“No, she was mostly just noisy, really. She sang as well then as she does now, though. And she was wonderful moral support. She usually arranged things so that she sat next to my brother Seymour at the broadcasting table, and whenever he said anything on the show that delighted her, she used to step on his foot. It was like a hand squeeze, only she used her foot.” As I delivered this little homily, I had my hands on the top rung of the straight chair at the desk. They suddenly slipped off—rather in the way one’s elbow can abruptly lose its “footing” on the surface of a table or a bar counter. I lost and regained my balance almost simultaneously, though, and neither Mrs. Silsburn nor the Lieutenant seemed to notice it. I folded my arms. “On certain nights when he was in especially good form, Seymour used to come home with a slight limp. That’s really true. Charlotte didn’t just step on his foot, she tramped on it. He didn’t care. He loved people who stepped on his feet. He loved noisy girls.”

  “Well, isn’t that interesting!” Mrs. Silsburn said. “I certainly never knew she was ever on the radio or anything.”

  “Seymour got her on, actually,” I said. “She was the daughter of an osteopath who lived in our building on Riverside Drive.” I replaced my hands on the rung of the straight chair, and leaned my weight forward on it, partly for support, partly in the style of an old back-fence reminiscer. The sound of my own voice was now singularly pleasing to me. “We were playing stoopball— Are either of you at all interested in this?”

  “Yes!” said Mrs. Silsburn.

  “We were playing stoopball on the side of the building one afternoon after school, Seymour and I, and somebody who turned out to be Charlotte started dropping marbles on us from the twelfth story. That’s how we met. We got her on the program that same week. We didn’t even know she could sing. We just wanted her because she had such a beautiful New Yorkese accent. She had a Dyckman Street accent.”

  Mrs. Silsburn laughed the kind of tinkling laugh that is, of course, death to the sensitive anecdotist, cold sober or otherwise. She had evidently been waiting for me to finish, so that she could make a single-minded appeal to the Lieutenant. “Who does she look like to you?” she said to him importunately. “Around the eyes and mouth especially. Who does she remind you of?”

  The Lieutenant looked at her, then up at the photograph. “You mean the way she is in this picture? As a kid?” he said. “Or now? The way she is in the movies? Which do you mean?”

  “Both, really, I think. But especially right here in this picture.”

  The Lieutenant scrutinized the photograph—rather severely, I thought, as though he by no means approved of the way Mrs. Silsburn, who after all was a civilian as well as a woman, had asked him to examine it. “Muriel,” he said shortly. “Looks like Muriel in this picture. The hair and all.”

  “But exactly!” said Mrs. Silsburn. She turned to me. “But exactly,” she repeated. “Have you ever met Muriel? I mean have you ever seen her when she’s had her hair tied in a lovely big—”

  “I’ve never seen Muriel at all until today,” I said.

  “Well, all right, just take my word.” Mrs. Silsburn tapped the photograph impressively with her index finger. “This child could double for Muriel at that age. But to a T.”

  The whiskey was steadily edging up on me, and I couldn’t quite take in this information whole, let alone consider its many possible ramifications. I walked back over—just a trifle straight-linishly, I think—to the coffee table and resumed stirring the pitcher of Collinses. The bride’s father’s uncle tried to get my attention as I came back into his vicinity, to greet me on my reappearance, but I was just abstracted enough by the alleged fact of Muriel’s resemblance to Charlotte not to respond to him. I was also feeling just a trifle dizzy. I had a strong impulse, which I didn’t indulge, to stir the pitcher from a seated position on the floor.

  A minute or two later, as I was just starting to pour out the drinks, Mrs. Silsburn had a question for me. It all but sang its way across the room to me, so melodiously was it pitched.

  “Would it be very awful if I asked about that accident Mrs. Burwick happened to mention before? I mean those nine stitches she spoke of. Did your brother accidentally push her or something like that, I mean?”

  I put down the pitcher, which seemed extraordinarily heavy and unwieldy, and looked over at her. Oddly, despite the mild dizziness I was feeling, distant images hadn’t begun to blur in the least. If anything, Mrs. Silsburn as a focal point across the room seemed rather obtrusively distinct. “Who’s Mrs. Burwick?” I said.

  “My wife,” the Lieutenant answered, a trifle shortly. He was looking over at me, too, if only as a committee of one to investigate what was taking me so long with the drinks.

  “Oh. Certainly she is,” I said.

  “Was it an accident?” Mrs. Silsburn pressed. “He didn’t mean to do it, did he?”

  “Oh, God, Mrs. Silsburn.”

  “I beg your pardon?” she said coldly.

  “I’m sorry. Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m getting a little tight. I poured myself a great drink in the kitchen about five minutes—” I broke off, and turned abruptly around. I’d just heard a familiar heavy tread in the uncarpeted hall. It was coming toward us—at us—at a great rate, and in an instant the Matron of Honor jounced into the room.

  She had eyes for no one. “I finally got them,” she said. Her voice sounded strangely levelled off, stripped of even the ghost of italics. “After about an hour.” Her face looked tense and overheated to the bursting point. “Is that cold?” she said, and came without stopping, and unanswered, over to the coffee table. She picked up the one glass I’d half filled a minute or so before, and drank it off in one greedy tilt. “That’s the hottest room I’ve ever been in in my entire life,” she said—rather impersonally—and set down her empty glass. She picked up the pitcher and refilled the glass halfway, with much clinking and plopping of ice cubes.

  Mrs. Silsburn was already well in the vicinity of the coffee table. “What’d they say?” she asked impatiently. “Did you speak to Rhea?”

  The Matron of Honor drank first. “I spoke to everybody,” she said, putting down her glass, and with a grim but, for her, peculiarly un-dramatic emphasis on “everybody.” She looked first at Mrs. Silsburn, then at me, then at the Lieutenant. “You can all relax,” she said. “Everything’s just fine and dandy.”

  “What do you mean? What happened?” Mrs. Silsburn said sharply.

  “Just what I said. The groom’s no longer indisposed by happiness.” A familiar style of inflection was tack in the Matron of Honor’s voice.

  “How come? Who’d you talk to?” the Lieutenant said to her. “Did you talk to Mrs. Fedder?”

  “I said I talked to everybody. Everybody but the blushing bride. She and the groom’ve eloped.” She turned to me. “How much sugar did you put in this thing, anyway?” she asked irritably. “It tastes like absolute—”

  “Eloped?” said Mrs. Silsburn, and put her hand to her throat.

  The Matron of Honor looked at her. “All right, just relax now,” she advised. “You’ll live longer.”

  Mrs. Silsburn sat down inertly on the couch—right beside me, as a matter of fact. I was staring up at the Matron of Honor, and I’m sure Mrs. Silsburn immediately followed suit.

  “Apparently he was at the apartment when they got back. So Muriel just ups and packs her bag, and off the two of them go, just like that.” The Matron of Honor shrugged her shoulders elaborately. She picked up her glass again and finished her drink. “Anyway, we’re all invited to the reception. Or whatever you call it when the bride and groom have already left. From what I gathered, there’s a whole mob of people over there already. Everybody sounded so gay on the phone.”

  “You said you talked to Mrs. Fedder. What’d she say?” the Lieutenant said.

  The Matron of Honor shook her head, rather cryptically. “She was wonderful. My God, what a woman. She sounded absolutely normal. From what I gathered—I mean from what she said—this Seymour’s promised to start going to an analyst and get himself straightened out.” She shrugged her shoulders again. “Who knows? Maybe everything’s gonna be hunky-dory. I’m too pooped to think any more.” She looked at her husband. “Let’s go. Where’s your little hat?”

  The next thing I knew, the Matron of Honor, the Lieutenant, and Mrs. Silsburn were all filing toward the front door, with me, as their host, following behind them. I was weaving now very obviously, but since no one turned around, I think my condition went unnoticed.

  I heard Mrs. Silsburn say to the Matron of Honor, “Are you going to stop by there, or what?”

  “I don’t know,” came the reply. “If we do, it’ll just be for a minute.”

  The Lieutenant rang the elevator bell, and the three stood leadenly watching the indicator dial. No one seemed to have any further use for speech. I stood in the doorway of the apartment, a few feet away, dimly looking on. When the elevator door opened, I said goodbye, aloud, and their three heads turned in unison toward me. “Oh, goodbye,” they called over, and I heard the Matron of Honor shout “Thanks for the drink!” as the elevator door closed behind them.

  I went back into the apartment, very unsteadily, trying to unbutton my tunic as I wandered along, or to yank it open.

  My return to the living room was unreservedly hailed by my one remaining guest—whom I’d forgotten. He raised a well-filled glass at me as I came into the room. In fact, he literally waved it at me, wagging his head up and down and grinning, as though the supreme, jubilant moment we had both been long awaiting had finally arrived. I found I couldn’t quite match grins with him at this particular reunion. I remember patting him on the shoulder, though. Then I went over and sat down heavily on the couch, directly opposite him, and finished yanking open my coat. “Don’t you have a home to go to?” I asked him. “Who looks after you? The pigeons in the park?” In response to these provocative questions, my guest toasted me with increased gusto, wielding his Tom Collins at me as though it were a beer stein. I closed my eyes and lay back on the couch, putting my feet up and stretching out flat. But this made the room spin. I sat up and swung my feet around to the floor—doing it so suddenly and with such poor coördination that I had to put my hand on the coffee table to keep my balance. I sat slumped forward for a minute or two, with my eyes closed. Then, without having to get up, I reached for the Tom Collins pitcher and poured myself out a drink, spilling any amount of liquid and ice cubes onto the table and floor. I sat with the filled glass in my hands for some more minutes, without drinking, and then I put it down in a shallow puddle on the coffee table. “Would you like to know how Charlotte got those nine stitches?” I asked suddenly, in a tone of voice that sounded perfectly normal to me. “We were up at the Lake. Seymour had written to Charlotte, inviting her to come up and visit us, and her mother finally let her. What happened was, she sat down in the middle of our driveway one morning to pet Boo Boo’s cat, and Seymour threw a stone at her. He was twelve. That’s all there was to it. He threw it at her because she looked so beautiful sitting there in the middle of the driveway with Boo Boo’s cat. Everybody knew that, for God’s sake—me, Charlotte, Boo Boo, Waker, Walt, the whole family.” I stared at the pewter ashtray on the coffee table. “Charlotte never said a word to him about it. Not a word.” I looked up at my guest, rather expecting him to dispute me, to call me a liar. I am a liar, of course. Charlotte never did understand why Seymour threw that stone at her. My guest didn’t dispute me, though. The contrary. He grinned at me encouragingly, as though anything further I had to say on the subject could go down only as the absolute truth with him. I got up, though, and left the room. I remember considering, halfway across the room, going back and picking up two ice cubes that were on the floor, but it seemed too arduous an undertaking, and I continued along to the hall. As I passed the kitchen door, I took off my tunic—peeled it off—and dropped it on the floor. It seemed, at the time, like the place where I always left my coat.

  In the bathroom, I stood for several minutes over the laundry hamper, debating whether I should or shouldn’t take out Seymour’s diary and look at it again. I don’t remember any more what arguments I advanced on the subject, either pro or con, but I did finally open the hamper and pick out the diary. I sat down with it, on the side of the bathtub again, and riffled the pages till I came to the very last entry Seymour had made:

  “One of the men just called the flight line again. If the ceiling keeps lifting, apparently we can get off before morning. Oppenheim says not to hold our breaths. I phoned Muriel to tell her. It was very strange. She answered the phone and kept saying hello. My voice wouldn’t work. She very nearly hung up. If only I could calm down a little. Oppenheim is going to hit the sack till the flight line calls us back. I should, too, but I’m too keyed up. I really called to ask her, to beg her for the last time to just go off alone with me and get married. I’m too keyed up to be with people. I feel as though I’m about to be born. Sacred, sacred day. The connection was so bad, and I couldn’t talk at all during most of the call. How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person at the other end shouts back ‘What?’ I’ve been reading a miscellany of Vedanta all day. Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve. Raise their children honorably, lovingly, and with detachment. A child is a guest in the house, to be loved and respected—never possessed, since he belongs to God. How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true. The joy of responsibility for the first time in my life. Oppenheim is already in the sack. I should be, too, but I can’t. Someone must sit up with the happy man.”

  I read the entry through just once, then closed the diary and brought it back to the bedroom with me. I dropped it into Seymour’s canvas bag, on the window seat. Then I fell, more or less deliberately, on the nearer of the two beds. I was asleep—or, possibly, out cold—before I landed, or so it seemed.

  When I wakened, about an hour and a half later, I had a splitting headache and a parched mouth. The room was all but dark. I remember sitting for rather a long time on the edge of the bed. Then, in the cause of a great thirst, I got up and gravitated slowly toward the living room, hoping there were still some cold and wet remnants in the pitcher on the coffee table.

  My last guest had evidently let himself out of the apartment. Only his empty glass, and his cigar end in the pewter ashtray, indicated that he had ever existed. I still rather think his cigar end should have been forwarded on to Seymour, the usual run of wedding gifts being what it is. Just the cigar, in a small, nice box. Possibly with a blank sheet of paper enclosed, by way of explanation.

  For Esmé—

  With Love and Squalor

  Just recently, by air mail, I received an invitation to a wedding that will take place in England on April 18th. It happens to be a wedding I’d give a lot to be able to get to, and when the invitation first arrived, I thought it might just be possible for me to make the trip abroad, by plane, expenses be hanged. However, I’ve since considered the matter rather extensively and decided against it.

  All the same, though, wherever I happen to be I don’t think I’m the type that doesn’t even lift a finger to prevent a wedding from flatting. Accordingly, I’ve gone ahead and jotted down a few revealing notes on the bride as I knew her almost six years ago. If my notes should cause the groom, whom I haven’t met, an uneasy moment or two, so much the better. Nobody’s aiming to please, here. More, really, to edify, to instruct.

  In April of 1944, I was among some sixty American enlisted men who took a rather specialized pre-Invasion training course, directed by British Intelligence, in Devon, England. And as I look back, it seems to me that we were fairly unique, the sixty of us, in that there wasn’t one good mixer in the bunch. We were all essentially letter-writing types, and when we spoke to each other out of the line of duty, it was usually to ask somebody if he had any ink he wasn’t using. When we weren’t writing letters or attending classes, each of us went pretty much his own way. Mine usually led me, on clear days, in scenic circles around the countryside. Rainy days, I generally sat in a dry place and read a book, often just an axe length away from a ping-pong table.

  The training course lasted three weeks, ending on a Saturday, a very rainy one. At seven that last night, our whole group was scheduled to entrain for London, where, as rumor had it, we were to be assigned to infantry and airborne divisions mustered for the D Day landings. By three in the afternoon, I’d packed all my belongings into my barrack bag, including a canvas gas-mask container full of books I’d brought over from the Other Side. (The gas mask itself I’d slipped through a porthole of the Mauretania some weeks earlier, fully aware that if the enemy ever did use gas I’d never get the damn thing on in time.) I remember standing at an end window of our Quonset but for a very long time, looking out at the slanting, dreary rain, my trigger finger itching imperceptibly, if at all. I could hear behind my back the uncomradely scratching of many fountain pens on many sheets of V-mail paper. Abruptly, with nothing special in mind, I came away from the window and put on my raincoat, cashmere muffler, galoshes, woollen gloves, and overseas cap (the last of which, I’m still told, I wore at an angle all my own—slightly down over both ears). Then, after synchronizing my wristwatch with the clock in the latrine, I walked down the long, wet cobblestone hill into town. I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they didn’t.

  In the center of town, which was probably the wettest part of town, I stopped in front of a church to read the bulletin board, mostly because the featured numerals, white on black, had caught my attention but partly because, after three years in the Army, I’d become addicted to reading bulletin boards. At three-fifteen, the board stated, there would be children’s-choir practice. I looked at my wristwatch, then back at the board. A sheet of paper was tacked up, listing the names of the children expected to attend practice. I stood in the rain and read all the names, then entered the church.