or to a party at a friend's in the Promenade standing under a house. On Sunday afternoons my picture of Hector Berlioz. There were mother always went with her sister a lot of people with her, but when to the Philharmonic concerts in Car- she saw me coming toward her, she negie Hall, and this year they asked grabbed hold of a woman who was me to go with them. I was presented standing beside her. with a large book of white tickets, "Look, Mother," she shouted.

! which I kept in my bureau drawer. "Here comes the King of Rome I liked the brown and gold feeling She broke away from the people of Carnegie Hall. I liked the com- and hurried over to me. She grabbed fortable, quiet people who sat near me by the hand and whirled herself me, and I liked the great chords that around in a circle. burst from the orchestra and seemed "It's beautiful, it's beautiful," she to shiver in the air. It was a long said. time before I liked anything but the I was embarrassed, but she came big loud sounds. I fidgeted during to a stop in front of me. Her face was the soft slow movements and looked flushed. "Come and meet lots of peo- up at the people who were sitting in ple." the boxes. It was one of these times, I went with her to the group. I during the first concert of the season, met her father, who was a big blus- that I looked up and saw Amy. She tering man who looked like a poli- was sitting in a lower tier box, her tician; her mother, who was fat and elbows were propped on the ledge jolly with an aristocratic look that in front of her, and her chin was contradicted her girth; her sister, buried in her hands. Her thin blonde who was also fat and talked in a loud hair was pulled into a bun at the voice; and several other people with back of her neck, and she was wear- foreign names who smiled vaguely ing a large pair of horn-rimmed but politely in all directions. The glasses. While I watched her, the mother came away from the group music began to surge. She pulled a and reached out to shake my hand. hand out from under her chin and "We saw you in Switzerland, I un- waved it up and down, following the derstand. Now you must come and changing sounds. The music faded see us. Amy hasn't many friends here. away again into a kind of mournful She's still a little strange. Do say stillness. Her head dropped, the hand you'll come." stopped waving. There was a silence "I'd love to," I answered. during which the listeners sighed, "Amy's the last of six children. We then came a gigantic chord. Amy's hardly know what to do with her." body stiffened and her head snapped "Oh, Mother!" Amy said. back. For a second she was caught "She mopes too much. I do hope in the glare of a spotlight. I saw her you don't mope. What are you doing eyes flashing behind the solemn-look- at this concert? Do you like music?" ing glasses; then she fell back in her "Yes." chair, out of the light. During the "Do you play?" rest of the symphony her fingers "No." tapped on the ledge. "What a shame. You might have "

4 Four Quarters helped Amy with her cello. She does- listen to what the other guests were n't practice much, though I don't sup- saying. pose anyone of your age practices un- "Why do they have that man? He less they're prodigies, and I'm glad turns everything into second-rate Amy isn't a prodigy." Brahms." Amy tugged at her mother's dress. "The Scherzo was awful. It sound- "Do be quiet, Mother." ed like a beer wagon rattling over "Don't you want me to talk to this stones." nice young man, dear?" "Toscanini will be furious. The "But you say such silly things." men play like slobbering idiots." "Very well, dear. I must go back "I couldn't listen to the Concerto. to our friends. Ask your friend to That dreadful woman—she has abso- come to tea with us afterwards." She lutely no legato." moved back to the group, leaving me Amy banged a fork on the table. alone with Amy. "It was beautiful," she said very "Could you?" she asked. "We're loudly. going next door to the Russian Tea Her mother looked shocked. "Amy Room." dear—

"I think so." "But it was, Mother, it was." She "Good. Meet me outside the main turned to me. "Wasn't it?" entrance." I nodded my head fearfully. "Will you be here next week?" I "But dear—you mustn't be rude," asked. the mother said. "Yes, if Mother doesn't give my Amy glared at her. "I think it's seat in the box to somebody else." rude of these people to talk that way

I had a wonderful feeling of poise about music." and belongingness as I walked back "But they know about music, dear. through the crowd to my seat. I felt You don't." of the I was one of them—the elite, the cul- Everyone was laughing. One tural leaders. I was going to con- guests tried to pat her hand, but Amy certs, I was going to teas, and best of quickly pulled it away. all I knew Amy, who had so much "We want it to be more beautiful enthusiasm. --for you," the guest said. After the concert, we met and went "Yes," said the mother. "You see, inside the restaurant. There we sat dear?" quietly in a corner while the foreign Amy's head began to sink. Her face friends, who were apparently musi- was reddening. cians, shouted across the table at "I'm sorry," she said. each other. Amy didn't seem to lis- "You've embarrassed the young ten. She looked away across the res- man," her father said suddenly. taurant and hummed bits of the sym- I moved closer to Amy. My face phony we had just heard. We drank was as red as hers. I looked at her. tea out of glasses and ate little cakes Her eyes were fierce, and her chin with bright colored frosting that hurt was trembling. my teeth when I bit into them. We "I'm not embarrassed," I whis- looked at each other as we ate the pered. cakes but said nothing. I began to She smiled her stiff smile. Amy Evans Street

"It was beautiful, wasn't it?" she "It's lovely, Mother, it's lovely." asked. "You're a strange girl. Amy. I can't "Yes," I answered. imagine how you came to be our "We won't let them spoil it, will daughter." we?" Amy lunged across the carriage. "No." Her head landed in her mother's lap, She smiled again, straightening but her feet were still beside me on herself in her chair. She looked across on the seat. When the carriage began at her father. to move into Central Park, she rubbed "Daddy, may we have some more them slowly back and forth on the cakes?" she asked. tattered leather upholstery. When we came out of the restau- "Sweet Mother," she crooned, rant, we saw that twilight was just "don't be angry with me now. Be thickening into night. There was still angry with me when it's cold—^not enough of Indian summer left to make now." the coming night seem warm. Amy Mrs. Evans sighed and patted sniffed the air. Amy's head. She looked across at me "It's going to be winter soon," she and shrugged her big shoulders. said. "We haven't much time. Soon "What do you think of us?" she we'll be huddled up, running away asked. from the wind. You know what I "I think you're very nice," I an- want to do? I want to ride home in swered. a carriage." "Tell me what you're like." She ran up to her father, who was "I—I don't know." standing on the curb waving at the "He's the King of Rome," Amy taxis that flashed by. murmured. "Daddy, I want to ride home in a "And you're the little Princess," carriage." her mother said. There was a lot of confused talk. I "Yes, Mother. That's just what I stood away from them and tried not feel like now." Her words were to hear. I saw Amy stamp her foot. blurred and indistinct, for she was Then she came back with her ]giother. falling asleep. "We're going to ride home in a Mrs. Evans sat in silence with carriage," she said triumphantly. Amy's head on her lap. The horse We walked to Fifty-ninth Street, pulled us through the park into the to the place where the old men with Eighty-fifth Street exit. their horses waited for someone to "You live right here, don't you?" want them. Mrs. Evans talked to the Mrs. Evans asked when we had come driver we picked out, and Amy and out of the darkness of the park into I climbed into the big open carriage. the lights of the Avenue. Amy bumped up and down on the "Yes." seat. "We'll let you out here, then." "Oh, heaven! It's just like the ones I climbed out of the carriage and in Monte Carlo." watched it move slowly away from Mrs. Evans came and settled her- me. Mrs. Evans waved. self opposite us. "Come and see us often, and be "I'm sure this is very uncomfort- nice to Amy in school." able," she said. The carriage wobbled as the horse —

Four Quarters

dragged it up the Avenue. I watched "No—not that, either." it until a bus blocked it from my "Then why?" sight. I walked home quickly, for the "Because I'd just done something night was beginning to be cold. exciting and I was going home in a carriage—-and because I went to beside Next morning the seat me sleep. That was part of it, too. Didn't was empty when the bus reached you feel it?" Ninety-second Street. I saw Amy wait- "No, I don't think so. I don't know ing as usual at the corner. She was how it feels to be Russian." wearing a new tweed coat. I leaned "I do. Or I think I do." out of the open window and waved "Do you know how it feels to be to her as she climbed aboard the bus. Chinese, too?" I waited until I heard her feet on "I did once." the iron stairs, then turned around "When was that?" in my seat to watch her coming. Her head appeared over the railing. She "When I had to go to a hospital in I all stood still for a second, looking at Montreux. was alone. Mother me; but when I motioned to her with was in Egypt, and my appendix had my hand, she climbed the rest of the burst. I forgot all my French, and stairs and walked down the aisle to no one could understand me. I just my seat. lay in bed with no one to talk to. I "May I sit down?" she asked. didn't say anything or understand "Why do you think I was waving?" anything for days. I was all alone in- "You looked like Don Quixote." side myself. That's when I felt Chi- "Then sit down, Sancho Panza." nese." She plumped into the seat and She leaned toward me quickly, dropped her book bag on the floor. eager to break the silence that had "I thought you'd be mad at me," followed her last words. she said. "Have you ever been to the bal- "Why?" let?" she asked. "Because I fell asleep in the car- "No." riage." "Come with us on Saturday. Moth- "Why should I be mad at that?" er told me to ask you. I've never been, "It's not the way a lady acts either. Won't you please?" that's what my mother says." "Sure." "I didn't mind." "Oh, good. I was afraid you'd say "It was a lovely ride. I felt like no. Mother said you'd say no." Natasha." "Why? Because you went to "Who's Natasha?" sleep?" "The girl in War and Peace." "No. Because she's afraid boys "Why did you feel like her?" don't like me. I'm not pretty." "Because everything seemed very "Yes, you are." Russian." "She doesn't think so—and any- "It did? Why? Because we went way, I'm not." to the Russian Tea Room?" "I said you were." "No—not just because of that." "You had to say that." "Because of the Tschaikowsky "No, I didn't." Symphony?" "I made you say it. I shouldn't Amy Evans Street

have done it. Now I'll never know if you can see they're not dancing in you really think so." the lobby." "But I do." Amy sighed and fell into step beside us. We filed out of the lobby. "No—I'll never know. But it does- the street. n't matter if I'm not pretty. I can When we reached Amy's mother patted her on the shoulder. pretend I am every once in a while. "I'm glad you liked it, dear." I can make myself feel pretty—not "Liked it. Mother? I adored it. I all the time—but sometimes I can. want to go every day. I want to be And if I were pretty, I'd be stuck-up ballerina. I, please?" and then I'd miss a lot. I wouldn't a May Mother, "It isn't as all that. draw, and I wouldn't play the cello. as easy Those I'd stop writing poetry and wait for girls start studying when they're people to write poetry about me. I'd young children. It would be too late think about being pretty all the time, for you to start now." and then maybe I'd never feel pretty Amy clenched her fists. at all." "Why is everything always too I wanted to laugh at her, but her late?" she asked. "Why do I have to voice sounded too serious and intent. be me, instead of Toumanova?" There were wisps of hair blowing in Her mother laughed. "There you her eyes, and looking at her small go, dear. Always so extravagant. You straight nose and tight little mouth, were perfectly happy to be you, two I suddenly felt newly serious. I had hours ago, so try to be happy about a feeling I had never had before. it now." I was afraid for her. I was used to "But I want to dance" feeling afraid for myself, but not for "You can take lessons if you like." other people. I felt that I had to "Can I go to Fokine?" guard her from something, but I did- "If that's what you want. But don't n't know what it was. I fell in love think you're going to be Touma- with her then, but I didn't know that, nova." either. Amy hugged her mother, then When we came out of the theatre grabbed me by the hand. that next Saturday, Amy ran ahead "Will you come to Fokine with of me in the lobby and, lifting her me?" she asked. "We can both skirt with her hand, tried to whirl study." around on her toes. I shuddered. "How could I? I'm Her mother called to her: "Amy, too clumsy." what are you doing?" "You mustn't be clumsy. You can't "I'm dancing. Mother, I'm danc- be. Come to Fokine with me, and ing." you'll be graceful, graceful, graceful." "Don't do it here, dear." She skipped and scampered in front "Why not?" of us. I felt embarrassed when peo- "Because people will think it ple turned to look at her, but the em- strange." barrassment did not destroy my "I don't care about people. They've pleasure in watching her. Mrs. Evans all seen the ballet. They must feel the must have seen my face and recog- same way I do." nized some look on it that told her "Maybe they do feel that way, but how I felt, for suddenly she took my Four Quarters arm and spoke to me in a soft, serious began to walk down the stairs to the voice. street. Amy said, "I loved it. I can't "You like her, don't you?' wait for the next lesson. I'm going to I looked at her. There was, in the practice hours and hours a day." look that she returned, no patronage I said nothing. or amusement such as there usually She looked at me. "You must prac- was when older people looked at me. tice, too." I knew that she had asked me more "No," I said. than that simple question. My gaze "Why?" fell from her face and went again to "I'm not coming again." Amy, who was still skipping in front "What?" of us. "I can't. It's no use. It's not for "I like her very much," I answered. me. I could never do it." "It's good for her to have you. She "But you must." needs confidence so badly. Will you "Why must I?" try to give it to her?" She stopped walking. She stood "Me?" I murmured. "How can I?" squarely in front of me one step low- "Just be patient with her. Like her. er on the staircase. Make her know that you like her." "Because I want you to," she said Amy came back to us, and her very quietly. chattering voice filled my ears. But "But I made a fool of myself." I didn't hear the words. I was too "You wouldn't always." conscious of her mother beside me "Once is enough." and of the uneasiness that had en- "I won't let you give up." gulfed me after I heard what she said All at once I was angry. I didn't to me. I had been made to feel re- like the hard, set look of her tight sponsible; immediately I felt the mouth or the stubborn stance of her weight of it. I didn't understand then body. why the mother's words stirred in my I blurted out defiance. "I'm going consciousness. I hardly knew what to give it up just the same. You can't they did. I was aware only of a kind make me go again." of nameless worry. She stared at me a moment, then I went with Amy to Fokine. There she stamped her foot. "If you give was a large class of teen-aged chil- up now, I'll hate you—how do you dren, all very agile and enthusiastic. like that?" I fell down three times during the "Then you'll have to hate me," I first lesson, and Fokine gave me dark, shouted. angry looks. Amy had set her mouth "Go home by yourself and don't in a hard line, and she watched every- speak to me again." She started to thing so intently that my own awk- run. I chased her out of the building wardness and lack of real interest and down Riverside Drive to the cor- seemed to me sinful, though I could ner. I caught up with her just as she do nothing to overcome them. By started to run across the street against the time the lesson was finally over, the traffic. I held her arm tightly I was in an agony of self-conscious- and pulled her on to the sidewalk. ness. I told myself that nothing could "Go away," she screamed. persuade me to go there again. "Amy, please." When we left the classroom and "Leave me alone, you clod," she Amy Evans Street said as she managed to break my She began to soothe me. "Don't be grip. Before I knew what had hap- angry with Amy." pened, she had streaked across the "I'm not." street and climbed aboard a bus that "Be nice to her." immediately began to move down- "But she's mad at me." town. I ran down the block, chasing "No, she isn't. Be sure she sits with bus in the wild hope of catching the you on the bus tomorrow." it, or at least seeing the quick flash I was stiff and formal when I saw of Amy's face in a window, or a sight Amy again. I avoided her eyes when of her hand waving forgiveness. But she came and sat beside me on the the bus went with what seemed un- bus, even though I felt sure they common speed, and I was alone at a would be pleading and remorseful if street corner. I leaned up against a I looked into them. It was because I building and wondered what had hap- knew this that I couldn't look. I pened. The anger was gone; only a stared out of the window and waited sense of shame remained. for her to speak; but she said noth- I did not know enough to phone ing. We were absolutely silent after her at once. My pride and my shame our first polite greeting until the bus won out. I went home and brooded stopped at the school corner. When in my room. I remembered that she we got up, I knew I had to speak, or had said, "Leave me alone." I was a something important would be lost stranger to quick words and quick to us forever. emotions, so I imagined that she had "Don't hate me," I said. said those words not out of quickness Her answer came in little gasps. but out of some long withheld resent- "Oh, I don't, I don't. I couldn't." ment. The relief was so great that I felt I My mother came to call me to the must laugh or cry, but after a mo- phone. I felt a rush of triumph; but ment in which I only smiled at her, the voice coming out of the receiver I felt safe and normal again. was not Amy's. It was her mother's. "I can't help it if I can't be a "What happened to Amy?" she dancer," I said. asked. Words poured from her mouth "We had a fight," I answered. happily and breathlessly as we walked "What was it about? I'm so wor- up the hill to school. ried. Amy has been sick all evening "You don't have to be a dancer. —crying and vomiting—but she You can be anything else you like. won't tell me a thing. I just had to You can sing or act or draw or call you to find out what's wrong." write." "I told her I wouldn't go to Fokine "But I can't do any of those any more." things." "Is that all?" "You'll do something. You'll be "Yes." famous and people will point you out "I can't understand it." in restaurants, and I'll be proud of "I'm afraid I was very stubborn. you and feel so terribly important." I just couldn't say I'd go back. I was "Don't count on my being famous. awful—I kept falling down, and Fo- I may be just nothing. I may just kine hated me." work in an office or maybe do noth- 10 Four Quarters

ing at all. Maybe I'll just flounder be as eternally happy as I thought along, and you'll be ashamed." people could be. "I'll never never never be ashamed of you. How can you say such a Since our school was attempting to thing? Why, if that ever happened, integrate all the high school classes I'd be a mean, dried-up old witch into what they called "one big cul- who didn't know anything about any- tural survey," it was easier for us to thing." shine in some subjects and sag in "I'm glad you feel that way, Amy. others than it might have been in an- Don't let's ever fight again. Let's go other school. It was even possible to on having fun. Let's do things to- avoid an unpleasant subject altogeth- gether—all sorts of things." er, if you made yourself appealing "I don't ever want to do anything enough and had your parents on your with anybody but you—ever. I could- side. Amy, aware of this possibility, n't bear to be with anyone else." announced to me one day that she "That's good." intended to eliminate biology from Just before we parted to go to our her life as soon as possible. classes. Amy took my arm, and our "I hate it," she said. eyes met at last. Her look made me "Oh, it isn't so bad," I answered. tremble. I wanted to break away from "It makes me sick. Dissecting her because my feeling for her was things—analyzing—why don't we too intense. just accept nature for whatever it is? "Will you marry me someday?" Everything loses its beauty when you she asked. tear things apart." "Yes," I whispered. "But we have to know about things. "And we'll have six children?" We have to have science." "Yes." "/ don't have to have it, do I?" "And they'll be dancers and paint- "No, I suppose not." ers and musicians?" But jAmy's plan failed. The school "Yes." authorities became suddenly stern "When?" with her. A new respect for practical "I don't know. When I'm through learning had taken hold of them. And college and making money. A long Amy's parents agreed that biology time, I guess." could not and should not be avoided. "I don't care—just as long as It There were tears and rages and vom- will be someday. It will be, won't itings, but Amy, in the end, had to it?" submit. "Yes." Then, later that year. Amy's deter- "You promise?" mination to live her life in Art re- "Yes, Amy. I promise." ceived a sudden justification when That was the closest we ever came a national literary magazine bought to saying we loved each other. Though four of her sonnets for publication. I never kissed her and hardly even This created a stir at Wordsworth, touched her hand, there was in the where it was hailed as a vindication year that followed such a sense of pos- of progressive education, which had session between us that I never become of late less fashionable in the doubted that some day we would be academic world. Amy was overjoyed married, have our six children, and at her success. She regarded it as Amy Evans Street 11 proof that we were poets, for she sion, and for once her hair went tried to make me believe that her straight up and down in a lovely success was mine as well. But I felt line from the top of her head to the left out, and for a while I resented edge of her shoulders. She carried the new, separating respect I was me from aunts and cousins to broth- now forced to feel for her. ers and sisters. They all looked Amy's parents were pleased, too, strange to me, for they were all large for success was something everyone and beaming, comfortable-looking, understood. They gave a party for with big round faces. They all laughed Amy one Saturday night early in a great deal, loudly and loosely, May. It was a beautiful night. The shouting jokes about Amy's poems. air was heavy with spring, full of Many of them slapped me on the back exciting scents as it blew into the as I passed, and one or two winked city from the blossoming West- whenever Amy grabbed my hand to chester hills. As I walked from drag me toward another relative. I my house to Amy's, I felt intense- didn't like them and felt that they ly happy because I knew the world had nothing to do with Amy. I was was beautiful. My life was full of relieved when I found myself beside the promise of innocent pleasure. the usually dependable Mrs. Evans; The days stretched ahead in my mind but she had succumbed to the collec- through the rest of languorous spring tive personality of her relatives and into the seemingly endless days of ruffled my hair when she introduced lazy summer. My prospect was full me to a friend as "another little of sunshine. I saw myself standing poet." I crept away from her and with Amy in some unlimited space went to a remote corner and stood reaching with her toward some great by myself. warmth. That night, walking on the Then Amy was beside me again. Avenue, I felt safer than I have ever Music was booming out of a large felt before or since. I had a wonder- walnut phonograph that stood against ful sense of me that was safe in my the wall on the other side of the room. sense of mother, father, home, and All around us people were kicking at Amy. That sense of me had not yet the edges of rugs and leaning down been torn away and cast out to be to roll them against sofas and chairs. itself in a world of responsibility. "Are you going to dance with The first big painful tear came that me?" Amy asked. night at Amy's party. "I don't know how," I said. The large living room of the This time she laughed. "It's the Evans's apartment was surrounded only thing you're stubborn about." on three sides by terraces. People- "I'm sorry—I just can't do it." both young and old—moved from She came toward me and held out the room to the terraces and back her arms. "Just this once. Listen to again. Everywhere, I saw schoolmates the music and push me around ever from Wordsworth and older people so gently. Everyone expects you to whom I did not know. Amy ran ex- dance with me." citedly from one person to the other, "They do? Why?" pulling me along with her. Her moth- She came into my arms, and we er had given her a beautiful white moved awkwardly into the middle of evening gown for this special occa- the room. "

12 Four Quarters

"Because they think I'm your girl." happen to other people. We won't for- There was a long moment of wait- get about beautiful things—we'll nev- ing during which I tried to hear the er be small and ugly. We'll always be rhythm of the music and move in just the way we are now, won't we?" accordance with it. "I hope so." Then she said, "I am, aren't I?" She turned away from the night "What?" I asked. and the darkness and put her face "Your girl." close to me. "Will you be different "Sure you are." when you're grown up and a man?" "And someday— ?" "No." "Someday?" "But you might be. We're still "You know." young—we don't have to do the "Yes." things that we'll have to do when Flushing with pleasure, I whirled we're old." her around with sudden confidence. "What things?" Then I saw some of her family watch- "Tearing things down and putting ing us, and I stumbled. To cover my them back up again; falling down embarrassment, I turned my back to and getting up again. Pushing, shov- them and said, "I haven't seen your ing, taking—all those things." father." "What do you mean?" "He isn't here." "I don't know. People seem so aw- "Isn't he coming?" ful sometimes when you see them all "I don't know. He's busy at the together in crowds. You're supposed office." to be more yourself when you grow I began to enjoy the dancing. We up, but sometimes when I see lots of were managing quite well. But I was people together, I'm afraid I'll be terrified to think I might have to less myself and more like them. I'm dance with someone else. After a afraid all the time that I'm going to while the phonograph was turned off, lose something. I don't really know and I was saved for the time being. what it is, but I'm awfully afraid. Amy took me out on one of the ter- That's silly, isn't it?" races. We looked down on the narrow "No, Amy—it isn't silly." streets and high walls of the city, She tossed back her hair and drew which looked quiet and orderly from away from me. Her face became the superior height of the Evans's blurred until she was only a patch apartment. We leaned, close together, of white in front of my eyes. over the ledge with our backs to the "I'm afraid of you, too," I heard noise and the light. her say. "I'm happy," she said. "But whv?" We were looking far across the "You'll change." city to the east where the river shone "No." dimly like a varnished table top. "Or I'll change." "I'm glad, Amy." "Don't think that." "Will we always be happv, do you "But it will happen." think?" No. "I don't know—why not?" "It will—I know it now this min- "Lots of reasons—but we won't ute—something —will happen." let things happen to us the way they "Amy, please Amy Evans Street 13

I came close to her again. I put getting into trouble. I don't like all my hands on her shoulders. She laid these fancy ideas you've been gether head on my chest, and I felt her ting. How do I know you haven't been soft hair with my lips. Then she doing things you shouldn't already?" broke away and laughed. "Shut up," Amy said. "I'm being morbid. Let's go back "Don't talk to me like that." and dance some more." She started to scream. It was a As we went back into the living long thin wail like a lonely dog's. loom, I glanced nervously at the oth- Only the words "shut up" came out, er girls, trying to think of ways to but they grew louder and louder.

£'. V o i d dancing with them. Amy People began pressing closely around crossed to the other side of the room. us, and I was alone in a crowd of As I followed her I saw her father busy, scrambling women. My face come into the room. I went toward was hot, and streaks of sweat ran him, but Amy came running back down from my forehead. My mind and stood in front of me. wouldn't come out of the haze. I was "Let's go back to the terrace," she standing still in the middle of the said. room. I looked nowhere and saw "I ought to speak to your father." nothing. No one paid me any atten- "No," she said loudly, "not now." tion. I knew that Amy was gone, "Why not?" that the father was gone. I saw that "Not now." the people had gone away into cor- But then he was beside us. Amy ners. There was a terrible hush in the turned and I saw her body stiffen. room until someone switched on the "Go away," she said in a whisper. phonograph, and there was a sudden Her father was very red in the face. and violent rush of music. Then He was holding a large hand out to everything looked the same except me. I took hold of it. It was very hot there was no white splash of Amy and wet. in the room. Amy's mother was be- "You're the scamp who's in love side me, speaking to me. Her voice with my daughter," he said. said, "Don't be upset." Amy tugged at my arm. "What happened? What was it?" "Don't pay any attention to him," "You don't understand?" she said. "No." "I like to see young people in "Amy is ill." love," said the father. "But I don't "Where is she?" trust them nowadays. You've got "In her room. One of our guests is fancy ideas. Poetry and painting and a doctor. He's with her." staying out late at night. You don't "What's wrong with her?" plan to lay hands on Amy, do you?" "Nothing serious." I said nothing. He still had hold "But what was it? All of a sudden of my hand. she was screaming." "Go away. Father," Amy whis- Mrs. Evans sighed. "I don't think pered. "Please go away." I know how to explain it to you. You "But I'm just looking out for your see, it's her father. She didn't like interests, Amy," he said. "I want to what he was saying to you. What did be sure this boy has the right idea he say? Do you mind if I ask?" about you. I'm not going to have you "It was about me . . . and Amy "

14 Four Quarters — ... he was asking if—if didn't open her eyes or turn her head, How could I say what he had said? but her voice coming to me across the Only then did I know the loathing room sounded clear and familiar. of it. I turned my head away quickly, "Are you looking at my pictures?" and Mrs. Evans understood. she asked. "I'm so sorry," she said. "But you "Yes." mustn't pay any attention. You see, "I spoiled the party, didn't I?" he didn't mean any of it. He wasn't "No, Amy—you didn't." really responsible." "Yes, I did—I know I did—but I I hung my head as I tried to an- couldn't help it. Anyway, I was too swer her. "I didn't really mind. It's happy. I'm sorry. Will you forgive just that Amy—she was so upset." me?" "It always upsets her when he's like I came close to her. She was pale that. There's nothing we can do about and drawn. She didn't look young at bits it. Why do you think we stayed in all. Her hair was stringy again; Europe so long? I thought that now of it were stuck to her forehead. she's older she'd get over it. She'll I spoke to her softly. "It doesn't have to—or it will ruin her health. matter what happened. Don't think Mr. Evans won't change—Amy's the about it. Nothing can hurt us really one who'll have to change." —not us." She went away after that. I was Now she opened her eyes, but she alone again. I still didn't realize what didn't turn them to me; instead, she it all meant. I began to think I should looked away through the doors, out leave quietly without speaking to any- at the distant city. one, but as I moved to the door of "Mother said I could ask you some- a room where I knew my coat had thing," she said. been taken by a maid, Mrs. Evans "What?" came back and asked me to go to "Would your parents let you go to Amy. She took me down a long hall Europe with us this summer?" to a large bedroom. When I went in- "I don't know—^maybe." side, I did not see Amy at first but "Please ask them. It would be so only the wall opposite the door, which wonderful." was covered with ballet pictures. "Yes, it would." There was a portrait of Toumanova, "You see, we're going away again. over which Amy had hung a pair I haven't told you. I thought maybe it of her old ballet shoes. When I looked wouldn't happen. We're going back away from the wall and over toward to Switzerland. the large French doors that led to "For good?" another terrace, I saw Amy lying on "A long time, I guess—until I'm a chaise longue. She was almost com- ready for college." pletely covered by a large puff. Her "No—no—you can't." head was leaning back against the "I have to go—Mother wants me cushions, and her eyes were closed. to. And it's nice. It's beautiful. It's "She's sleeping," I whispered. quiet. You see. Mother's leaving Dad- "No, she isn't—she knows you're dy again—because of—you know, here. I'll leave you alone." you saw him tonight. Oh, I hoped I tried to protest, but she was gone. you'd never see it. We have to go I stood still until Amy spoke. She away, you see. People won't gossip Amy Evans Street 15

if we go to Switzerland, and I'll like was no memory of it. I felt now that it if you come for the summers." Amy had already gone. The pain I "But it's wrong," I cried. "It's felt for her was not so strong as my wrong—you mustn't go!" own pain. What I had seen had "Not if you come. It will be all frightened me. I didn't want to see right then. You must come." any more. I wanted to stay as I was. "I'll come if they'll let me." That was why I did not go to Switz- "They will. Mother will make them. erland. Then it won't be bad. When you're Once Amy was gone, she became not there, I'll write you and send you more important to me than ever, for poems and pictures. And I'll come in my dream of her she achieved back. It's only two years. You'll wait perfection. Writing to her, expressing that long, won't you?" myself to her, became the law by "I'll wait ten years." which I lived and for which I existed. "And you'll still like me then? She was the crucible into which I You won't change? Everything will poured everything I thought and be the way we've said it will be?" hoped and dreamed. Nothing was too "Yes, yes." trivial or too secret to be confided to "Then I won't mind going. I won't her. I made her the confessor of a mind at all." religion I had invented for her. Her mother came back into the Amy's letters, though less confid- room. She came and looked anxious- ing, were full of talismans, charms, ly at Amy. whimsies, and poems that were to me "He isn't angry with me, Mother," perfect tokens of our enchantment. Amy said. They gave me a happiness so com- "Of course not, dear. Are you go- plete that I became impregnable, so ing to sleep?" much so that my last year at Words- "Yes." worth School affected me hardly at "Everyone sends you love, dar- all. Though I was aware of the usual ling." schoolboy's problems and acted upon "Thank you, Mother. I've told him them in whatever way I could, I was —he's going to come with us." remote from them. Amy sustained me "That's good, dear." in every crisis, for worship of her Mrs. Evans beckoned me away. I had become a ritual with which no could see that Amy was almost asleep. one could argue and which no hap- I murmured goodbye to her, but she pening could upset. didn't hear me. Then, suddenly, she stopped writ- When I was back in the hall with ing. Her last letter came a month be- Mrs. Evans, she said, "The doctor fore I was to go away to college. In gave her an injection. She'll sleep it, she suggested that once I had en- now. Thank you for talking to her." tered my new life, I would no longer "Are you really going away?" need to write to her. I wrote her a "I'm afraid so. It will be better for dozen letters in which I revealed my Amy. I can't let this happen again." fear of new experience, my terror of Soon I was in the street again, leaving home, my horror of com- walking just where I had walked a petition, and the imminent collapse of few hours before. I tried to remem- my self-confidence, which had no ex- ber how I had felt then, but there istence except in her. But she did not 16 Four Quarters

answer and I did not write again. I When I came to Amy's building, had to adjust to the new life without I stopped. The doorman, remember- her. It was not easy, for the only life ing me, saluted and smiled. I looked I had with my contemporaries was the past him, through the open doors. one I had shared with Amy. Amy was waiting for me in the lob- The following year, Amy's father by. Seeing her, I trembled with ex- died of cirrhosis of the liver in a citement, for I suddenly felt that this sanitarium up-state. Amy and Mrs. meeting between us might be the Evans came home at once, and Amy crucial event of my life. entered Barnard. I wrote to them She looked the same, though her from the Middle West, where I was hair was brushed smooth and she in college. They answered politely, was wearing a mink jacket that hung but I did not see Amy or hear from capelike from her shoulders. She still her again until I came back to New stooped. Knowing this, I was re- York at the end of my sophomore assured. I ran forward. year. I would have embraced her, but It was several days before I could a hand held out for shaking stopped find the courage to phone the Evans's me. apartment. When I did, Amy's voice "You look exactly the same," she answered. When she heard mine, she said brightly. "I expected you to be faintly at first, as if I had answered so different, I wouldn't recognize taken her by surprise. you." "You're here!" she said. "I thought "Why different?" I asked cautious- you were away." ly. "Summer vacation," I said. "I thought you'd be all grown up "Oh of course—silly of me." — into a man." "When can I see you?" "But I am," I answered defensive- Her voice brightened. "I'm sup- ly. "I'm almost twenty." posed to go to a party tonight, but "You don't look it." I need an escort. Could you take me?" "You look more than nineteen," That night, walking down Ninety- I said. "You're very grown up." second Street again, I felt both eager "It's the mink jacket," she an- and afraid. Eager for the Amy that swered. "Don't let it fool you. It's had been mine, afraid of the Amy Mother's." that might be now. But the June night "How is your mother?" I asked. was warm and tender. Amy Evans "Fine. Getting fatter." She took Street had not changed. The apart- my arm and moved me forward. "I ment houses that lined it in unbroken thought you'd have a pipe," she said. procession eastward from Fifth Ave- "No." nue were still as they always had "And wear a fedora." been, solid, harmonious, and safe. "No." Walking past them, passing under "You haven't even got a beard!" their canopies, I did not believe that "But I do. I shave." Amy could change. Three years had "You do? How often?" made no difference in me. What I didn't answer. I was blushing could they have done to her that they with awkwardness. She was laughing had not done to me? at me, not cruelly or mockingly, but Amy Evans Street 17 objectively, as a disinterested stran- "Yes, she's somebody or other, ger would laugh. isn't she?" "Why didn't you write?" I asked "Phoebe Dawson," abruptly, though I had been deter- "Oh, yes, Phoebe Dawson," I said. mined not to ask that question. "She's a great artist," Amy said. She shrugged and loosened her There was annoyance in her tone. hold on my arm. Phoebe Dawson had left her mark "We'll take a taxi," she said flatly. on the country, for there was hardly "It's a long way. I'll pay, of course." a post office in it that did not have a "Whose party is it?" I asked. mural painted by her. "A friend's." "Those dreadful murals," I said. "A Swiss friend?" Amy turned and glared indignant- "No, American. But we met in ly. Switzerland last year." "They're great" she said. "Who is it?" "Are they? Puvis de Chavannes "His name is Toby Miller." was better." "Toby Miller? I know him." "What a snobbish thing to say." "You do?" "It's true, isn't it?" "I mean I've heard of him." "No, it certainly is not. But I "Yes, I suppose you have." She might have known you'd think so." gestured to me impatiently and led "Why?" me out into the street. She nodded "Because you have absolutely no to the doorman and he blew his whis- social conscience. You're art struck!" tle. A cab came up to the door almost "Art struck? What's wrong with at once. that?" "What's the address?" I asked. "Everything's wrong with it. I'd "MacDougal Alley." hoped you were over it by now. Art When we were in the cab, sitting is nothing if it doesn't mean any- close together, I turned to look at her. thing." Her profile moved me. It seemed "If it doesn't mean anything, it to have become what I always knew isn't art," I said. "But if it is art,

it would, the perfect outline of sen- then it does mean something." sibility. "Does it? What?" "Who is Toby Miller?" I asked. "Lots of things." "I thought you said you knew." "Such as?" "I said I've heard of him." "If it's art, it's beautiful, and that "He wrote Progress in Reality" means something. It means every- "Oh—" I remembered who Toby thing." Miller was. He had to be forty, or "Rubbish!" even more, I realized with relief, for "You used to agree with me," I he had been a prominent Marxist said reproachfully. philosopher for at least ten years. I "Yes. Yes. I know. I was very had seen his name everywhere. Essay- childish. But I've learned a lot." ist. Columnist. Lecturer. Organizer. "So I see," I said sharply. Then I And he was married to somebody twisted my body and moved closer to famous. her. "Why didn't you write?" I asked. "Who's his wife?" I asked. Amy shook her head slightly and "His wife?" turned away from me. She gazed out "

18 Four Quarters of the window into the streets. "I paid any attention. I kept on scream- can't explain," she said slowly. ing until Mother dragged me away. "There wasn't any real reason. Not I went around telling everyone I met one particular one, anyway. There about the Jews in chains going to con- were a lot of reasons, I guess." centration camps, but nobody cared." "Tell me some of them," I said "Terrible—" I said softly. pleadingly. "I tried to write to you about it. "No. It wouldn't help. I didn't But I couldn't. I was afraid you want to hurt you. That was the real wouldn't care either. And if that was reason." so, I didn't want to know it." "But you did." "But I would have cared," I pro- She bit her lip and shook her head tested. again, "Yes, I guess I did hurt you," "Would you? And what would you she murmured. "I'm sorry." have done about it?" "What happened?" "What can you do about it?" "I don't think I can explain," she "There, you see!" She whirled answered. "I was very lonely. I felt round and glared at me in grim tri- lost. It was the Swiss loneliness. umph. Everyone feels it there after a while. "But what coi^Zc/ I do?" Nature is so grand, and only man is "Wake up!" she answered fiercely. vile—you know. My ideas began to "Think! Work! Fight!" change. I suddenly knew what I was, "But how?" I asked naively. and I didn't want to be it any more." "How?" She stared at me incredu- "What do you mean?" I demanded. lously. "Join your comrades!" "I don't know exactly. I can't re- Then I understood. I felt shocked, member when it started or how. May- not because I was anti-Communist, be it was one day when we were up but because I was not a joiner. Amy's in a high village and there was an espousal of a cause was, to me, a avalanche. I saw them bringing in betrayal. I hated all armies and the bodies. I'd never seen anything churches and fraternities and clubs like that before. It was a shock. Sud- on general principles. I feared denly I realized I didn't know any- groups, any and all of them, and the thing about life." thought of Amy conforming to a "But what's that got to do with group was to me almost obscene. me?" Confounded as I was, I could not "Nothing really. Not directly. But answer, and Amy and I sat in silence when I went home and started to write as the cab drove us down Fifth Ave- to you about it, I couldn't." nue. "Why not?" "What are you majoring in at col- "I don't know why." — lege?" Amy asked after a while. "But I don't understand "English," I said. "I never did understand it," she "You want to write?" she asked. said sadly. "But it happened again a "Or teach," I answered wryly. few weeks later. Mother and I went to "You ought to be able to do better Munich, and on the railroad platform than that." I saw men in chains climbing into a "And what are you studying?" I cattle car. I pointed at them and asked. screamed, I couldn't stop. Nobody "Pre-Med." "

Amy Evans Street 19

"What?" She dropped my hand and, turning She nodded and smiled faintly. "I'll away from me, moved into her cor- be a doctor in seven or eight years," ner of the cab. "There always has to she said proudly. "Maybe sooner if be a reason, or a person," she said there's a war." angrily. "She won't believe I ever "A doctor!" I cried. "But you think for myself." can't!" The cab had stopped. I paid the "And why not?" driver and we got out. "But it isn't you." "Let me give you the money," Amy "But it is." said when the cab had driven away. "No, no," I protested. "You would- "No," I said sharply. n't be able to stand it." "All right—if you want to prove "I'll stand it," she said quietly. something." She walked ahead of me, "But you'll have to dissect up MacDougal Alley. She stopped in corpses!" front of a house with a blue door and "Yes, I will." She shuddered and reached out to raise the handle of a looked down at her hands. "I'm afraid brass Eagle knocker. of that, I'll admit. But I'll do it. It's "What kind of party is this?" I life. You have to do things like that. asked. You can't escape." "Something for Spanish refugees. "But you have to be sensible, We'll have to give a dollar each." Amy." "I hope there won't be folk songs," "Exactly." She reached out and I said. tapped my knee. "That's what I've Amy shook her head and smiled in- been trying to tell you. You re the one voluntarily. "You're a worse snob that has to learn to be sensible." than ever," she said, just as some- "What's happened to you. Amy?" one opened the door and a wave of I asked. I was almost in tears. party noises swept over us. "Nothing's happened to me," she A woman dressed in a peasant answered. blouse and dirndl skirt smiled at us "But you've changed." from the door. "Have I? Maybe—I guess we have "Straight ahead," she said. "It's to change, don't we?" every man for himself." "We said we never would." We were in a large studio two "Yes—" She smiled again and stories high. One of the high walls took my hand. "But we can't help was covered by a gigantic photo- changing," she said softly. mural of workers in the Ukrainian "But you've changed so much." wheat fields. There were a great "And you haven't changed?" many people in the room. They were "No, I haven't changed." huddled in groups, some of them "But you will. You'll have to." round a man with a guitar, others "No," I answered intensely. "I round another who had a violin. The won't change." refreshments stood on a table in the "Yes, you will. Something will hap- center of the room. A great many pen to you." thick china cups were piled round "What, Amy? What is it happened a large zinc garbage can, which to you?" served, I found, as a punch bowl. "You're just like my mother— The drink was mulled wine. Potent, 20 Four Quarters

I thought, as I surveyed the guests. "Yes, we met there. Then we all "Is this Toby Miller's studio?" I came back on the same boat." asked Amy. "She says she's going to be a doc- "No, a friend of his." tor," I murmured. "Is Toby Miller here?" "Yes, isn't that wonderful? Quite "Yes, I think so." remarkable, considering her back- "Where?" ground." "I don't know," she answered im- "What background?" patiently. "We'll see him eventually." "Oh—you k n o w—money- -over- "Hello, Amy dear." A woman was protected. That mink jacket is touch- coming toward us. She was tall and ing. Why do you suppose she thought spare, severely dressed in a mannish she had to wear it?" suit. Her hair was black, tied in a "June nights can be chilly," I an- knot at the back of her neck. She swered. was striking but, I thought, forbid- "That's hardly the reason, I'm sure. ding. Those little affectations cling, even in "This is Phoebe Dawson," Amy the best of us. And Amy's a wonder- said. ful subject." I bowed and shook hands. Phoebe "Subject? What for?" Dawson eyed me steadily. She seemed Phoebe Dawson looked at me with to dissect me completely in the time surprise. "Why, for the work, of it took to say how-do-you-do. course." "Your young man?" Phoebe Looking away from Phoebe Daw- asked, assuming a coyness that was son, I saw Amy in a group. She was obviously not natural to her. giggling and prancing with several "An old friend," Amy answered. men in an impromptu square dance. "You're not old enough to have Everyone was waving his white china old friends." cup. The garbage can was vast and "He's my oldest, then," Amy said. its supply infinite. Amy was in a "If it were me, I wouldn't admit group. I hated this group as I hated it. I'd say he was my newest." Phoe- all others. I hated it for being a be smiled at me, not encouragingly, group and myself for being alien to but tolerantly, as a teacher might it. I felt nauseated. I wanted air. smile at a difficult pupil. Pushing my way through revelers, I "Have you seen Toby?" she asked. found a door at the far end of the "No," said Amy. studio that opened on a garden. I "Well, he's in the crowd some- went out. where. Go and look for him. I'm sure The garden was dirty and neglect- he's anxious to be rescued." ed. A solitary eucalyptus stood in "I'll be back in a minute," Amy feeble life in the center of the yard. said to me. She smiled briefly at There was a bench under it. I sat Phoebe and walked over to the group down on it and looked at the trash by the guitar player. scattered in the yard and listened to "We're very proud of Amy," Phoe- the jumbled noises of merriment com- be Dawson said to me. "She's our ing from the studio. A cat was sitting discovery." on a board fence at the end of the "You knew her in Switzerland?" yard, hoAvling for a mate who did not I asked. appear. Amy Evans Street 21

I sat for a long time, staring at the compact. "I'm sorry," she said. "I ground. Anger, disgust, revolt alter- didn't know you were out there." nated in my emotions. Then I heard "Who was the man?" I asked. a noise and looked up. Two people "Does it matter?" had come from the studio into the "I suppose you don't even know yard. Though they were hidden in his name." shadow, I knew they were embracing. She snapped the compact shut and Then one of the figures moved, and turned to me. "That's a rotten thing I saw the outline of loose sleeves to say," she said furiously. "Of hanging from drooping shoulders. course I know his name. It was Tobv Rising, I started forward. The cat Miller." howled, and I turned back. My foot "I thought so. You're in love with struck a tin can that clattered loudly him, aren't you?" against the tree. She didn't answer, but looked When I looked again, the figures away. This was an answer, I knew. were gone. "What about Phoebe Dawson?" I I went back into the studio. Hilar- asked. ity had risen until it had overflowed. "I don't know."

Anger had now usurped it. Several "Don't you care that he's mar- fist fights were in progress. Crockery ried?" and objets d'art were crashing. Men "Of course I care. But what can I were shouting, women were scream- do about it?" ing, and the hostess was phoning the "Is he in love with you?" police. — "He says so." "Please " Amy took me —by the "Do you believe him?" arm and pulled me forward "let's "Yes—I don't know—sometimes." go—quickly." "What is it, Amy?" I asked harsh- When we were out in the street, ly. "A silly flirtation, or is it really running down the alley, I felt trium- an affair?" phant. I had rescued Amy. She need- She bit her lip and looked away ed me again. But when we were safe- again. "I wish you wouldn't be so ly installed in a taxi, she threw back nasty to me," she said wearily. "I her head and laughed. "God, what a rather need a friend right now. But brawl," she said. I don't want to answer questions "Disgusting," I said. please, if you don't mind." "Oh, come off it." Amy slapped me "I'm sorry," I said ashamedly. "I on the shoulder and sank back in the have been nasty." seat. "It would do you good to get "I think you're jealous," she said. rid of some inhibitions," she said. She looked back at me and smiled. "That's not your problem, is it?" "I really think you are. Isn't that I asked, funny?" "What do you mean by that?" "No, it isn't funny. You ought to "You know what I mean." have known I'd be jealous." "I'm afraid I don't know, and I "But we were children," she said. wish you'd please explain." "Were we?" I asked. "I saw you in the yard," I said. "Yes. It's a shame we had to grow "Oh—" She looked away and up. searched in her pocketbook for a "Amy—" I reached out and took "

22 Four Quarters her hand. "I'm worried. I don't like "I'll take you into the lobby." what's happening to you. Aren't you Standing there in the lobby with worried, yourself? Don't you care the doorman watching us, I felt this what's happening?" moment was our last. But I could She did not turn my hand away, not let Amy go. but hers lay in it limply. "All I "Amy—" I said. "If this thing know," she said, "is that something with Miller is real,— then it will have real has happened to me at last. to work out—but Whatever is going to happen, I want "What?" she asked. She raised her it to happen. Do you understand head and stared into my eyes. that?" "Weren't we real. Amy?" "No, I don't understand," I said. Her mouth began to tremble and "I know it may end badly," she her shoulders drooped deeply. Then continued. "I know I may get badly the tears came, and she put her head burned. But it's real, and I want it. down on my chest.

Whatever it is, I want it. Is that so She sobbed for a long time. When terrible?" she had finally stopped and was able "But you're so young," I said to look up at me again, she laughed sadly. nervously and backed away. "I'm a "You can't be young forever. I've mess," she said, "I'd better go up. been young long enough. Too long, I You will call me sometime, won't think." you?" The cab had entered Amy Evans I nodded and turned to go, but Street. When it drew up in front of she put out a hand and pulled me jAmy's building, she handed me a back. bill. I paid the driver and we got "You'll always be the King of out. Rome," she said. "I'll say goodnight here," Amy Then she who was now a woman said. gently kissed me who was still a boy.

Paradox

• Francis Lehner

Summer sings a green song to lovers, and on my days the dry leaf falls. Fictional New England: Empire in Dissolution

• John J. McAleer

The 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction was given to Edwin O'Connor for The Edge of Sadness, the story of a New England priest struggling against spiritual aridity and an Irish thirst. The following year, when the Nobel Committee awarded its prize for literature to John Steinbeck, it cited The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), which explores a modern-day Yankee's blunt efforts to nullify his New England conscience, as the book which gave Steinbeck his margin of victory. In the past year, John Cheever's Wapshot Scandal and Louis Auchincloss's Rector of Justin, which deal, in varying degrees, with New England types, have stood high on the best-seller lists and high in the esteem of redoubtable critics. Other works, such as Peter de Vries's Reuben, Reuben and Arona McHugh's A Banner with a Strange Device, have sought with a zeal, no less strenuous for being mistaken, the same approbation. And these, too, are novels of modern New England. The moment, then, may be apposite to give account of New England's status in present-day fiction. Despite Puritanism's ingrained opposition to all writing not avowedly pious, the first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1787), is set in Boston and even was published there. Within a few years of its publication, confirming the worst fears of the watchful, novelists were ransacking New England for story material. Thus Mrs. Foster's The Coquette (1797) fictionalizes the sad history of Elizabeth Whitman of Hartford, who rejected the suits of two worthy ministers and then was seduced, with fateful results, by a grandson of Jonathan Edwards—presumably the Lord's avenging instrument. With The Coquette, there could be no doubt that New England had come into fiction to stay. In the nineteenth century, Cooper, Hawthorne, Brownson, Hohnes, Howells, James, Stowe, Freeman, and Jewett joined a legion of lesser writers in penning New England tales. As substantial as that body of writing is, however, it dwindles to insignificance beside the great mass of fiction which lately has utilized the New England scene. If this circumstance arouses wonder, we need only recall that Robert Frost was born in California, Van Wyck Brooks, in New Jersey, and John Marquand, in Delaware, to remember that New England owes much of her prominence in modern literature to adoptive sons and daughters lured there by her universities, traditions, and picturesque scenery. This fact, moreover, helps to explain the unusual proliferation of approaches to New England seen in recent fiction. We distinguish six: historical, elegiac, regenerative, transcultural, remonstrative, and ethnic. These classificatory divisions, of course, are not fixed but hypo- 23 24 Four Quarters thetical, and we plead their acceptance here only on the grounds of expediency. Cooper's Lionel Lincoln (1825), one of America's first historical novels, is set in Boston in the period of the Revolution. Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), still, surely, America's best historical novel, is set in seventeenth century Boston. Curiously, most twentieth century historical New England novels have gone outside the two periods that Cooper and Hawthorne picked to work in. Henry Stuart's Weeping Cross (1908), Esther Forbes's Mirror for Witches (1928), Ernest Gebler's The Plymouth Adventure (1950), and Anya Seton's The Winthrop Woman (1958) are set in seventeenth century New England; Kenneth Roberts's Oliver Wiswell (1940) is set in the period of the Revolution. Only Ben Ames Williams turns to New England for tales of the War of 1812 {Threads of Scarlet; 1939) and the Civil War {Strange Woman; 1941). Esther Forbes writes of the rise and fall of mer- cantile Salem in The Running of the Tide (1948), and Anya Seton puts forth a three-centuries saga in The Eagle and Hearth (1948). But the fomentive first six decades of the eighteenth century have been left virtually untouched, as well as the triumphant middle decades of the romantic era. Historical novels of New England, like those set in other locales, tend to deal in high adventure, absolute courage, and the smock heroics of lusty womenfolk. In some instances they have been written, as Anya Seton relates, "to vivify the founding of New England," but only rarely have they attained to distinction as literature. Many modern novels of New England are elegiac. With reverence for what has been, with fevered reluctance, they carry tidings of the waning hours of the Yankee world. This labor sometimes is managed with the controlled pace of Sarah Orne Jewett, with the somber perceptiveness of George Santa- yana {The Last Puritan; 1936), and sometimes with the droll deliberateness of John Marquand, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning The Late George Apley (1937) and H. M. Pulham Esquire (1941) are important illustrations of the type. In Silas Crockett (1935) Mary Ellen Chase follows a family from swaddling days to the sobering present. The first Silas Crockett was a dashing clipper-ship captain. Four generations later his namesake is a pickler in a herring factory, the Crockett homestead is in the hands of strangers, and the family portraits have been sold to a New York antique dealer. Colonel Pemmerton, in Charles Bracelin

Flood's Love Is a Bridge (1953) , is the last of the Pemmertons. His hopes are pinned forlornly on a grandson (born of a broken marriage between his daughter and a New Yorker) who debates affirmatively at Harvard on the topic "Should Prostitution Be Legalized?" Taylor Caldwell's Caroline Ames {A Prologue to Love; 1961), after a grasping prime during which she kills her husband's love and freezes her old nanny to death, sinks into a tragic dotage estranged from her children and mocked by her servants. Every house- hold, whether it is that of Nancy Hale's Eliots, in "The Rich People," or Elizabeth Coatsworth's Treadwells in The White Room, harbors inflexible patriarchs, inept businessmen prone to defenestration, neurotic wives, pixi- lated mothers-in-laws, or rebellious offspring. On the periphery are eccentric neighbors or handymen, the woebegone survivors of once illustrious mer- chants and mariners—a type that has found in Joseph C. Lincoln a resolute Fictional New England: Empire in Dissolution 25 hagiographer. Such novels generously concede nostalgic regard for the dignity and idealism of the old way of life but give grim assurances that the world will never see its like again. The regenerative New England novel, like the elegiac, argues that the specialized civilization which gave New England its distinction in the past has been overwhelmed by forces of change rampant in the modern world. Yet it differs from the elegiac in several significant particulars. It features a flinty New England protagonist who is unsettled by the breakup of his cultural pattern, by the modern world's disdain for puritan virtues, by the loss of family fortune, by the proud seclusion into which his elders have withdrawn; he has an active New England conscience which enables him to withstand the onslaughts of an immoral society. The way in which trial accentuates in his hardpressed elders the old New England traits of pride, tenacity, and restraint is not for him, as it is for others, a source of amusement. Making a realistic adaptation to existing circumstances, he sets about rebuilding his family's position, within a context of its traditions, assisted usually by a spouse of different ethnic background—his one concession to the likelihood that he has tired blood. Gerald Brace's novels The Garretson Chronicle (1949) and BeWs Landing (1955) are regenerative. Both frankly show the plight of what Brace calls "the Brahmin remnants." Financial failure, nervous disability, and suicide have blasted the tight unity of their world as it once existed. Gone is the summer place at "Northeast Harbor" where "Forests and mountains and cliffs and islands seemed to have been arranged by a master designer for the special use of a few good Boston families and their friends"; gone are the family silver, crystal, oils, and even the scrimshaw and presentation copies of Evangeline and Daisy Miller. But the capacity for plain living and high thinking persists; the Ralph Garretsons have not been summoned to preside at the bedside of the expiring heritage but to bear witness that what was essential in that heritage remains inviolate and, even in a world "predominant- ly barbarian," can by them be brought to fulfillment. In Sara Ware Bassett's The Girl in the Blue Pinafore (1957), Lydia Freeman, last of her family, sits in the old homestead surrounded by her father's books and memories of her brother who went to Harvard and died. It is acknowledged that "her New Englandism had, perhaps, made her too practical and Martha-like," but it is said further that she is constructed of "stern old New England fiber," just like grandma used to be made of. Eventually she marries a highly cultured East German refugee who has enrolled at Harvard for Ph.D. work and is glad he burrowed under the Bran- denburg Gate because he can imagine no "haven more representative of what is best in America than Lydia Freeman's modest New England home." Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent is regenerative also. His hero, Ethan Allan Hawley, "an heir to the upright New England tradition," does violence to his New England conscience to recoup his fortunes. Yet pride in his heritage permits no lasting estrangement. Remorse impels him toward self-destruction, but he is saved finally by a conviction that the values of ten generations of Yankees are humanity's one hope. Theodore Morrison's Rowley trilogy, which ponders the dilemmas of moral man in an immoral 26 Four Quarters society, may likewise be accounted regenerative, as also, in a rare departure from his usual acquiescence, Marquand's Wickford Point (1939). Unlike the regenerative novel, which tolerates selective cross-breeding to reinvigorate Yankee stock, the transcultural novel implies that crucial deficiencies have sapped Yankee vigor and that these deficiencies cannot be overcome without a radical modification of Yankee character, such as pur- poseful miscegenation (i.e., marriage between a Yankee and non-Yankee) may produce, Emily Blair, heroine of Rachel Field's And Now Tomorrow (1942), is the daughter of a Yankee mill owner and a Polish bobbin girl. Foiling a family plot to marry her to a Yankee, she finds happiness, far from New England, with Dr. Vancovitch, son of a labor radical. John Marston, hero of Mary Ellen Chase's Windswept (1941), renounces a tenacious grandmother to champion Sacco and Vanzetti and vote for Al Smith. Boston-bred Francis Chabrier (May Sarton's Shadow of a Man; 1950), child of a Parisian and a Bostonian, contrives, on a sojourn in Paris, to learn how to find love in Boston. In Win Brook's The Shining Tides (1952) Evelyn Force, daughter of a Harvard professor emeritus, spurns a proper Bostonian to plight her troth with a burly fisherman. Charlotte Vale of Olive Higgins Prouty's Now Voyager (1941) emancipates herself from Boston's stultifying atmosphere by going on a cruise, falling in love with a married New Yorker, and vicariously consummating the affair by adopting one of his children. Sonia Marburg, heroine of Jean Stafford's Boston Adventure (1944), hides her German-Russian parentage, while in a brilliant series of scenes, including a mock-heroic Boston tea party, she ponders "the proud and futile decadence of Boston society." Although she has a setback when the Brahmin whose bloodlines she intends to improve marries a pregnant cousin (ironically a Mather), things quickly right themselves when the new bride has a fatal fall on the bridal path. If some special award were given for novels of rapprochement, then Frances Parkington Keyes surely should have one for Joy Streeet (1950). Her heroine, Emily Forbes of Louisburg Square, sanctum sanctorum of Brahminism, in an Himalayan effort to level Boston single-handedly, marries a proper Bostonian, cultivates a passion for his Jewish law partner, involves herself in the love life of his Italian law partner, and finally, as a widow, marries his Irish law partner. "There are lots of different Bostons," says Mrs. Keyes; but, give her credit, she does her level best to integrate them all. Her solicitude extends even to Boston's gray squirrels, among whom she introduces a pair of Spanish brown squirrels, instructing nature to take its course. Standard characters in transcultural novels are homiletic foreign servants, wispy old Catholic priests, granddaughters enamored of one or more New Yorkers, and zenophobic matriarchs. Says John Marston's grandmother: "I'd send all these ignorant French and Irish back where they came from. We don't have to have them here, do we? Buying our decent old homes and ruining our schools? Setting up their horrid churches on our old streets? Why doesn't the President of this country and the Congress say they can't come 9" "I think a lot of Avhat I write is a kind of peculiar struggle against Fictional New England; Empire in Dissolution 27

New England morality," says Charles Mergendahl. The task Mergendahl has set for himself may be, as he says, peculiar, but it is not unique. During the past decade a dozen books ripping the shroud from New England morality have regaled a vast readership. These we distinguish as remonstra- live—books rebuking New Englanders not for their sins but for their failure to advertise them. Arona McHugh's Back Bay (A Banner with a Strange Device; 1964), Mergendahl's East Norton {The Bramble Bush; 1958), Coz- zens's Brocton (By Love Possessed; 1957), Charles Thompson Philip's Massachusetts {Half Way Down the Stairs; 1957), Nobakov's Ramsdale, where Lolita entered into the wonderful world of childhood (Lolita; 1955), and Mrs. Metalious's notorious Peyton Place {Peyton Place; 1956) vie with one another in their efforts to assure us that if you scratch a New Englander, you find a sybarite. Of New Leeds {A Charmed Life; 1954), Mary McCarthy says: "In wife-beating, child neglect, divorce, automobile accidents, falls, suicide, the town was on a sort of statistical rampage." Add to this Ijist adultery, fornication, abortion, and incest, and you have a deca- logue to which the whole of present-day New England subscribes if the remonstrative view may be relied on. Some foes of the New England conscience take courage in statistics which show that Boston actually prosecutes more people annually for adultery than New York City does. This probably has been true since the days of Hester Prynne. The likelihood is that Bostonians do not commit more adultery than New Yorkers do—they just take a greater interest in it. It would be idle to deny that modern New England maintains with diminished enthusiasm its regard for Puritanism's narrow virtues. And it is true that the perpetuation of the image of a straghtlaced New England flouts reality and makes more complex the writer's task of depicting present-day New England. But to suggest that New England, torn loose from its moral moorings by twentieth-century upheavals, has been plunged into carnal chaos merely trades one inexactness for another. The ethnic New England novel features a single racial group of non- Anglo-Saxon origin. Yankee characters appear not at all, or in roles brief and perfunctory. Only four national groups are represented. Jack Kerouac's Doctor Sax (1959) depicts a French-Canadian community in Lowell, Massa- chusetts. In The Priest (1956) Joseph Caruso writes of Italians in Boston's North End. Neither novel suggests that the impact of New England traditions has altered the cultural patterns of the communities discussed. The same holds true for the Jewish community portrayed in Charles Angoff's Polonsky tetralogy {Journey to the Dawn; 1951; In the Morning Light; 1952; The Sun at Noon; 1955; Between Day and Dark; 1959). The Polonskys, refugees from Russia, as proprietors of "The Plymouth Rock Clothing Company," make a speedy adaptation to Boston. David, the son, goes to Harvard and writes for the Boston Transcript, but finds both Harvard and the Transcript subscribers overrated. After 2399 pages of declining expectation, it occurs to him suddenly that all New England is in an advanced state of dry rot, and he rushes away to New York. Among non-Anglo-Saxon New Englanders, the Irish alone have called forth a shelf of novels. In a few such novels the Irish New Englander seems unaware of the New England heritage. The Martins of Galloway, in Kerouac'B 28 Four Quarters

The Town and the City (1950), might live in Everytown, U.S.A. In A Cry of Children (1952) John Home Burns's Irish lovers, with exasperating unawareness, stage assignations in the same cemetery where, so Hawthorne says, Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne lie buried. Even Edwin O'Con- nor's Edge of Sadness concerns a self-sustained Irish world. Although cul- turally it is a step forward, since it shows the New England Irish secure enough to indulge in self-criticism, Edge of Sadness is not distinctively a New England novel. O'Connor's Last Hurrah (1950) attains to a position of merit reached by no other New England ethnic novel. The Irish were the first aliens to enter New England in force. They arrived when Yankee culture was at its zenith. Meeting with discrimination because of their povery, ignorance, and habits of worship, they transferred their habitual dislike of the English to the Yankee aristocracy. Curiously this situation worked to their advantage, for there is much truth in James T. Farrell's assertion that the Irish who settled in Chicago and other sections of America dissipated much of their vitality because they found there no one cause which rallied their spirits as detestation of the British had done at home. As for the Boston Irish, their sense of tradition, given impetus by a proud history and an ancient faith, made them want to prove themselves the equal of those who looked down on them. At first, the only road of challenge open to them was politics—they knew well enough that control of circumstances reposed here—and they headed down it with a hardy will. It is this struggle for political supremacy which O'Connor's Last Hurrah com- memorates. An account of an Irish political boss, it conveys to the reader much of the satisfaction which the Boston Irish felt in James Michael Curley's repeated victories over the Yankee sachems. It should not be forgotten that the Irish liked Curley best, not when he was calling the Yankees "milk bottle thieves," or threatened to rupture a city water main to flood their bank vaults if they balked at funding depression era emergencies, but when, as governor, he addressed a Harvard Commencement for seventy minutes in faultless Latin and debated to a standstill three Harvard Law School professors at a sym- posium on Roman law. Within the Irish community itself, another way to match prestige with the Yankee overlords offered itself—the attainment of ecclesiastical eminence. Robinson's The Cardinal, which traces the career of a Boston Irishman, Stephen Fermoyle, from his humble start to his elevation to the College of Cardinals, illustrates—with a canniness of perception that bears little relation to its limitations as literature—this phase of the struggle. Robinson implies that while Stephen is not pitted against his Yankee environment in his rise in the Church (the Yankee community had no machinery for producing cardinals) , in Stephen's attainment of princely rank, the community he rep- resents establishes a claim to cultural equivalency with the Brahmin world. The Cardinal, of course, merely images a contest much more broadly based. The Boston Irish can, in fact, boast of three cardinals. Goaded to surpass themselves by the accident of being thrust into comparison with the most sophisticated society in America, they could boast also of Charles Graham Halpine, Louis Sullivan, John Boyle O'Reilly, Maurice Prendergast, Imogene Guiney, Geraldine Farrar, Doctors William Lahey and Sarah Jordan, John Fictional New England: Empire in Dissolution 29

Home Burns, Eugene Conley, Mary McGrory, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. But if any one theme best symbolizes the struggle of the Boston Irish to shed status as second-class citizens, then it is the one Robinson chose. It is, after all, an absurdity to pit the newcomer against the special sophistication of a society that reminisces of a grandfather who sat in Lafayette's lap, of Henry James's table manners, of what Amy Lowell said to the photographer who set up his tripod on Longfellow's grave, of President Eliot's invoking Phil- ador's defense to checkmate Admiral Dewey, that can and does stage family reunions at King's Chapel Burying Ground and in the Copley suite of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The Cardinal shows a Boston Irishman succeed- ing not by besting Yankees at their own game, or by being assimilated into the cultural patterns of the Brahmin world, but by fulfilling his own heritage. It is offered as a declaration of cultural maturity, asserting that the Boston Irish community no longer needs a sense of rivalry with Brahminism to give it motive force. What will be the future of New England in fiction? The historical novel may well persist so long as interest in history itself persists. In time it should absorb the elegiac novel, since the world the elegists memorialize already is past. Regeneration seems a forlorn hope, since the society meant to resurge already is dispersed and can maintain an illusion of continuance only through relentless recruitment of bewildered, inconstant, and often absurdly miscast outsiders brought in through the academic community. The remonstrative novel has a limited goal which it has exceeded already. The concept of Brahminism, an important stimulus to the Boston Irish, is in recession now; its power to energize competition nearly is exhausted. Later settlers have been unaffected by it, and its hold on the Irish is diminishing. Indeed, the Irish have stopped looking on the Yankees as rivals and cherish the survivors as prize specimens to be protected, like Daniel Chester French's statue of the Minuteman (for which, incidentally, Patrick Harrington, an Irish farm- laborer stood as model) and the glass flowers in the Peabody museum, for posterity's edification. The ethnic novel, then, should decline also, leaving the field to the transcultural, that genre which shows New Englanders putting aside factionalism to work together as Americans. Whether in so complaisant an environment, the tension needed to produce great literature will exist, admits of some doubt.

Epiphany

• John Fandel

Simplicity versus vehemence and rage Is so outcried by vocables that wage Winning their war sapping Wisdom, Sage To Dolt, it must speak silently, and age. —

Three Winter Scenes

• Brother Fidelian, F.S.C. The Land

Today the law is snow. Among the hills and slews, It falls impartially On thicket and errant road, Indifferently. Against the claim of wall or fence. The pretexts and indecisions of the hedge, It rules that all is simple, That everything is level. But it cannot hide the naked trees Weighted thus with blackbirds As with evil fruit. The Room

No circumventing No resisting now Behind shutter or slatted blind, This gray constraint This dense and soundless afternoon. But with a finch to kindle locust trees A cardinal to flare the sycamores With shattering light Against insolent ice One might by chance By windows then Escape, The Heart

Our hope, Lord, will be A young eagle of Spain Frozen to the dust of Iceland, The fiercest hawk Falling in that northern sky, A claw and feather Of our summer's heat Blown across dark tundras To one lost point Then suddenly at the utmost whit Bursting in a billion suns. 30 Rose Garrity

• David Kelly

So you're gone, Denny, and a lot cheerful church to be buried from, of old St. Vincent's parish goes with Denny Costello, and I'm rather proud you. Me, the thing I'll be grateful for of it because things are different till the day I die is these foam rub- now. I mean in the old days when ber cushions you paid to have put St. Vincent's needed something, the on these kneeling benches. Lord, I pastor could take a walk up the hill should have a lot of Purgatory time to Denny Costello's Castle and drop knocked off for the time I spent the hint and come down with a check. grinding my knees into those boards But men like you aren't around before Denny Costello donated the here anymore, and it's to people like padding. George and myself the priests look Ah, but, Denny, I'm sorry you now with our dollar bills in the du- couldn't have come around to see the plex envelopes. Like Father Deacon church now that it's been all cleaned always used to say, there's nothing up inside. Took a whole year to do like a silent collection to please God. it and it was just the whole year you Nice quiet, polite dollar bills falling lay sick, and as far as I'm concerned, into the basket. None of those noisy you deserved better than a lingering dimes and quarters. So our dollar death like that. But it's too bad you bills gave you a nice church to be couldn't have gotten round to see buried from, Denny, and it was the old St. Vincent's with its new face least we could do for you. on. All the bright colors that came And it's a lovely day for your ride around from under the grime. Cheer- up to Holy Sepulchre. As my Uncle ful. Even the Stations of the Cross Joe used to say, you die in St. Vin- look more cheerful; all bright and cent's parish, it's like a two-cushion colorful they make you feel that if pool shot. They shoot you over to poor Jesus had to die, at least he had Charley Matthews' place for the wake, a nice day for it. One thing I'm bank you over to St. Vincent's for thankful for, when they fixed up the Requiem Mass, and then roll you Jesus on the cross up there, they took neat as you please into the side pocket off some of the blood. All that red up at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. Char- paint blood used to frighten my Mary ley Matthews—God, he's buried I Catherine, and my boy Peter was wonder how many of the old parish- sure that Sister Anne Joseph, the one ioners? Always sends you out with the boys called Battleship, was going a smile on your face. He's well known to crucify him because she was al- for that. Cotton in the cheeks or ways threatening to crown somebody, something. Charley does a nice job. and Peter thought she meant with I suppose he'll do me when I go. thorns and hang him up like poor One thing, though, I'm going to Jesus. Well, anyway, you had a nice tell them before I go. A nice respect- 31 32 Four Quarters

able casket, yes, I'll appreciate that. I couldn't sleep after the thunder- But if it's all the same, I don't want storm, so I got up at the first gray to be put inside one of those con- light and went down and made my- crete boxes they put caskets in now. self some tea. Thunderstorms frighten I'd feel like I was inside a nest of me. All that booming and crashing boxes, like those Chinese boxes my and the lightning leaping about like Aunt Mary used to have, each little the fires of hell bent for sinners. And box inside the other. I mightn't hear afterwards the thunder trundling off the trumpet on Judgment Day, and into the distance like gypsy wagons after a long life doing my Easter full of kidnapped children. That's Duty and making the First Fridays, what I used to think when I was a I want to be up there to cash in on little kid. Some old lady told me. my Extreme Unction. Gypsies came in thunderstorms and Judgment Day, I can just see it took children away in painted wag- with all the pink little angels run- ons. God, the things you believe as a ning through Holy Sepulchre rousing kid never leave your dreams. us dead from our graves, running and Yes, I sat there this morning think- shouting through the gravestones like ong about you, Denny, and the way the children on Christmas morning it was when my father worked for shouting down the house to wake their you up at the Castle and we lived poor dead-tired parents. All the dead on Hagar Street. It's not often I sit rising, and at the tippy-toe of the down and have a good think to my- sky the Cross of Jesus turned into self anymore, a good remembering. a great, grand Christmas tree with But I suppose I'll be doing more of all the saints standing on its branches it in the years to come. George and gleaming like candles and on top the me—we'll be alone in the old house, Angel Gabriel himself tooting for all with the grandchildren coming on creation to come and be judged sheep Sundays. Remembering. Like when or goat. Well, they can leave the con- Mary Catherine's kids come over crete box off my coffin because I now, I don't look at little Jean think- don't want to miss the show. The ing how she'll look in fifteen years, Beatific Vision I think they call it, but I remember Mary Catherine as a which always makes me think of my child of four. My kids are all raised Uncle John three sheets to the wind now, Denny; Mary Catherine's not telling people he was having "beerati- long from thirty, with her three kids. fic visions." Peter's away in the Marine Corps Anyways, it's a nice day for your over in Japan, and the only one ride up to Holy Sepulchre, Denny. home now is Virginia, although God That thunderstorm early blew away knows she's never home. I don't know all mucky air, and this morning when whether she's in love with Charley I looked out the kitchen window, my Doyle or that funny little red car of roses were blooming in the sunrise. his, to tell the truth. The rambler came from your gar- What a funny name for a car. M.G. den. I'll bet you've forgotten that, Lord, people are so much in a hurry Denny. It did. You gave it to my fa- these days they can't even give a car ther because you knew he was crazy a proper name. Cars used to have for roses, and he gave a cutting to dignified names like Hupmobile and George and me for our yard. LaSalle and Pierce-Arrow, and even —

Rose Garrity 33

that little blue Essex, the first car worked for you up at the Castle, tend- George bought, had character, I ing your dogs and horses and the thought, when it was all simonized. garden and later driving the car when Yes, Sunday afternoons taking a ride the horses went to their reward after in the country up along the Nesha- Mr. Henry Ford put them out of miny Creek or maybe over to Pit- business. cairn Field to see the planes fly; al- In the good weather on Saturday though I never really cared for that nights us kids would sit on the front because the kids all wanted to take a porch steps under the wisteria vine ride in a plane and George, too, I and wait for Pop to come whistling think, and they would have, but they along under the whispering trees, a knew I'd never go for it. It was nice growler of beer in one hand and a then riding on Sunday afternoons, quart of ice cream in the other but no more, with all the cars out payday at the Castle—and a pocket- driving as if the Devil was after them. ful of shiny pennies, one for each It's worth your life out there with all of us. And up in the tulip tree, hid- those kids driving like maniacs as den in the big white blossoms, my soon as the state gives them a license brother Joe, cowboy hat on his head, to kill. Where do they get the money red handkerchief over his mouth, to have cars at seventeen, I wonder. and toy pistol in his hand, ready to A bicycle was a luxury in my time. leap down in Pop's path and relieve People today drive in a rage. Even him of the pennies and ice cream. the cars look angry and mean when Joe. Pretty as a pagan god he was, they come zooming at you around a and over thirty years now lying in curve. And angry names, too. What's the soil of France, killed in France that one? Jaguar. English, of course. not a week before the Armistice. And Ah, but Denny, when you came we all appreciated with all our hearts driving down from the Castle in that your offer to have his body brought big black Pierce-Arrow of yours, with back, Denny, but like my father said, my father at the wheel and maybe it's best to let him lie where God a monsignor with you in the back took him. I'm glad I didn't have any seat, I was a proud kid because no sons old enough for the Second other kid's dad knew how to drive World War, but of course there's a big car like that and had the privi- Peter now over in Korea and you lege of opening the door for, yes, never know what those yellow devils even the Bishop, once or twice. There are up to, especially since they kicked are always presents from the Castle, I out the missionaries and got taken remember that. Pop was always over by the Reds. But I'm sure not bringing us home toys or maybe going to think about that now. God clothes that didn't fit one of the Cos- sees and God wills. Now sitting here tello kids. And when the order came in this old church, I'll just remem- up from Reading Terminal, there ber waiting for my father on those were always some chops or maybe lovely evenings, with the sky green a leg of spring lamb for Pop to take as apples, and across the way strange home with him. Your orders, Denny, old Mr. Withers, all alone since his not Pop helping himself out, as I wife died, sitting on his side porch heard one old biddy remark. Jealous playing his violin with a chorus of some people were because Pop birds singing, and above us the laven- 34 Four Quarters

der wisteria and the blossoms of the you'd think it was the Battle of tulip tree. At night from my bed I'd Gettysburg. Champagne punch by see the white blossoms shining in the the gallon in the big cut glass bowls darkness and think they were the with strawberries floating on the top faces of angels watching over me as and couples dancing on the lawn un- I slept. der the Japanese lanterns. Like Pop Poor old Mr. Withers. When the often said, it all started out with leaves fell and the cold came, he Strauss waltzes but when the cham- went into his house and he was found pagne started to take hold, the Irish hanged in the attic. They never found came out and soon the band was his violin. Nobody ever knew what playing jigs and reels. Then Polish happened to the violin. For days, or German or whatever you were, the poor old man hung up there in you'd be jigging to the Rakes of Mal- the attic until somebody called the low, with Pop standing in the shad- police and they came and broke in. ows looking at his big pocket watch Charley Hart, the cop who lived in waiting for ten o'clock. And down our block and knew about Mr. With- on the streets around the Castle, the ers's violin, was there when they people waiting for Pop to start the found him and he looked for the vio- show, people sitting up on their roofs, lin. People always said afterward and boys by the dozens up in trees. that sometimes they could hear Mr. Lord, it was a good night for a bur- Withers playing, or somebody play- glar in Germantown because all the ing in the house, but the nuns told cops themselves were all waiting for us never to believe in ghosts. Besides, Pop to fire the first shot. And then Mr. Withers was a very proper man, whoosh! Up went the first one like a very staunch Presbyterian, and I'm a fiery snake and then aaaah! went sure he'd never haunt his old house the crowd at the shower of golden and cause people to get upset. Mr. stars and the big bang that came a Withers was strange and had his stiff second later. I never appreciated the Protestant way, but haunting he'd big bang and neither did my little never go. sister, Elizabeth, who one Fourth of And the fireworks! That was the July night got so upset she wet all big thing in the summer, the fire- over my lap. But it was all lovely works display up on the back lawn and frightening, whoosh! whoosh! of the Castle with the rockets going Up went the rockets. Pop scurrying up and exploding over Tucker's along the line of rockets like an in- Meadow beyond, where the little sane firebug, and the dark sky filled stream was and the dam where the with red and green and gold and sil- sunfish were. Pop was in charge of ver stars and such a racket you'd setting them off, and didn't that make think they'd blown out the floor of us important. Big doings at the Castle the sky and jewels were raining from on Fourth of July night. Pop, he'd the treasure houses of Heaven. Ah, be name-dropping for a month after- we all loved Fourth of July night, ex- ward. What he said to Judge so-and- cept Prince, our old Collie, who went so and what Councilman so-and-so under the bed at the sound of the said to him. Pop loved the fireworks. first firecracker in the morning and I think he felt like Napoleon himself didn't come out till Pop got home setting off all that gunpowder. Lord from the Castle. Pop always had a Rose Garrity 35

headache next morning, which he Sister Jane Marie gave me the little said was from all the explosions, but globe filled with water with a statue we all knew it was from the cham- of the Virgin Mary in it and when pagne he had nipped. you turned it over little white flakes Fireworks for excitement, yes, and swirled up and made a snowstorm weren't they beautiful and thrilling; for Mary, I took it to show the pea- but for my money the most wonder- cock, Denny. I stole across your lawn ful thing you had up in your Castle, and up to the window and held it up Denny, was the glass peacock that in both my hands and turned it over sat in the bay window on the Harley and made the snow fall. Oh, Rose of Street side, its great tail all lit up the World I was with my prize and with the bulb behind, all the little the little white flakes floating around pieces of colored glass feathers as the Virgin like the holy souls of pretty as a church window. I guess dead children, like my little Tommy. I was about twelve when I first no- God, Denny, is there anything in this ticed the peacock there, coming along life to break your heart like seeing the street one night just after dark, your child die, with the doctor stand- seeing it and coming through the gate ing by and not a trick in his bag to and onto the lawn. Yes, the air was save him? No penicillin in those days full of honeysuckle smell. I stood and the penumonia took him, just there staring at the beautiful thing past two, and lying in that little white until all the reds and greens and blues coffin like a doll in a box, and the and yellows glazed over into one Angel's Mass sung for him by the lovely shine, and it was like I was priest that baptized him, Father Pot- breathing all the colors into me, like ter—he died himself just last year I was drinking them in and they were I remember reading in the paper. all down there tingling in my belly That strange dream I had after Tom- house, and then somebody threw up my died. It was Christmas morning a window and off I went as fast as and I was a little kid again, opening my long skinny legs would carry me presents, and Pop—yes. Pop was in like a skyrocket with all the colored the dream—handed me this big white stars bursting aside me, leaping over box and when I opened it, there was pools of lamplight, feeling like I was Tommy with his arms raised up to running to something wonderful but me and his face shining like the In- I didn't know what, falling up the fant Jesus himself. And I woke up porch steps and slamming the screen sobbing and trembling all over, and door behind me and Pop throwing I reached out for George and that's down his newspaper and thundering: how we got Peter started. "In the name of God, Rosie, how can And, you've come up the middle anybody skinny as you are make aisle of St. Vincent's loaded down more racket than an elephant?" But with sorrow yourself, Denny, like how could I explain I had fallen in when Margaret died of the flu back love with a peacock? It would have in 1918, that terrible Fall when the only meant castor oil. Yes, Denny, he people dropped like the leaves from became my private peacock then; I the trees and there wasn't a block in never told anybody about him and Germantown, it seemed, without one always went alone to see him, like or two crepes on the doors. Three the time I won the spelling bee and hundred dead in six weeks; and one 36 Four Quarters day there were seventy-five funerals over now, and you've seen your Mar- and they brought out the seminarians garet again and poor Paul, murdered from St. Charles to help dig the by God-knows-who the week before graves up at Holy Sepulchre, the we buried Pop. caskets stacked so high that they Anna's the only one left from what finally had to get steam shovels to dig we used to call your first family. temporary graves so they could get Sister Marie Francis now and the them underground and pile the soil image of her mother with that peach- on top of the plague. Charley Hy- es and cream skin. Yes, John he died lan—he worked in your mill—dug in Cleveland last year, didn't he? graves for his own children and was And Paul, poor Paul, a wild one he never the same, walking the streets was, Denny, I don't have to tell you of Germantown like a dead man him- that, for all he was gentle Anna's self until the day he died. Yes, and twin; but he didn't deserve a death wasn't your Margaret a regular Flor- like that, knifed in the back over in ence Nightingale, volunteering to Tallytown and his murderer never work in the Germantown Hospital found. Fll bet things would be dif- with half of the nurses down or dead ferent at the mill today if your boys, with the flu, working herself night your first boys, had been able to and day and then being one of the carry on for you. John he was never last to die of it. God's ways are the same after he came home from strange, Denny, and it was a cruel France, and I heard he moved from thing to lose her, but maybe like my place to place until he married and mother said, her reward was so great settled down in Cleveland. The war that God wouldn't wait to call her and the flu tore your first family home to give it to her, for she was apart, but Anna, she stayed with you a lovely woman and not a bit of the and cared for you during that time high mucky muck about her, not until you married Helen Shaw, and ashamed that her mother took in then Anna went off to the convent, washing down in Spring Alley to where she always wanted to go since help raise her and her sisters, after she was a little girl. We had such a their father went out after a loaf of nice talk at your wake, Denny, Anna bread one day and never returned. and I. Lord, Margaret smiles at you She was always one of us, Denny, from Anna's face, and I mean no always stopping to pass the time of disrespect when I say I enjoyed every day when she passed through our minute of your wake, because Anna neighborhood, with a laugh that took me off into a corner and we would sweeten vinegar, and her love- talked about our time as kids in Ger- ly auburn hair piled high on her mantown. Death does that to the peo- head, lovelier than any queen's ple left behind. Someone dies and crown. I can see you yet at her it's like dropping a stone into a pool funeral Mass, straight as a king of water and the ripples spread about, kneeling there, your face like stone stirring your mind to remembering. because you had to be strong in I was glad Anna was there. Your sec- front of Anna and Paul, poor sorrow- ond family are strangers to me, which ful things, and your thoughts far is only natural, of course, but I felt away in France, where your son John better kneeling at your casket with lay wounded. Ah, well, Denny, it's Anna beside me, as if she was saying Rose Garrity 37 to you, "It's Rose Garrity, Father; forget you either, waiting until your you remember Rose, Mr. Flanigan's time of sorrow had passed and she girl." We remembered those summer went out of your house to be the afternoons playing under the shady bride of Christ. trees on the Castle grounds, playing Denny, do you know what people hide and seek or sitting by the fish said about us kids from the neighbor- pond drinking lemonade and talking hood coming up to the Castle to play about the things we were going to do with Anna and Paul? They said we when we got big, me lying flat on my had to be invited because your kids stomach and looking down into the really weren't good enough to play pond, with the snail's eggs like pieces with the Quaker and the Protestant of pink taffy on the rocks and the kids, the kids with blue in their goldfish swimming slowly around blood. That's what they said. Well, swishing their feathery tails and the you built your Castle, every stone of catbirds coming down to get the rai- it with money earned by you; you sins we put in the dish there by the didn't have it handed down to you, pond; ah, the catbirds with their and if people felt that way about little black caps and throwing up their you and your kids, let the Devil take tails to show their little pink behinds, ihem—God forgive me for saying wicked as French chorus girls, as such a thing here in church, with they flew away, raisins in their beaks. the incense from your Requiem Mass Yes, there was lemonade on the hot still in my nose and this gardenia afternoons and peppermint sticks that that fell from one of your lovely you sucked on after the cold lemon- funeral flowers here in my hands. ade and. Lord, how cold your mouth Fll press this flower in my Missal in felt. And Saturday afternoons in the memory of you. I wish George and winter of the year with me and may- I could have sent a spray for you, be Catherine Southby and Mary but money's a little tight right now. Grant playing with Anna in her play- We did manage a Mass Card, though, room way up on the third floor, show- and Fll say a prayer for you every- ing the magic lantern slides of Jack time I clip roses from the rambler in and the Beanstalk and all those Moth- the yard. er Goose stories and the wonderful Well, Denny, I guess you're just doll house, all the way from Ger- about there by now, about to go down many it came, painted white with red into your grave. When it comes my and green trim—I can see every tiny time to go, Fd like it to be this time room of it yet—and yes, I reminded of the year when the world is green Anna of that December afternoon and blooming, when the earth is stir- with the rain splashing and splatter- ring with new life, not cold and lone- ing down the gray stones of the ly like in winter. Fd like to go down Castle and the shrubs in the yard all into the cool, dark ground and have covered like the church statues of the roots of flowers reach out like Holy Week, that afternoon when she gentle fingers touching me, like they told me she was going to be a nun were saying, won't you sleep, Rosie, when she grew up and how she would sleep, and soon we'll all go together say a prayer for me and all of us to the blooming fields of Heaven. every day of her life, and Fll bet Like we used to all go together on she didn't forget that and she didn't Christmas Eve up to the Castle when 38 Four Quarters you held open house for the people raised on high, "God bless you all, of the neighborhood. It was funny my dear and loyal friends. Your fel- the way the people would all meet at lowship shines from our Christmas our house first and then troop up in tree, and the holy spirit of the Christ a body. I guess they were too shy child is in this house." Then we'd to go up family by family, but up sing carols, Margaret pumping away we'd go, Pop scolding us kids every at the organ, and then back down step of the way, promising us coal the hill we'd go, singing Adeste in our stockings if we misbehaved Fideles, us kids running ahead laugh- and checking our shoes before we ing and shouting and watching for went in, seeing there was no dirt on St. Nick to come riding around the them. I can still see Pop like a general moon, everybody's breath bright in looking over his troops before he the holy night, and the stars over us rapped on the door with the big brass like a million clocks ticking toward knocker. Knocking on the door was Christmas morning. kind of Pop's privilege, you might Ah, Denny, it's so quiet and peace- say, being that he worked for you. ful here I'd like to stay all day until Ah, the big holly wreath hanging on it's time for George to come home. the great oaken door and all the Virginia won't be home for dinner. Castle ablaze with Christmas. And Charley Doyle and his little red car you and Margaret would answer the again. So quiet and peaceful I'd like door yourselves, "Come on in, come to sit here and just look at all the in, now," you'd say to us, and weren't things you never really see in St. you a grand figure in that red velvet Vincent's because they're so familiar. jacket you wore. And in we'd go shy I guess—^Jesus rising from the dead as sheep under the great chandeliers over the altar up there with swords I thought were hung with real dia- of light around him, and up in the monds, into the drawing room where dome St. Vincent rising into Heaven the grandest Christmas tree in Phila- with angels swarming around him delphia stood in all its glory, with and below the Saint, the Sisters of fruitcake and candy piled high on Charity in their winged hats tending the table and punch in the cut glass the sick. So many pretty things un- bowls big enough to bathe the baby der the dome of Mother Church. in, and the cannel coal spread over Lord, Denny, can I ever forget the the Yule log making colored flames time I was carrying Virginia and in the fireplace. And we had punch big as a house, and I was passing and cake and candy and then we put St. Vincent's with little Peter and the tinsel on the tree that was all he looked at me and he looked at St. decorated except for the tinsel be- Vincent's dome and asked me if the cause that was the neighbors' job. church was going to have a baby, Remember, Denny? And each of us too. Ah, Denny, I know I should be in turn, kid and grownup alike, would saying a rosary for you instead of take a few strands of tinsel and put all this rambling around in my head, them carefully on the tree, the fathers but remembering is a kind of pray- going up the ladder to the higher ing, if you're remembering good branches. things, I suppose. But I'll go now And when it was done, you'd toast and take a stroll along Germantown us saying with your punch glass Avenue and maybe stop at Jones's to — —

Rose Garrity 39

see if they have any good buys in two. I think I'd rather wait my time curtain material. I have a lot of time out here in Germantown, German- on my hands, these days, Denny. It's town's changed, but I don't want to a shame you don't have the time leave because I'm too old to change when you're young enough to enjoy now. I'll tend your rambler rose bush, it. George talks about going to live Denny, and when the time comes, at the seashore when he retires from we'll all go together up the golden the telephone company. But I don't stairs to glory. And thanks again for know. I'd feel strange living by the the kneeling pads. sea, fine though it is for a week or

Dr. JekylFs Music Lesson

• Charles Edward Eaton

The great man, the politico, was all he might have been. Encompassing everything, both good and evil. Not willing to admit he harbored any hidden mannikin.

The world was full and everything a positive sign: I was his and you and you and all the others The August morning even played his music on the trumpet vine.

It is remarkable to watch a human tower Shine and shine in the demulcent light, A virtuoso who has learned to play by ear any instrument of power.

Everything, in fact, is lifted up in air. Inflated for a while for what its tune is worth, But set aside if it should sound the slightest tremor of despair.

As he stood beside me on that August morning, my regret Must have touched a chord of fear as if he saw my hand move up To take down from the halo round his head one single orange trumpet.

It could be I wanted to alert the mannikin or play A simple tune of solace for the hidden one I saw him listen, rub his face to see if any little features might be under way. —

Lines for Bruce Mitchell

• John Wheatcroft

As a man he groped a tightrope high in a dream, blindfolded by midnight, across a net-less pit, without pole or parasol doubting the wire was there. To watch him was no fun.

Last night he slipped from nightmare to dark peace and now he knows what sleep is, I for one refuse one tear for this man raged for rest.

But take him as just hand married to knife or brush and governed by a lens that prismed chaos in a bungled universe to lines defined, sharp shapes, and tinges, tints, and tones more

true that light . . . the shivering of that lens, the severing of the hand that manned the tool puts out our eye and amputates our urgent power to make.

One landscape won't let go. It's far in summer. Birds seem weary, favoring bottom branches and the lower sky. A river lolls behind a line of willows. Perspective is all harvest. Along the nearer bank he chanced on, almost secret among some bramble, chickory, and burdock, one stalk of late bloom thistle princely purple still though touched with autumn umber final claim of earth.

Here scatter fragments of the shattered lens, bury the hand still wedded to the brush. 40 ContnbutoTS VICTOR CHAPIN, whose long story, "Amy Evans Street" (with its genuinely natural dialogue and evocation of the period between the two great Wars), says that the narrative was written "straight from the heart in memory of the days spent at the Lincoln School before going on to Carnegie Institute of Technology to study dramatic art." He has had stories published in more than twenty literary magazines. He has had honorable mention in Martha Foley's Best American Short Stories; has published five books (The Hill, The Lotus Seat, The Company of Players; the novelization from the film script of the motion picture Career and ghost-written the novelization from the film script of the picture Dark Purpose). He has been a frequent contributor to four quarters, and before he began writing professionally, he had a successful career on the stage. He lives in New York City. FRANCIS LEHNER is the librarian at Loras College, Dubuque, and writes poetry in his leisure time. JOHN the department at J. McALEER, professor of English and chairman of Boston College, is a successful writer of fiction and articles; several of his stories have appeared in this magazine. JOHN FANDEL, on the staff of Manhattan College, writes regularly for Commonweal and other magazines. DAVID KELLY, short story writer, is now engaged on a novel; he lives in Germantown, Philadelphia, and holds his degree from La Salle College. CHARLES EDWARD EATON, a writer who lives in Merlin Stone, Woodbury, Connecticut, is working on his fifth volume; his most recent book is Countermoves. JOHN WHEATCROFT, a member of the English staff at Bucknell University, Lewisburg, wrote his poem to commemorate a Scottish landscape painter who died in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, in 1963. BROTHER FIDELIAN, F.S.C., vice-president for academic affairs at La Salle College, is a poet and critic; he is preparing a book on literary criticism.

Editor and Business Manager, BROTHER EDWARD PATRICK, F.S.C. Associate Editor, ROBERT F. SMITH Managing Editor, CHARLES V. KELLY Circulation Manager, RICHARD P. BOUDREAU Editorial Associates Chairman, ROBERT McDONOUGH Typograhic Cover Design by Joseph Mintzer

Manuscripts and other correspondence should be addressed to the Editor, four quar> ters. La Salle College, Philadelphia 41, Pa. Manuscripts should be typed double- spaced and should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Annual Subscription: Two Dollars. Copyright, 1965, by La Salle College