The witching hour

Two

NINE P.M. THE room was dark, save for the bluish light of the television. Miss Havisham, was it not, a wraith in a wedding dress from his beloved Great Expectations.

Through the clear, unadorned windows he could see the lights of downtown San Francisco when he chose to look-a constellation burning through the thin fog, and just below, the peaked roofs of the smaller Queen Anne houses across Liberty Street. How he loved Liberty Street. His house was the tallest on the block, a mansion once perhaps, now only a beautiful house, rising majestically among humbler cottages, above the noise and the bustle of the Castro.

He had “restored” this house. He knew every nail, every beam, every cornice. Shirtless in the sun, he had laid the tiles of the roof. He had even poured the concrete of the sidewalk.

Now he felt safe in his house, and safe nowhere else. And for four weeks he had not been out of this room, except to enter the small adjacent bathroom.

Hour by hour, he lay in bed, hands hot inside the black leather gloves which he could not and would not take off, staring at the ghostly black-and-white television screen in front of him. He was letting the television shape his dreams through the various videotapes he loved, the videotapes of the movies he’d watched years ago with his mother. They were “the house movies” to him now, because all of them had not only wonderful stories and wonderful people who had become his heroes and heroines, but wonderful houses. Rebecca had Manderley. Great Expectations had Miss Havisham’s ruined mansion. Gaslight had the lovely London town house on the square. The Red Shoes had the mansion by the sea where the lovely dancer went to hear the news that she would soon be the company’s prima ballerina.

Yes, the house movies, the movies of childhood dreams, of characters as great as the houses. He drank beer after beer as he watched. He drifted in and out of sleep. His hands positively hurt in the gloves. He did not answer the phone. He did not answer the door. Aunt Vivian took care of it.

Now and then Aunt Vivian would come into his room. She would give him another beer, or some food. He rarely ate the food. “Michael, please eat,” she would say. He would smile. “Later, Aunt Viv.”

He would not see or speak to anyone except Dr. Morris, but Dr. Morris couldn’t help him. His friends couldn’t help him either. And they didn’t want to talk to him anymore. They were tired of hearing him talk about being dead for an hour and then coming back. And he certainly did not want to talk to the hundreds who wanted to see a demonstration of his psychic power.

He was sick to death of his psychic power. Didn’t anyone understand? It was a parlor trick, this taking off his gloves and touching things and seeing some simple, mundane image. “You got this pencil from a woman in your office yesterday. Her name’s Gert,” or “This locket. This morning, you took it out and you decided you’d wear it but you didn’t really want to. You wanted to wear the pearls, and you couldn’t find them.”

Just a physical thing, this, an antenna that maybe all human beings had thousands of years ago.

Didn’t anyone appreciate the real tragedy? That he could not remember what he saw when he was drowned. “Aunt Viv,” he would say, still trying now and then to explain it to her, “I really did see people up there. We were dead. All of us were dead. And I had a choice about coming back. And I was sent back for a purpose.”

Pale shadow of his dead mother, Aunt Vivian would only nod her head. “I know, darling. Maybe in time, you’ll remember.”

In time.

His friends had gotten more harsh at the end. “Michael, you’re talking crazy. This happens that people drown and they’re brought back. There’s no special purpose.”

“That’s nuthouse talk, Mike.”

Therese had cried and cried. “Look, there’s no use me being here, Michael. You’re not the same person.”

No. Not the same person. That person drowned. Over and over he tried to remember the rescue-the woman who had got him up out of the water and brought him around. If only he could talk to her again, if only Dr. Morris would find her … He just wanted to hear it from her own lips that he’d said nothing. He just wanted to take off his gloves and hold her hand in his when he asked her. Maybe through her he could remember …

Dr. Morris wanted him to come in for further evaluation.

“Leave me alone. Just find that woman. I know you can reach her. You told me she called you. She told you her name.”

He was through with hospitals, with brain scans and electroencephalograms, through with shots and pills.

The beer he understood. He knew how to pace it. And the beer sometimes brought him close to remembering …

… And it was a realm he’d seen out there. People-so many of them. Now and then it was there again, a great gossamer whole. He saw her … who was she? She said … And then it was gone. “I will, I’ll do it. If I die again trying, I’ll do it.”

Had he really said that to them? How could he have imagined such things, things so very far afield of his own world, which was full of the solid and the real, and why these odd flashes of being far away, back home, in the city of his boyhood?

He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything that mattered anymore.

He knew he was Michael Curry, that he was forty-eight years old, that he had a couple of million socked away, and property that amounted to almost that, which was a very good thing because his construction company was shut down, cold. He could no longer run it. He’d lost his best carpenters and painters to the other crews around town. He’d lost the big job that had meant so much, the restoration of the old bed-and-breakfast hotel on Union Street.

He knew that if he took off his gloves and started touching anything-the walls, the floor, the beer can, the copy of David Copperfield which lay open beside him-he’d start getting these flashes of meaningless information and he’d go crazy. That is, if he wasn’t already crazy.

He knew he had been happy before he drowned, not perfectly happy, but happy. His life had been good.

The morning of the big event, he had awakened late, needing a day off, and it was a good time for it. His men were doing just fine out there, and maybe he wouldn’t check on them. It was May 1 and the oddest memory came back to him-of a long drive out of New Orleans, and along the Gulf Coast to Florida when he was a boy. It must have been the Easter vacation, but he really didn’t know for sure, and all those who would have known-his mother, his father, his grandparents-were dead.

What he remembered was the clear green water on that white beach, and how warm it had been, and that the sand was like sugar under his feet.

They had all gone down to the waves to swim at sunset; not the slightest chill in the air; and though the great orange sun still hung in the blue western sky, there was a half moon shining straight overhead. His mother had pointed it out to him. “Look, Michael.” Even his father seemed to love it, his father who never noticed such things had said in a soft voice that it was a beautiful place.

It had hurt him to remember this. The cold in San Francisco was the one thing he powerfully resented, and he could never tell anyone why afterwards-that such a memory of southern warmth had inspired him to go out that day to San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. Was there any place colder in all of the Bay Area than Ocean Beach? He had known how drab and forbidding the water would look under the bleached and sullen sky. He had known how the wind would cut through his clothes.

Nevertheless he’d gone. Alone to be at Ocean Beach on this dim, colorless afternoon with visions of southern waters, of driving with the top down on the old Packard convertible through the soft caressing southern wind.

He didn’t turn on the car radio as he drove through town. So he didn’t hear the high tide warnings. But what if he had? He knew Ocean Beach was dangerous. Every year people were washed out, natives as well as tourists.

Maybe he’d been thinking a little about that when he went out on the rocks just below the Cliff House Restaurant. Treacherous, yes, always, and slippery. But he wasn’t much afraid of falling, or of the sea, or of anything. And he was thinking about the south again, about summer evenings in New Orleans when the jasmine was blooming. He was thinking of the smell of the four o’clocks in his grandmother’s yard.

The wave must have knocked him unconscious. He had no memory at all of being washed out. Just that distinct recollection of rising into space, of seeing his body out there, tossed on the surf, of seeing people waving and pointing, and others rushing into the restaurant to call for assistance. Yes, he knew what they were doing, all of these people. Seeing them was not really like looking down on people from above. It was like knowing all about them. And how purely buoyant and safe he’d felt up there; why, safe didn’t even begin to describe it. He was free, so free he could not comprehend their anxiety, why they were so concerned about his body being tossed about.

Then the other part began. And that must have been when he was really dead, and all the wonderful things were shown to him, and the other dead were there, and he understood, understood all the simplest and the most complex things, and why he had to go back, yes, the doorway, the promise, shot down suddenly and weightlessly into the body lying on the deck of the ship, the body that had been dead drowned for an hour out there, into the aches and the pains, and come back alive staring up, knowing it all, ready to do exactly what they had wanted of him. All that splendid knowledge!

In those first few seconds, he tried desperately to tell of where he’d been and the things he’d seen, the great long adventure. Surely he had! But all he could remember now was the intensity of the pain in his chest, and in his hands and his feet, and the dim figure of a woman near him. A fragile being with a pale delicate face, all of her hair hidden by a dark cap, her gray eyes flickering for a second like lights in front of him. In a soft voice, she’d told him to be calm, that they would take care of him.

Impossible to think that this little woman had gotten him out of the sea, and pumped the water out of his lungs. But he had not understood that she was his savior at that moment.

Men were lifting him, putting him on a stretcher, and strapping him down, and he was filled with pain. The wind was whipping his face. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. The stretcher was rising in the air.

Confusion after that. Had he blacked out again? Had that been the moment of true and total forgetting? No one could confirm or deny, it seemed, what had happened on the flight in. Only that they had rushed him to shore, where the ambulance and the reporters were waiting.

Cameras flashing, that he did recall, people saying his name. The ambulance itself, yes, and someone trying to stick a needle into his vein. He thought he heard his Aunt Vivian’s voice. He begged them to stop. He had to sit up. They couldn’t strap him down again, no!

“Hold on, Mr. Curry, just hold on. Hey, help me here with this guy!” They were strapping him down again. They were treating him as if he were a prisoner. He fought. But it was no use; they’d shot something into his arm, he knew it. He could see the darkness coming.

Then they came back, those he had seen out there; they began to talk again. “I understand,” he said. “I won’t let it happen. I’ll go home. I know where it is. I remember … ”

When he had awakened, it was to bright artificial light. A hospital room. He was hooked to machines. His best friend, Jimmy Barnes, was sitting next to the bed. He tried to speak to Jimmy, but then the nurses and the doctors surrounded him.

They were touching him, his hands, his feet, asking him questions. But he couldn’t concentrate on the proper answers. He kept seeing things-fleeting images of nurses, orderlies, hospital hallways. What is all this? He knew the doctor’s name-Randy Morris-and that he’d kissed his wife, Deenie, before he left home. So what? Things were literally popping into his head. He couldn’t stand it. It was like being half awake and half asleep, feverish, worried.

He shuddered, trying to clear his head. “Listen,” he said. “I’m trying.” After all, he knew what this was all about, the touching, that he’d been drowned and they wanted to see if there had been any brain damage. “But you needn’t bother. I’m fine. I’m all right. I’ve got to get out of here, and get packed. I have to go back home immediately … ”

Plane reservations, closing the company … The doorway, the promise, and his purpose, which was absolutely crucial …

But what was it? Why did he have to get back home? There came another flash of images-nurses cleaning this room, somebody wiping the chrome bat of the bed a few hours ago while he’d been asleep. Stop it! Have to get back to the point, the whole purpose, the-

Then he realized it. He couldn’t remember the purpose! He couldn’t remember what he’d seen while he was dead! The whole thing, all of it-the people, the places, all he’d been told-he couldn’t remember any of it. No, this couldn’t be. It had been wondrously clear. And they were depending on him. They’d said, Michael, you know you do not have to return, you can refuse, and he’d said that he would, that he … that he what? It was going to come back in a flash, like a dream you forget and then completely remember!

He had sat up, brushing one of the needles out of his arms and asked for a pen and paper.

“You have to lie still.”

“Not now. I have to write it down.” But there was nothing to write! He remembered standing on the rock, thinking of that long-ago summer in Florida, of the warm waters … Then the wet soaked cold aching thing that he was, on the stretcher.

All of it gone.

He had shut his eyes, trying to ignore the strange warmth in his hands, and the nurse pushing him back against the pillows. Somebody was asking Jimmy to go out of the room. Jimmy didn’t want to go. Why was he seeing all these strange irrelevant things-flashes of orderlies again, and the nurse’s husband, and these names, why did he know all these names?

“Don’t touch me like that,” he said. It was the experience out there, over the ocean, that’s what mattered!

Suddenly he reached for the pen. “If you’ll be very quiet … ”

Yes, an image when he touched the pen, of the nurse getting it out of the drawer at the hallway station. And the paper, image of a man putting the tablet in a metal locker. And the bedside table? Image of the woman who’d last wiped it clean, with a rag full of germs from another room. And some flash of a man with a radio. Somebody doing something with a radio.

And the bed? The last patient in it, Mrs. Ona Patrick, died at eleven A.M. yesterday, before he’d even decided to go to Ocean Beach. No. Turn it off! Flash of her body in the hospital morgue. “I can’t stand this!”

“What’s wrong, Michael?” said Dr. Morris. “Talk to me.” Jimmy was arguing in the hall. He could hear Stacy’s voice, Stacy and Jimmy were his best friends.

He was trembling. “Yeah, sure,” he whispered to the doctor. “I’ll talk to you. Just so long as you don’t touch me.”

In desperation he had put his hands to his own head, run his fingers through his own hair, and mercifully he felt nothing. He was drifting into sleep again, thinking, well, it will come as it did before, she’ll be there and I’ll understand. But even as he nodded off, he realized he didn’t know who this she was.

But he had to go home, yes, home after all these years, these long years in which home had become some sort of fantasy …

“Back to where I was born,” he whispered. So hard now to talk. So sleepy. “If you give me any more drugs, I swear I’ll kill you.”

It was his friend, Jimmy, who brought the leather gloves the next day. Michael hadn’t thought it would work. But it was worth a try. He was in a state of agitation bordering on madness. And he had been talking too much, to everybody.

When reporters rang the room direct, he told them in a great rush “what was going on.” When they pushed their way into the room, he talked on and on, recounting it again and again, repeating “I can’t remember!” They gave him things to touch; he told them what he saw. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

The cameras went off with their myriad shuffling electronic sounds. The hospital staff threw the reporters out. Michael was scared to touch even a fork or a knife. He wouldn’t eat. Staff members came from all over the hospital to place objects in his hands.

In the shower, he touched the wall. He saw that woman, that dead woman again. She’d been in this room three weeks. “I don’t want to take a shower,” she’d said. “I’m sick, don’t you understand?” Her daughter-in-law had made her stand there. He had to get out of the stall. He fell down exhausted in the bed, shoving his hands under the pillow.

There had been a few flashes as he first smoothed the tight leather gloves over his fingers. Then he rubbed his hands together slowly, so that everything was a blur, image piling upon image until nothing was distinct, and all the various names tumbling through his mind made a noise-then quiet.

Slowly he reached for the knife on the supper tray. He was seeing something but it was pale, silent, men gone. He lifted the glass, drank the milk. Just a shimmer. All right! These gloves were working. The trick was to be quick about every gesture.

And also to get out of here! But they wouldn’t let him. “I don’t want a brain scan,” he said. “My brain is fine. It’s my hands that are driving me crazy.”

But they were trying to help-Dr. Morris, the chief resident, and his friends, and his Aunt Vivian who stayed at his side by the hour. At his behest, Dr. Morris had contacted the ambulance men, and the Coast Guard, the Emergency Room people, the skipper of the boat who had revived him before the Coast Guard had been able to find her-anybody who might have remembered his saying something important. After all, a single word might unlock his memory.

But there were no words. Michael had mumbled something when he opened his eyes, the skipper had said, but she hadn’t been able to make out a specific word. It began with an L, she thought, a name, maybe. But that was all. The Coast Guard took him up after that. In the ambulance he’d thrown a punch. Had to be subdued.

Still, he wished he could talk to all those people, especially the woman who’d brought him around. He told the press that when they came to question him.

Jimmy and Stacy remained with him late each night. His Aunt Vivian was there each morning. Therese finally came, timid, frightened. She didn’t like hospitals. She couldn’t be around sick people.

He laughed. Wasn’t that California for you, he thought. Imagine saying something like that. And then he did the impulsive thing. He ripped off the glove and grabbed her hand.

Scared, don’t like you, you’re the center of attention, knock it off all this, I don’t believe you drowned out there, ridiculous, I want to get out of here, I, you should have called me.

“Go on home, honey,” he said.

Sometime during the silent hours, one of the nurses slipped a silver pen into his hand. He’d been sound asleep. The gloves were on the table.

“Tell me her name,” she said.

“I don’t get her name. I see a desk.”

“Try harder.”

“A beautiful mahogany desk with a green blotter on it.”

“But the woman who used the pen?”

“Allison.”

“Yes. Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Try again.”

“I tell you I don’t know. She gave it to you, and you put it in your purse, and this morning, you took it out. It’s just images, pictures, I don’t know where she is. You’re in a cafe, and you’re drawing on the napkin with the pen. You’re thinking about showing it to me.”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“I don’t know, I told you. I don’t see it. Allison, that’s all I see. She wrote a grocery list with it, for Chrissakes, you want me to tell you what was on the list?”

“You have to see more than that.”

“Well, I don’t!” He put back on the gloves. Nothing was going to make him take them off again.

He left the hospital the following day.

The next three weeks were an agony. A couple of Coast Guard men called him, so did one of the ambulance drivers, but they had nothing really to tell him that would help. As for the rescue boat, the woman wanted to remain out of it. And Dr. Morris had promised her that she would. Meantime, the Coast Guard admitted to the press that they had failed to record the name of the craft or its registry. One of the newspapers referred to it as an ocean-going cruiser. Maybe it was on the other side of the world.

Michael realized by this time that he had told his story to too many people. Every popular magazine in the country wanted to talk to him. He could not go out at all without a reporter blocking his path and some perfect stranger placing a wallet or photograph in his hand, and the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Mail piled up at the door, and though he kept packing his suitcase to leave, he could not bring himself to do it. Instead he drank-ice-cold beer all day long, then bourbon when the beer did not make him numb.

His friends tried to be loyal. They took turns talking to him, trying to calm him, trying to get him to lay off the drink, but it was no good. Stacy even read to him because he couldn’t read himself. He was wearing everybody down and he knew it.

The fact was, his brain was teeming. He was trying to figure things out. If he couldn’t remember, he could understand about all this, this earthshaking thing, this awful thing. But he knew he was rambling on and on about “life and death,” about what had happened “out there,” about the way the barriers between life and death were crumbling in our popular art and in our serious art. Hadn’t anybody noticed? Movies and novels always told you what was going on. You just had to study them to see it. Why, he’d seen it before this even happened.

Take Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander. Why, the dead just come walking in and talk to the living. And the same thing happened in Ironweed. In Cries and Whispers didn’t the dead just get up and talk? And there was some comedy out now, and when you considered the lighter movies, it was happening with even greater frequency. Take The Woman in White, with the little dead girl appearing in the bedroom of the little boy, and there was Julia with Mia Farrow being haunted by that dead child in London.

“Michael, you’re bashed.”

“It isn’t only horror movies, don’t you see? It’s happening in all our art. Take the book The White Hotel, any of you read that? Well, it goes on right past the heroine’s death into the afterlife. I tell you, something is about to happen. The barrier is breaking down, I myself talked to the dead and I came back, and on some subconscious level we all know the barrier is breaking.”

“Michael, you have to calm down. This thing with the hands … ”

“I don’t want to talk about that.” But he was bashed, that he had to admit, and he intended to stay bashed. He liked being bashed. He picked up the phone to order another case of beer. No need for Aunt Viv to go out for anything. And then there was all that Glenlivet Scotch he’d stashed away. And more Jack Daniel’s. Oh, he could stay drunk till he died. No problem.

By phone he finally shut down the company. When he’d tried to work, his men had told him pointedly to go home. They couldn’t get anything done with his constant talking. He was hopping from subject to subject. And then there was the reporter standing there asking him to demonstrate the power for the woman from Sonoma County. And something else was plaguing him, too, which he could not confide to anyone: he was receiving vague emotional impressions from people whether he touched them or not.

A certain free-floating telepathy it seemed; and there were no gloves to shut it off. It wasn’t information he received; it was merely strong impressions of like, dislike, truth or falsehood. Sometimes he was so caught up in this, he only saw people’s lips moving. He didn’t hear their words at all.

This highly charged intimacy, if that was the proper thing to call it, alienated him to the core.

He let the contracts go, transferring everything in the space of an afternoon, making sure all his men got work, and then closing his small shop on Castro which sold vintage Victorian fixtures.

It was OK to go indoors, to lie down, to pull the curtains, and drink. Aunt Viv sang in the kitchen as she cooked for him meals he didn’t want to eat. Now and then he tried to read a little of David Copperfield, in order to escape from his own mind. At all the worst moments of his life, he had always retired to some remote corner of the world and read David Copperfield. It was easier and lighter than Great Expectations, his true favorite. But the only reason he could follow the book now was that he knew it practically by heart.

Therese went to visit her brother in Southern California. A lie, he knew, though he had not touched the phone, merely heard the voice through the answering machine. Fine. Good-bye.

When his old girlfriend Elizabeth called from New York, he talked to her until he actually passed out. The next morning she told him he must get psychiatric help. She threatened to drop work and fly out if he didn’t agree. He agreed. But he was lying.

He did not want to confide in anybody. He did not want to describe the new intensity of feeling. He certainly didn’t want to talk about his hands. All he wanted to talk about were the visions, and nobody wanted to hear about that, nobody wanted to hear him talk about the curtain dropping that separated the living from the dead.

After Aunt Viv went to bed, he experimented just a little with the touching power. He could tell a great deal from an object when he allowed himself to handle it slowly; if he asked questions of his power-that is, tried to direct it-he could receive even more. But he did not like the feel of it, of these images flashing through his head. And if there was a reason he had been given this sensitivity, the reason was forgotten along with the vision, and the sense of purpose regarding his return to life.

Stacy brought him books to read about others who had died and come back. Dr. Morris at the hospital had told him of these works-the classic studies of the “near death experience” by Moody, Rawlings, Sabom, and Ring. Fighting the drunkenness, the agitation, the sheer inability to concentrate for any length of time, he forced himself through some of these accounts.

Yes, he knew this! It was all true. He too had risen out of his body, yes, and it was no dream, yes, but he had not seen a beautiful light; he had not been met by dead loved ones; and there had been no unearthly paradise to which he was admitted, full of flowers and beautiful colors. Something altogether different had happened out there. He had been intercepted as it were, appealed to, made to realize that he must perform a very difficult task, that much depended upon it.

Paradise. The only paradise he had ever known was in the city where he’d grown up, the warm sweet place he’d left when he was seventeen, that old great square of some twenty-five-odd city blocks known in New Orleans as the Garden District.

Yes, back there, where it all started. New Orleans which he hadn’t seen since the summer of his seventeenth year. And the funny thing was, that when he considered his life, as drowning men are supposed to do, he thought first and foremost of that long-ago night when, at age six, he had discovered classical music on his grandmother’s back porch, listening in the fragrant dusk to an old tube radio. Four o’clocks glowing in the dark. Cicadas grinding in the trees. His grandfather was smoking a cigar on the step, and then that music came into his life, that heavenly music.

Why had he loved that music so much when nobody around him did? Different from the start, that’s what he’d been. And his mother’s breeding could not account for it. To her all music was noise, she said. Yet he had loved that music so much that he stood there conducting it with a stick, making great sweeping gestures in the dark, humming.

It was in the Irish Channel that they lived, hardworking people, the Currys, and his father was the third generation to inhabit the small double cottage in the long waterfront neighborhood where so many of the Irish had settled. From the great potato famine Michael’s ancestors had fled, packed into the emptied cotton ships on their way back from Liverpool to the American South for the more lucrative cargo.

Into the “wet grave” they’d been dumped, these hungry immigrants, some of them dressed in rags, begging for work, and dying by the hundreds from yellow fever, consumption, and cholera. The survivors had dug the city’s mosquito-infested canals. They had stoked the boilers of the big steamboats. They had loaded cotton onto ships and worked on the railroads. They had become policemen and firemen.

These were tough people, people from whom Michael had inherited his powerful build, his determination. The love of working with his hands had come from them and finally prevailed in spite of years of education.

He’d grown up hearing tales of those early days, of how the Irish workingmen themselves had built the great parish church of St. Alphonsus, dragging the stones from the river, laying the mortar, collecting for the beautiful statues that came from Europe. “We had to outdo the Germans, you see, you know they were building St. Mary’s right across the street. Nothing on earth was going to make us go to Mass with each other.” And that’s why there were two magnificent parish churches instead of one, with Masses being said by the very same staff of priests every morning.

Michael’s grandfather had worked as a policeman on the wharves, where his father had once loaded cotton bales. He took Michael to see the banana boats come in and the thousands of bananas disappearing into the warehouse on the conveyor belts, warning him about the big black snakes that could hide in the banana stalks right until they hung them up in the markets.

Michael’s father was a fire fighter until his death one afternoon in a fire on Tchoupitoulas Street when Michael was seventeen. That had been the turning point of Michael’s life, for by that time his grandparents were gone, and his mother had taken him back with her to the place of her birth, San Francisco.

There was never the slightest doubt in his mind that California had been good to him. The twentieth century had been good to him. He was the first of that old clan ever to earn a college degree, ever to live in the world of books or paintings or fine houses.

But even if his dad had never died, Michael’s life would not have been a fireman’s life. There were things stirring in him that had not ever stirred at all, it seemed, in his forebears.

It wasn’t just the music that summer night. It was the way he loved books from the time he learned to read, how he gobbled up Dickens when he was nine years old, and treasured ever after the novel Great Expectations.

Years later in San Francisco he had given his beloved construction company that name: Great Expectations.

He used to fall into Great Expectations or David Copperfield in the school library where other boys threw spitballs and punched him on the arm and threatened to beat him up if he didn’t stop acting “simple,” the Irish Channel word for someone who did not have the good sense to be hard, and brutal, and disdaining of all things that defy immediate definition.

But nobody ever beat up Michael. He had enough healthy meanness from his father to punish anyone who even tried. Even as a child he was husky and uncommonly strong, a human being for whom physical action, even of a violent sort, was fairly natural. He liked to fight too. And the kids learned to leave him alone, and also he learned to hide his secret soul enough that they forgave him the few slips and generally liked him.

And the walks, what about those long walks that nobody else his age ever took? Even his girlfriends later on never understood. Rita Mae Dwyer laughed at him. Marie Louise said he was nuts. “What do you mean, just walk?” But from the earliest years, he liked to walk, to slip across Magazine Street, the great dividing line between the narrow sunbaked streets where he’d been born and the grand quiet streets of the Garden District.

In the Garden District were the oldest uptown mansions of the city, slumbering behind their massive oaks and broad gardens. There he strolled in silence over the brick sidewalks, hands shoved in his pockets, sometimes whistling, thinking that someday he would have a great house here. He would have a house with white columns on the front and flagstone walks. He would have a grand piano, such as those he glimpsed through long floor-length windows. He would have lace curtains and chandeliers. And he would read Dickens all day long in some cool library where the books went to the ceiling and the bloodred azaleas drowsed beyond the porch railings.

He felt like Dickens’s hero, the young Pip, glimpsing what he knew he must possess and being so very far from ever having it.

But in this love of walking he was not entirely alone, for his mother had loved to take long walks, too, and perhaps it was one of the few very significant gifts she had given him.

Houses she had understood and loved, just as he always would. And when he was very small, she had brought him to this quiet sanctuary of old homes, pointing out to him her favorite spots, and the great smooth lawns often half concealed by the camellia shrubs. She had taught him to listen to the cry of the birds in the oaks, to the music of hidden fountains.

There was one dark house she dearly loved which he would never forget, a long grim town house affair with a great bougainvillea vine spilling over its side porches. And often when they passed, Michael saw a curious and solitary man standing alone among the high unkempt shrubs, far to the back of the neglected garden. He seemed lost in the tumbling, tangled green, this man, blending with the shadowy foliage so completely that another passerby might not have noticed him.

In fact, Michael and his mother had played a little game in those early years about the man. She would always say that she couldn’t see him. “But he’s there, Mom,” Michael would reply, and she would say, “All right, Michael, tell me what he looks like.”

“Well, he has brown hair and brown eyes, and he’s very dressed up, as if he’s going to a party. But he’s watching us, Mom, and I don’t think we should stand here and stare at him.”

“Michael, there is no man,” his mother would say.

“Mom, you’re teasing me.”

But there had been one occasion on which she had seen that man, for certain, and she hadn’t liked him. It wasn’t at the house.

It wasn’t in that ruined garden.

It was at Christmastime when Michael was still very small, and the great crib had just been set up at the side altar of St. Alphonsus Church, with the Baby Jesus in the manger. Michael and his mother had gone up to kneel at the altar rail. How beautiful the life-sized statues of Mary and Joseph; and the Baby Jesus himself, smiling, with his chubby little arms extended. Everywhere it seemed there had been bright lights and the sweet, softening flicker of candles. The church was full of the sound of shuffling feet, of hushed whispers.

Perhaps this had been the first Christmas that Michael could remember. Whatever the case, the man had been there, over in the shadows of the sanctuary, quietly looking on, and when he had seen Michael, he had given him that little smile he always did. His hands were clasped. He wore a suit. His face looked very calm. Altogether he looked the same as he did in the garden on First Street.

“Look, there he is, Mom,” Michael said at once. “That man, the one from the garden.”

Michael’s mother had only glanced at the man and then fearfully away. She’d whispered in Michael’s ear, “Well, don’t stare at him.”

As they left the church, she’d turned to look back once.

“That’s the man in the garden, Mom,” Michael said.

“Whatever are you talking about?” she’d asked. “What garden?”

The next time they’d walked down First Street again, he had seen the man, and he had tried to tell her. But again, she played the game. She had teased him, saying there was no man.

They had laughed. It was all right. It didn’t seem to mean much at the time, though he never forgot it.

Much more significant that Michael and his mother were fast friends, that they always had so much fun together.

In later years, Michael’s mother gave him another gift, the movies she took him to see downtown at the Civic Theater. They would take the streetcar on Saturdays to the matinees. Sissy stuff, Mike, his father would say. Nobody was dragging him into those crazy shows.

Michael knew better than to answer, and as time passed he found a way to smile and shrug it off so that his father left him alone, and left his mother alone too, which meant even more to him. And besides, nothing was going to take away those special Saturday afternoons. Because the foreign movies were like portals into another world, and they filled Michael with unspeakable anguish and happiness.

He never forgot Rebecca and The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman and a film from Italy of the opera Aida. And then there was the wonderful story of the pianist called A Song to Remember. He loved Caesar and Cleopatra with Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh. And The Late George Apley with Ronald Colman, who had the most beautiful voice Michael ever heard in a man.

It was frustrating that he sometimes couldn’t understand these films, that sometimes he couldn’t even follow them. The subtitles invariably went by too fast for him to read; and in the British films, the actors spoke too fast for him to understand their crisp accents.

Sometimes his mother explained things on the way home. They rode the streetcar past their stop and all the way uptown to Carrolton Avenue. It was a good place for them to be alone. And there were the palatial houses of that street to see, the later, often gaudier houses built after the Civil War, not as beautiful as the older Garden District homes, but nevertheless sumptuous to behold and endlessly interesting.

Ah, the quiet pain of those leisurely rides, of wanting so much and understanding so little. He caught the crepe myrtle blossoms now and then with his fingers through the open streetcar window. He dreamed of being Maxim de Winter. He wanted to know the names of the classical pieces he heard on the radio and loved, to be able to understand and recall the unintelligible foreign words spoken by the announcers.

And strangely enough, in the old horror films at the dirty Happy Hour Theater on Magazine Street-his own neighborhood-he often glimpsed the same elegant world and people. There were the same paneled libraries, arched fireplaces, and men in smoking jackets, and graceful soft-spoken females-right along with Frankenstein’s monster or Dracula’s daughter. Dr. Van Helsing was a most elegant guy, and there was the very Claude Rains who had played Caesar at the downtown theater now cackling madly as The Invisible Man.

Try as he might not to do it, Michael came to loathe the Irish Channel. He loved his folks. And he liked his friends well enough. But he hated the double houses, twenty to a block, with tiny front yards and low picket fences, the comer bar with the jukebox playing in the back room and the screen door always slamming, and the fat women in their flowered dresses, smacking their children with belts or naked hands on the street.

He loathed the crowds that shopped on Magazine Street in the late Saturday afternoon. It seemed to him the children always had dirty faces and dirty clothes. The salesgirls behind the counter at the dime store were rude. The pavement stank of rotting beer. There was a stench to the old railroad fiats above the shops where some of his friends, the most unfortunate, lived. The stench was in the old shoe shops and radio repair shops. It was even in the Happy Hour Theater. The stench of Magazine Street. Carpet on the stairs in these old buildings looked and felt like bandages. A layer of dirt overlaid all. His mother would not go to Magazine Street even for a spool of thread. She walked through the Garden District and caught the St. Charles car on the Avenue and went down to Canal Street.

Michael was ashamed of this hate. He was ashamed as Pip had been ashamed of such a hate of his own in Great Expectations. But the more he learned and the more he saw, the more the disdain grew in him.

And it was the people, always the people, who put him off the most. He was ashamed of the harsh accent that marked you as being from the Irish Channel, an accent, they said, which sounded like Brooklyn or Boston or anyplace where the Irish and the Germans settled. “We know you’re from Redemptorist School,” the uptown kids would say. “We can tell by the way you talk.” They meant it contemptuously.

Michael even disliked the nuns, the crude, deep-voiced sisters who smacked the boys whenever they felt like it, who shook them and humiliated them at whim.

In fact, he hated them in particular for something they had done when he was six years old. One little boy, a “troublemaker,” was dragged out of the boys’ first-grade classroom and taken over to the first-grade teacher in the girls’ school. Only later did the class find out that there the boy had been made to stand in the trash basket, crying and red-faced, in front of all the little girls. Over and over the nuns had shoved at him and pushed at him, saying “Get in that trash can; get in it!” The girls had watched and told the boys about it afterwards.

This chilled Michael. He felt a sullen wordless terror that such a thing could happen to him. Because he knew he would never let it happen. He would fight and then his father would whip him, a violence that had always been threatened but never carried out beyond a couple of licks with a strap. In fact, all the violence that he had always sensed simmering around him-in his father, his grandfather, all the men he knew-might rise, like chaos, and drag him down into it. How many times had he seen the kids around him whipped? How many times had he heard his father’s cold, ironic jokes about the whippings his own father had given him? Michael feared it with a horrid, paralyzing speechless fear. He feared the vicious catastrophic intimacy of being hit, being beaten.

So in spite of his general physical restlessness and his stubbornness, he became an angel in school long before he realized that he needed to learn in order to fulfill his dreams. He was the quiet boy, the boy who always did his homework. Fear of ignorance, fear of violence, fear of humiliation drove him as surely as his later ambitions.

But why hadn’t these elements driven anyone else around him? He never knew, but there was no doubt in retrospect that he was from the start a highly adaptable person. That was the key. He learned from what he saw, and changed accordingly.

Neither of his parents had that flexibility. His mother was patient, yes, and kept in check the disgust she felt for the habits of those around her. But she had no dreams, no great plans, no true creative force to her. She never changed. She never did much of anything.

As for Michael’s father, he was a brash and lovable man, a brave fire fighter who won many decorations. He died trying to save lives. That was his nature. But it was his nature, too, to shrink from what he didn’t know or understand. A deep vanity made him feel “small” before those with real education.

“Do your lessons,” he’d say, because that was what he was supposed to say. He never dreamed that Michael was drawing all he could from the parish school, that in the overcrowded classrooms, with the tired, overworked nuns, Michael was actually acquiring a fine education.

For no matter how abysmal the conditions, the nuns taught the children how to read and write very well. Even if they had to hit them to do it. They gave the children a beautiful handwriting. They taught them how to spell. They taught them their arithmetic tables, and they even taught Latin and history and some literature. They kept order among the toughs. And though Michael never stopped hating them, though he would hate them for years after, he had to admit that now and then they did speak in their own varying simple ways about spiritual things, about living a life that mattered.

When Michael was eleven, three things happened which had a rather dramatic effect upon him. The first was a visit from his Aunt Vivian from San Francisco, and the second was an accidental discovery at the public library.

The visit of Aunt Vivian was brief. His mother’s sister came to town on a train. They met her at Union Station. She stayed at the Pontchartrain Hotel on St. Charles, and the evening after her arrival she invited Michael and his mother and father to join her for dinner at the Caribbean Room. This was the fancy dining room in the Pontchartrain Hotel. Michael’s father said no. He wasn’t going into a place like that. Besides, his suit was at the cleaners.

Michael went, the little man, all dressed up, walking through the Garden District with his mother.

The Caribbean Room quite astonished him. It was a near silent, eerie world of candlelight, white tablecloths, and waiters who looked like ghosts, or better yet, they looked like the vampires in the horror movies, with their black jackets and stiff white shirts.

But the true revelation was that Michael’s mother and her sister were entirely at home in this place, laughing softly as they talked, asking the waiter this and that about the turtle soup, the sherry, the white wine they’d have with dinner.

This gave Michael an enhanced respect for his mother. She wasn’t a lady who just put on airs. She really was used to that life. And he understood now why she sometimes cried and said she’d like to go home to San Francisco.

After her sister left, she was sick for days. She lay in bed, refusing everything but wine, which she called her medicine. Michael sat by her, reading to her now and then, getting scared when she didn’t speak for an hour. She got well. She got up, and then life went on.

But Michael often thought of that dinner, of the easy and natural way the two ladies had been together. Often he walked by the Pontchartrain Hotel. He looked with quiet envy at the well-dressed people who stood outside, under the awning, waiting for their taxis or limousines. Was he just greedy to want to live in their world? Wasn’t all that beauty spiritual? He puzzled over so many things. He was bursting with desires to learn, to understand, to possess. Yet he wound up next door in Smith’s Drugstore reading the horror comics.

Then came the accidental discovery at the public library. Michael had only recently learned about the library itself, and the accidental discovery came in stages.

Michael was in the children’s reading room, roaming about, looking for something easy and fun to read when he suddenly saw, open for display on top of a bookcase, a new stiff-backed book on the game of chess-a book that told one how to play it.

Now, chess had always struck Michael as highly romantic. But how he knew of it he couldn’t have told anyone. He’d never seen a chess set in real life. He checked out the book, took it home, and began to read it. His father saw it and laughed. He knew how to play chess, played it all the time, he said, at the firehouse. You couldn’t learn it from a book. That was stupid.

Michael said that he could learn it from the book, he was learning it.

“OK, you learn it,” his father said, “and I’ll play it with you.”

This was a great thing. Another person who knew chess. Maybe they would even buy a chessboard. Michael finished the book in less than a week. He knew chess. For an hour he answered every question his father put to him.

“Well, I don’t believe this,” his father said. “But you know how to play chess. All you need is a chess set.” Michael’s father went downtown. When he returned home, he had a chess set that surpassed all Michael’s visions. It was made up not of symbols-a horse’s head, a castle, a bishop’s cap-but of fully delineated figures. The knight sat upon his horse with its front feet raised; the bishop held his hands in prayer. The queen had long hair beneath her crown. The rook was a castle riding upon the back of an elephant.

Of course it was made of plastic, this thing. It had come from D. H. Holmes department store. But it was so much finer than anything pictured in the book on chess that Michael was overcome by the sight of it. Never mind that his father called the knight “my horse man.” They were playing chess. And thereafter they played often.

But the great accidental discovery was not that Michael’s father knew how to play chess, or that he had the kindness in him to buy such a beautiful set. That was all very well and good. And of course playing chess drew father and son together. But the great accidental discovery was that Michael could absorb something more than stories from books … that they could lead him to something other than painful dreaming and wanting.

He had learned something from a book which others believed must be learned from doing or practice.

He became more courageous in the library after that. He talked to the librarians at the desk. He learned about the “subjects catalog.” And haphazardly and obsessively, he began to research a whole spectrum of subjects.

The first was cars. He found lots of books in the library on cars. He learned all about an engine from the books, and all about makes of cars, and quietly dazzled his father and his grandfather with this knowledge.

Then he looked up fire fighters and fires in the catalog. He read up on the history of the companies that developed in the big cities. He read about the fire engines and ladder trucks and how they were made, and all about great fires in history, such as the Chicago fire, and the Triangle Factory fire, and once again he was able to discuss all this with his father and grandfather.

Michael was thrilled. He felt now that he had great power. And he proceeded to his secret agenda, not confiding this to anyone. Music was his first secret subject.

He chose the most babyfied books at first-this subject was hard-and then he moved on to the illustrated histories for young adults which told him all about the boy genius Mozart, and poor deaf Beethoven, and crazy Paganini who had supposedly sold his soul to the devil. He learned the definitions of symphony and concerto and sonata. He learned about the musical staff, quarter notes, half notes, major and minor key. He learned the names of all the symphonic instruments.

Then Michael went on to houses. And in no time, he came to understand the Greek Revival style and the Italianate style and the late Victorian style, and what distinguished these various types of buildings. He learned to identify Corinthian columns and Doric columns, to pick out side hall houses and raised cottages. With his new knowledge, he roamed the Garden District, his love for the things he saw deeply and quietly intensified.

Ah, he had hit the jackpot with all this. There was no reason to live in confusion anymore. He could “read up” on anything. On Saturday afternoons, he went through dozens of books on art, architecture, Greek mythology, science. He even read books on modern painting, and opera and ballet, which made him ashamed and afraid that his father might sneak up behind him and make fun of him.

The third thing that happened that year was a concert at the Municipal Auditorium. Michael’s father, like many firemen, took extra jobs in his time off; and that year he was working the concession stand at the auditorium, selling bottled soda, and Michael went with him one night to help out. It was a school night and he shouldn’t have gone at all, but he wanted to go. He wanted to see the Municipal Auditorium and what went on there, so his mother said OK.

During the first half of the program, before the intermission during which Michael would have to help his father, and after which they would pack up and go home, Michael went inside and up to the very top of the auditorium where the seats were empty, and he sat there waiting to see what the concert would be like. It reminded him of the students in The Red Shoes, actually, the students in the balcony, waiting up there with such expectation. And sure enough the place began to fill with beautifully dressed people-the uptowners of New Orleans-and the orchestra gathered to tune up in the pit. Even the strange thin man from First Street was there. Michael caught a glimpse of him far below, his face turned upward, as though he could actually see Michael all the way in the top row.

What followed swept Michael away. Isaac Stern, the great violinist, played that night, and it was the Beethoven Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, one of the most violently beautiful and simply eloquent pieces of music Michael had ever heard. Never once did it leave him in confusion. Never once did it leave him out.

Long after the concert was over, he was able to whistle the principal melody, and to remember as he did so the great sweet sensuous sound of the full orchestra and the thin heartbreaking notes that came from Isaac Stern’s violin.

But Michael’s life was poisoned by the longing created in him by this experience. In fact, he suffered, in the days that followed, possibly the worst dissatisfaction with his world that he had ever experienced. But he did not let anyone know this. He kept it sealed inside of him, just as he kept secret his knowledge of the subjects he studied at the library. He feared the snobbishness growing in himself, the loathing he knew that he could feel for those he loved if he let such a feeling have life.

And Michael couldn’t bear not to love his family. He couldn’t bear to be ashamed of them. He couldn’t bear the pettiness and the ingratitude of such a thing.

He could hate the people down the block. That was fine. But he had to love, and be loyal to, and be in harmony with, those under his own roof.

Reasonably, naturally, he was devoted to his hardworking grandmother who always had cabbage and ham boiling on the stove when he came in. She spent her life it seemed either cooking or ironing or hanging out clothes on backyard lines from a wicker basket.

And he loved his grandfather, a little man with tiny black eyes who was always on the front steps waiting for Michael after school. He had wonderful stories to tell of the old days and Michael never tired of them.

And then there was his father, the fire fighter, the hero. How could Michael not appreciate such a man? Often Michael went over to the firehouse on Washington Avenue to see him. He sat around, just one of the guys, dying to go out with them when an alarm came in, but always forbidden to do it. He loved to see the truck tearing out, to hear the sirens and the bells. Never mind that he lived in dread that he might someday have to be a fireman. A fireman and nothing else. Living in a double shotgun cottage.

How his mother managed to love these people was another story, and one Michael could not entirely understand. He tried day in and day out to mitigate her quiet unhappiness. He was her closest and only friend. But nothing could save his mother, and he knew it. She was a lost soul down there in the Irish Channel, a woman speaking better and dressing better than those around her, begging to go back to work as a sales clerk in a department store, and always being told no; a woman who lived for her paperback novels late at night-books by John Dickson Carr and Daphne Du Maurier and Frances Parkinson Keyes-sitting on the living room couch, dressed only in a slip on account of the heat, when everyone else was asleep, drinking wine slowly and carefully from a bottle wrapped in brown paper.

“Miss San Francisco” Michael’s father called her. “My mother does everything for you, you know that?” he’d say to her. He stared at her with utter contempt on the very few occasions when she drank too much wine and her voice became slurry. But he never moved to stop her. After all, she rarely got that bad. It was just the idea-a woman sitting there drinking like a man, from a bottle all evening long. Michael knew that was what his father thought, no one had to tell him.

And maybe Michael’s father was afraid she’d leave if he tried to boss her or control her. He was proud of her prettiness, her slender body, and even the nice way that she talked. He even got the wine for her now and then, bottles of port and sherry which he himself detested. “Sticky sweet stuff for women,” he said to Michael. But it was also the stuff that winos drank and Michael knew it.

Did his mother hate his father? Michael never really knew for sure. At some point in his childhood, he came to know that his mother was some eight years older than his father. But the difference was not apparent, and his father was a good-looking man and his mother seemed to think so. She was kind to her husband most of the time, but then she was kind to everyone. Yet nothing in the world was going to make her get pregnant again, she often said, and there were quarrels, awful muffled quarrels behind the only closed door in the little shotgun flat, the door to the back bedroom.

There was a story about his mother and father, but Michael never knew if it was true. His aunt told him the story after his mother’s death. It was that his parents had fallen in love in San Francisco, near the end of the war, while his father was in the navy, and that his father had looked very handsome in his uniform and had the charm in those days to really get the girls.

“He looked like you, Mike,” his aunt said years later. “Black hair and blue eyes and those big arms, just like you. And you remember your father’s voice, it was a beautiful voice, kind of deep and smooth. Even with that Irish Channel accent.”

And so Michael’s mother had “fallen hard” for him, and then when he went overseas again he had written Michael’s mother lovely poetic letters, wooing her and breaking her heart. But the letters had not been written by Michael’s father. They had been written by his best friend in the service, an educated man on the same ship, who had laid on the metaphors and the quotes from books. And Michael’s mother never guessed.

Michael’s mother had actually fallen in love with those letters. And when she’d found herself pregnant with Michael, she went south trusting in those letters, and was received at once by the common good-hearted family who prepared for the wedding in St. Alphonsus Church immediately and had it all done right as soon as Michael’s father could get leave.

What a shock it must have been to her, the little treeless street, the tiny house with each room opening onto the other, and the mother-in-law who waited hand and foot on the men and never took a chair herself during supper.

Michael’s aunt said that Michael’s father had one time confessed the story of the letters to his mother when Michael was still a baby, and that Michael’s mother had gone wild and tried to kill him and she had burned all the letters in the backyard. But then she’d quieted down and tried to make a go of it. Here she was with a little child. She was past thirty. Her mother and father were dead; she had only her sister and brother out in San Francisco, and she had no choice but to stay with the father of her child, and besides the Currys were not bad people.

Her mother-in-law in particular she had loved for taking her in when she was pregnant. And that part-about the love between the two women-Michael knew had been true, because Michael’s mother took care of the old woman during her final illness.

Both his grandparents died the year Michael started high school, his grandmother in the spring and his grandfather two months after. And though many aunts and uncles had died over the years, these were the first funerals that Michael ever attended, and they were to be engraved forever in his memory.

They were absolutely dazzling affairs with all the accoutrements of refinement which Michael loved. In fact, it troubled him deeply that the furnishings of Lonigan and Sons, the funeral parlor, and the limousines with their gray velvet upholstery and even the flowers and the finely dressed pall bearers seemed connected to the atmosphere of the elegant movies Michael so valued. Here were soft-spoken men and women, fine carpets and carved furniture, rich colors and textures, and the perfume of lilies and roses, and people tempering their natural meanness and crude ways.

It was as if when you died you went into the world of Rebecca or The Red Shoes or A Song to Remember. You had beautiful things for a final day or two before they put you in the ground.

It was a connection that intrigued him for hours. When he saw The Bride of Frankenstein for a second time at the Happy Hour on Magazine Street, he watched only the great houses in the picture, and he listened to the music of the voices and studied the clothes more than anything else. He wished he could talk about all this to somebody, but when he tried to tell his girlfriend, Marie Louise, she didn’t know what he was talking about. She thought it was dumb to go to the library. She wouldn’t go to foreign movies.

He saw that same look in her eyes that he had seen so often in his father’s eyes. It wasn’t fear of the unknown thing. It was disgust. And he didn’t want to be disgusting.

Besides, he was in high school now. Everything was changing. Sometimes he was really afraid that maybe now was the time that his dreams were supposed to die and the real world was supposed to get him. Seems other people felt that way. Marie Louise’s father, sitting on his front steps, looked at him coldly one night and demanded: “What makes you think you’re going to college? Your daddy got the money for Loyola?” He spat on the pavement, looked Michael up and down. There it was again, the disgust.

Michael had shrugged. There was no state school in those days in New Orleans. “Maybe I’ll go to LSU at Baton Rouge,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get a scholarship.”

“Bull Durham!” the guy muttered under his breath. “Why don’t you think about being half as good a fireman as your father?”

And maybe they were all in the right, and it was time to think of other things. Michael had grown to almost six feet, a prodigious height for an Irish Channel kid, and a record for his branch of the Curry family. His father bought an old Packard and taught him how to drive in a week’s time, and then he got a part-time job delivering flowers for a florist on St. Charles Avenue.

But it was not until his sophomore year that his old ideas began to give way, that he himself began to forget his ambitions. He went out for football, made first string, and suddenly he was out there on the field in the stadium at City Park and the kids were screaming. “Brought down by Michael Curry,” they said over the loudspeakers. Marie Louise told him in a swooning voice on the phone that as far as she was concerned he had taken over her will, that with him she would do “anything.”

And these were good days for Redemptorist School, the school which had always been the poorest white school in the city of New Orleans. A new principal had come, and she climbed on a bench in the school yard and shouted through a microphone to inflame the kids before the games! She sent huge crowds to City Park to cheer. Soon she had scores of students out collecting quarters to build a gym, and the team was working small miracles. It was winning game after game, by sheer force of will it seemed, just scoring those yards even when the opposition was playing better football.

Michael still hit the books, but the games were the real focus of his emotional life that year. Football was perfect for his aggression, his strength, even his frustration. He was one of the stars at school. He could feel the girls looking at him when he walked up the aisle at eight o’clock Mass every morning.

And then the dream came true. Redemptorist won the City Championship. The underdogs had done it, the kids from the other side of Magazine, the kids who spoke that funny way so that everyone knew they were from the Irish Channel.

Even the Times-Picayune was full of ecstatic praise. And the gymnasium drive was in high gear, and Marie Louise and Michael went “all the way” and then suffered agonies waiting to find out if Marie Louise was pregnant.

Michael might have lost it all then. He wanted nothing more than to score touchdowns, be with Marie Louise, and make money so he could take her out in the Packard. On Mardi Gras day, he and Marie Louise dressed as pirates, went down to the French Quarter, drank beer, snuggled and necked on a bench in Jackson Square. As summer came on, she talked more and more about getting married.

Michael didn’t know what to do. He felt he belonged with Marie Louise, yet he could not talk to her. She hated the movies he took her to see-Lust for Life, or Marty, or On the Waterfront. And when he talked about college, she told him he was dreaming.

Then came the winter of Michael’s senior year. It was bitter cold, and New Orleans experienced its first snowfall in a century. When the schools let out early, Michael went walking alone through the Garden District, its streets beautifully blanketed in white, watching the soft soundless snow descend all around him. He did not want to share this moment with Marie Louise. He shared it instead with the houses and the trees he loved, marveling at the spectacle of the snow-trimmed porches and cast-iron railings.

Kids played in the streets; cars drove slowly on the ice, skidding dangerously at the corners. For hours the lovely carpet of snow stayed on the ground; then Michael finally went home, his hands so cold he could scarcely turn the key in the lock. He found his mother crying.

His dad had been killed in a warehouse fire at three that afternoon; he’d been trying to save another fire fighter.

It was over for Michael and his mother in the Irish Channel. By late May, the house on Annunciation Street was sold. And one hour after Michael received his high school diploma before the altar of St. Alphonsus Church, he and his mother were on a Greyhound bus, headed for California.

Now Michael would get to have “nice things” and go to college and mix with people who spoke good English. All this turned out to be true.

His Aunt Vivian lived in a pretty apartment on Golden Gate Park, full of dark furniture and real oil paintings. They stayed with her until they could get their own place a few blocks away. And Michael at once applied to the state college for the freshman year, his father’s insurance money taking care of everything.

Michael loved San Francisco. It was always cold, true, and miserably windy and barren. Nevertheless he loved the somber colors of the city, which struck him as quite particular, ochers and olive greens and dark Roman reds and deep grays. The great ornate Victorian houses reminded him of those beautiful New Orleans mansions.

Taking summer courses at the downtown extension of the state college, to make up for the math and science which he lacked, he had no time to miss home, to think of Marie Louise, or of girls at all. When he wasn’t studying, he was busy trying to figure things put-how San Francisco worked, what made it so different from New Orleans.

It seemed the great underclass to which he had belonged in New Orleans did not exist in this city, where even policemen and fire fighters spoke well and dressed well and owned expensive houses. It was impossible to tell from what part of town a person came. The pavements themselves were amazingly clean, and an air of restraint seemed to affect the smallest exchanges between people.

When he went to Golden Gate Park, Michael marveled at the nature of the crowds, that they seemed to add to the beauty of the dark green landscape, rather than to be invading it. They rode their glamorous foreign bicycles on the paths, picnicked in small groups on the velvet grass, or sat before the band shell listening to the Sunday concert. The museums of the city were a revelation, too, full of real Old Masters, and they were crowded with average people on Sundays, people with children, who seemed to take all this quite for granted.

Michael stole weekend hours from his studies so that he could roam the De Young, and gaze in awe at the great El Greco painting of Saint Francis of Assisi, with its haunted expression and gaunt gray cheeks.

“Is this all of America?” Michael asked. It was as if he’d come from another country into the world he had only glimpsed in motion pictures or television. Not the foreign films of the great houses and the smoking jackets, of course, but the later American films, and television shows, in which everything was neat and civilized.

And here Michael’s mother was happy, really happy as he had never seen her, putting money in the bank from her job at I. Magnin where she sold cosmetics as she had years ago, and visiting with her sister on weekends and sometimes her older brother, “Uncle Michael,” a genteel drunk who sold “fine china” at Gumps on Post Street.

One weekend night they went to an old-fashioned theater on Geary Street to see a live stage production of My Fair Lady. Michael loved it. After that they went often to “little theaters” to see remarkable plays-Albert Camus’s Caligula and Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths and a peculiar mishmash of soliloquies based on the work of James Joyce called Ulysses in Nighttown.

Michael was entranced with all this. Uncle Michael promised him that when the opera season came he would take him to see La Bohème. Michael was speechless with gratitude.

It was as if his childhood in New Orleans had never really happened.

He loved the downtown of San Francisco, with its noisy cable cars and overflowing streets, the big dime store on Powell and Market, where he could stand reading at the paperback rack, unnoticed, for hours.

He loved the flower stands which sold bouquets of red roses for almost nothing, and the fancy stores on Union Square. He loved the little foreign movie theaters, of which there were at least a dozen, where he and his mother went to see Never on Sunday with Melina Mercouri and La Dolce Vita made by Fellini, absolutely the most wonderful film Michael had ever seen. There were also comedies with Alec Guinness, and dark murky philosophical films from Sweden by Ingmar Bergman, and lots of other wonderful films from Japan and from Spain and from France. Many people in San Francisco went to see such movies. There was nothing secret about them at all.

He loved having coffee with other summer students in the big garishly lighted Foster’s Restaurant on Sutter Street, talking for the first time in his life with Orientals and Jews from New York, and educated colored people who spoke perfect English, and older men and women who were stealing time from families and jobs to go back to school just for the sheer joy of it.

It was during this period that Michael came to comprehend the little mystery of his mother’s family. By bits and pieces he put it together that they had once been very rich, these people. And it was Michael’s mother’s paternal grandmother who had squandered the entire fortune. Nothing was left from her but one carved chair and three heavily framed landscape paintings. Yet she was spoken of as something beyond wonderful, a goddess one would think, who had traveled the whole world, and ate caviar, and managed to put her son through Harvard before going completely bankrupt.

As for the son-Michael’s mother’s father-he had drunk himself to death after the loss of his wife, a “beautiful” Irish-American girl, from the Mission District of San Francisco. Nobody wanted to talk about “Mother” and it soon came clear that “Mother” had committed suicide. “Father,” who drank unceasingly until he had a fatal stroke, left his three children a small annuity. Michael’s mother and her sister Vivian finished their education at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, and went into genteel occupations. Uncle Michael was “the spitting image of dad,” they said with a sigh, when he had fallen asleep from his cognac on the sofa.

Uncle Michael was the only salesman that Michael ever knew who could sell people things while he himself was sitting down. He would come back to Gumps, drunk from lunch, and sit there, flushed and exhausted and merely point to the beautiful china, explaining everything from his chair, while the young customers, couples soon to be married, made up their minds. People seemed to find him charming. He did know all about fine china, and he was a terribly nice guy.

This gradual education regarding his mother’s family illuminated much for Michael. As time went on he came to see that his mother’s values were essentially those of the very rich though she herself did not know it. She went to see foreign films because they were fun, not for cultural enhancement. And she wanted Michael to go to college because that’s where he “ought” to be. It was perfectly natural to her to shop at Young Man’s Fancy and buy him the crew-neck sweaters and button-down shirts that made him look like a prep-school boy. But of middle-class drive or ambition she and her sister and her brother really knew nothing. Her work appealed to her because I. Magnin was the finest store in town, and she met nice people there. In her leisure hours, she drank her ever increasing amounts of wine, read her novels, visited with friends, and was a happy, satisfied person.

It was the wine that killed her eventually. For as the years passed she became a ladylike drunk, sipping all evening long from a crystal glass behind closed doors, and invariably passing out before bedtime. Finally one night, late, she struck her head in a bathroom fall, put a towel to the wound and went back to sleep, never realizing that she was slowly bleeding to death. She was cold when Michael finally broke down the door. That was in the house on Liberty Street which Michael had bought and restored for his family, though Uncle Michael was gone by then, too, of drink also, though in his case they had called it a stroke.

But in spite of her own lassitude and final indifference to the world at large, Michael’s mother was always proud of Michael’s ambition. She understood his drive because she understood him, and he was the one thing that had given her own life true meaning.

And Michael’s ambition was a raging flame when he finally entered San Francisco State College in the fall as a matriculating freshman.

Here, on an enormous college campus amid full-time students from all walks of life, Michael felt inconspicuous and powerful and ready to start his true education. It was like those old days in the library. Only now he got credit for what he read. He got credit for wanting to understand all the mysteries of life which had so provoked him in years past when he’d hidden his curiosity from those who might ridicule him.

He could not believe his luck. Going from class to class, deliriously anonymous among the great proletarian student body with their backpacks and their brogans, Michael listened, rapt, to the lectures of his professors and the stunningly clever questions asked by the students around him. Peppering his schedules with electives in art, music, current events, comparative literature, and even drama, he gradually acquired a true old-fashioned liberal arts education.

He majored in history finally because he did well in that subject and could write the papers and pass the tests, and because he knew that his latest ambition-to be an architect-was quite beyond him. He could not master the math, no matter how he tried. And in spite of all his efforts, he could not make the grades that would admit him to a School of Architecture for four years of postgraduate study. Also he loved history because it was a social science in which people tried to stand back from the world and figure out how it worked. And this is what Michael had been doing ever since he was a kid in the Irish Channel.

Synthesis, theory, overview-this was utterly natural to him. And because he had come from such an alien and otherworldly place, because he was so astonished by the modern world of California, the perspective of the historian was a comfort to him. He liked above all to read well-written books about cities and centuries-books, that is, which tried to describe places or eras in terms of their origins, their sociological and technological advances, their class struggle, their art and literature.

Michael was more than content. As the insurance money ran out, he went to work part-time with a carpenter who specialized in restoring the beautiful old Victorians of San Francisco. He began to study books on houses again, as he had in the old days.

By the time he received his bachelor’s degree, his old friends from New Orleans would not have known him. He had still the football player’s build, the massive shoulders and the heavy chest, and the carpentry kept him in fine form. And his black curly hair, his large blue eyes, and the light freckles on his cheeks remained his distinctive features. But he wore dark-rimmed glasses now to read, and his common dress was a cable-knit sweater and Donegal tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. He even smoked a pipe, which he carried always in his right coat pocket.

He was at age twenty-one equally at home hammering away on a wood-frame house or typing rapidly with two fingers a term paper on “The Witchcraft Persecutions in Germany in the 1600s.”

Two months after he started his graduate work in history, he began to study, right along with his college work, for the state contractor’s examination. He was working as a painter then, and learning also the plastering trade and hew to lay ceramic tile-anything in the building trades for which anyone would hire him.

He went on with school because a deep insecurity would not allow him to do otherwise, but he knew by this time that no amount of academic pleasure could ever satisfy his need to work with his hands, to get out in the air, to climb ladders, swing a hammer, and feel at the end of the day that great sublime physical exhaustion. Nothing could ever take the place of his beautiful houses.

He loved to see the results of his work-roofs mended, staircases restored, floors brought back from hopeless grime to a high luster. He loved to strip and lacquer the finely crafted old newel posts, balustrades, and door frames. And always the learner, he studied under every craftsman with whom he worked. He quizzed the architects when he could; he made copies of blueprints for further examination. He pored over books, magazines, and catalogs devoted to restoration and Victoriana.

It seemed to him sometimes that he loved houses more than he loved human beings; he loved them the way that seamen love ships; and he would walk alone after work through the rooms to which he’d given new life, lovingly touching the windowsills, the brass knobs, the silk smooth plaster. He could hear a great house speaking to him.

He finished the master’s in history within two years, just as the campuses of America were erupting with student protests against the American war in Vietnam and the use of psychedelic drugs became a fad among the young who were pouring into San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury. But well before that he had passed the contractor’s examination and formed his own company.

The world of the flower children, of political revolution and personal transformation through drugs, was something he never fully understood, and something which never really touched him. He danced at the Avalon Ballroom to the music of the Rolling Stones; he smoked grass; he burned incense now and then; he played the records of Bismilla Kahn and Ravi Shankar. He even went with a young girlfriend to the great “Be In” in Golden Gate Park where Timothy Leary told his acolytes to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” But all this was only mildly fascinating to him.

The historian in him could not succumb to the shallow, often silly revolutionary rhetoric he heard all around; he could only laugh quietly at the dining table Marxism of his friends who seemed to know nothing personally of the working man. And he watched in horror when those he loved destroyed their peace of mind utterly, if not their very brains, with powerful hallucinogens.

But he learned from all this; he learned as he sought to understand. And the great psychedelic love of color and pattern, of Eastern music and design had its inevitable influence on his esthetics. Years later, he would maintain that the great sixties revolution in consciousness had benefited every person in the nation-that the renovation of old houses, the creation of gorgeous public buildings with flower-filled plazas and parks, the erection even of the modern shopping malls with marble floors, fountains, and flower beds-all this directly stemmed from those crucial years when the hippies of the Haight Ashbury had hung ferns in the windows of their flats and draped their junk furniture with brilliantly colored Indian bedspreads, when the girls had fixed the proverbial flowers in their free-flowing tresses, and the men had discarded their drab clothes for shirts of bright colors and had let their hair grow full and long.

There was never any doubt in his mind that this period of turmoil and mass drug taking and wild music had borne directly on his career. All over the nation young couples turned their backs on the square little houses of the modem suburbs and, with a new love of texture and detail and varied forms, turned their attention to the gracious old homes of the inner city. San Francisco had such houses beyond count.

Michael had perpetually a waiting list of eager customers. Great Expectations could renovate, restore, build from scratch. Soon he had projects going all over town. He loved nothing better than to walk into a broken-down, moldy Victorian on Divisadero Street and say, “Yeah, I can give you a palazzo here in six months.” His work won awards. He became famous for the beautiful and detailed drawings he could make. He undertook some projects without architectural guidance at all. All his dreams were coming true.

He was thirty-two when he acquired a vintage town house on Liberty Street, restored it inside and out, providing apartments for his mother and his aunt, and there he lived on the top floor, with a view of the downtown lights, in exactly the style he’d always wanted. The books, the lace curtains, the piano, the fine antiques-he possessed all these things. He built a great hillside deck where he could sit and drink up the fickle northern California sun. The eternal fog of the oceanfront frequently burned off before it reached the hills of his district. And so he had captured-it seemed-not only the luxury and refinement he’d glimpsed those many years ago in the South, but a little of the warmth and sunshine he so fondly remembered.

By the age of thirty-five he was a self-made man and an educated one. He had netted and socked away his first million in a portfolio of municipal bonds. He loved San Francisco because he felt that it had given him everything he ever wanted.

Though Michael had invented himself as many a person has done in California, creating a style perfectly in tune with the style of so many other self-invented people, he was always partly that tough kid from the Irish Channel who had grown up using a piece of bread to push his peas onto his fork.

He never entirely erased his harsh accent, and sometimes when he was dealing with workmen on the job, he would slip back into it entirely. He never lost some of his crude habits or ideas either, and he understood that about himself.

His way of dealing with all this was perfect for California. He simply let it show. After all, it was only part of him. He thought nothing of saying “Where’s the meat and potatoes?” when he walked into some fancy nouvelle cuisine restaurant (he did actually like meat and potatoes a lot and ate them whenever it was possible, to the exclusion of other things), or of letting his Camel cigarette hang on his lip when he talked, just the way his father had always done.

And he got along with his liberal friends principally because he did not bother to argue with them, and while they were shouting at each other over pitchers of beer about foreign countries where they had never been and would never go, he was drawing pictures of houses on napkins.

When he did share his ideas, it was in a highly abstract way, from a remove, for he felt like an outsider in California really, an outsider in the American twentieth century. And he wasn’t the least bit surprised that nobody paid much attention to him.

But whatever the politics involved, he always connected most truly with those who were passionate as he was-craftsmen, artists, musicians, people who went about in the grip of obsession. And an amazing number of his friends and lovers were Russian-American Jews. They really seemed to understand his overall desire to live a meaningful life, to intervene in the world-even if in a very small way-with his visions. He had dreams of building his own great houses; of transforming whole city blocks, of developing whole enclaves of cafés, bookstores, bed-and-breakfast inns within old San Francisco neighborhoods.

Now and then, especially after his mother died, he’d think about the past in New Orleans, which seemed ever more otherworldly and fantastical. People in California thought they were free, but how conformist they were, he reasoned. Why, everybody coming from Kansas and Detroit and New York just reached for the same liberal ideas, the same styles of thinking, dressing, feeling. In fact, sometimes the conformity was downright laughable. Friends really said things like “Isn’t that the one we’re boycotting this week?” and “Aren’t we supposed to be against that?”

Back home, he had left a city of bigots perhaps, but it was also a city of characters. He could hear the old Irish Channel storytellers in his head, his grandfather telling about how he’d snuck into the Germans’ church once when he was a boy just to hear what German Latin sounded like. And how in the days of Grandma Gelfand Curry-the one German ancestor in the entire tribe-they’d baptized the babies in St. Mary’s to make her happy and then snuck them over to St. Alphonsus to be baptized again and right and proper in the Irish church, the same priest presiding patiently at both ceremonies.

What characters his uncles had been, those old men who died one by one as he was growing up. He could still hear them talking about swimming the Mississippi back and forth (which nobody did in Michael’s day) and diving off the warehouses when they were drunk, of tying big paddles to the pedals of their bikes to try to make them work in the water.

Everything had been a tale, it seemed. Talk could fill the summer night of Cousin Jamie Joe Curry in Algiers who became such a religious fanatic they had to chain him to a post all day long, and of Uncle Timothy who went nuts from the Linotype ink so that he stuffed all the cracks around the doors and windows with newspapers and spent his time cutting out thousands and thousands of paper dolls.

And what about beautiful Aunt Lelia, who had loved the Italian boy when she was young and never knew till she was old and dried up that her brothers had beaten him up one night and driven him out of the Irish Channel. No dagos for them. All her long life mourning for that boy. She had turned the supper table over in a rage when they told her.

Even some of the nuns had had fabulous stories to tell-old ones like Sister Bridget Marie who had substituted for two weeks when Michael was in the eighth grade, a really sweet little sister who still had an Irish brogue. She didn’t teach them a thing. She just told them tales about the Irish Ghost of Petticoat Loose, and witches-witches, can you believe it! – in the Garden District.

And some of the best talk in those times had been merely talk of life itself-of how it was to bottle your own beer, to live with only two oil lamps in a house, and how they’d had to fill the portable bathtub on Friday night so everybody could take a bath before the living room fireplace. Just life. Laundry boiling over a wood fire in the backyard, water from cisterns covered with green moss. Mosquito netting tucked in tight before you went to sleep. Things now probably utterly forgotten.

It would come back to him in the oddest flashes. He’d remember the smell of the linen napkins when his grandmother ironed them before putting them in the deep drawers of the walnut sideboard. He’d remember the taste of crab gumbo with crackers and beer; the scary sound of the drums at the Mardi Gras parades. He’d see the ice man rushing up the back steps, the giant block of ice on his padded shoulder. And over and over those marvelous voices, which had seemed so coarse then, but seemed now to be possessed of a rich vocabulary, a flare for the dramatic phrase, a sheer love of language.

Tales of great fires, and the famous streetcar labor riots, and the cotton loaders who had screwed the bales into the holds of the ships with giant iron screws, singing as they worked, in the days before the cotton compressors.

It seemed a great world in retrospect. Everything was so antiseptic in California sometimes. Same clothes, same cars, same causes. Maybe Michael didn’t really belong here. Maybe he never would. Yet surely he didn’t belong back there. Why, he hadn’t seen the place in all these years …

He wished he’d paid more attention to those guys in those days. He’d been too afraid. He wished he could talk to his dad now, sit with him and all those other crazy firemen outside the firehouse on Washington Avenue.

Had the oak trees really been that big? Had they really arched completely over the street so that you gazed down a tunnel of green all the way to the river?

He’d remember the color of twilight as he walked home late after football practice, along Annunciation Street. How beautiful the orange and pink lantana pushing through the little iron fences. Ah, was there a sky so purely incandescent as that sky, changing from pink to violet and then finally to gold over the tops of the shotgun cottages. There could not have been such an unearthly place.

And the Garden District, ah, the Garden District. His memories of it were so ethereal as to be suspect.

Sometimes he dreamed of it-a warm glowing paradise where he found himself walking among splendid palaces, surrounded by ever-blooming flowers, and shimmering green leaves. Then he’d wake and think, Yes, I was back there, walking down First Street. I was home. But it couldn’t really be like that, not really, and he’d want to see it all again.

Particular houses would come back to him-the great rambling house on Coliseum and Third, painted pure white even to its cast-iron railings. And the double-galleried side hall houses he had always loved the most, with their four front columns up and down, their long flanks, and high twin chimneys.

He’d remember even people whom he had often glimpsed on his regular walks, old men in seersucker suits and straw hats, ladies with canes, black nurses in crisp blue cotton uniforms pushing white babies in carriages. And that man, that strange, immaculately dressed man whom he so often saw on First Street in that deep overgrown garden.

He wanted to go back to check memory against reality. He wanted to see the little house on Annunciation Street where he had grown up. He wanted to see St. Alphonsus where he’d been an altar boy when he was ten. And St. Mary’s across the street with its Gothic arches and wooden saints, where he had also served Mass. Were the murals on the ceiling of St. Alphonsus really so lovely?

Sometimes as he drifted off to sleep, he would imagine himself in that church again on Christmas Eve when it had been packed for Midnight Mass. Candles blazed on the altars. He would hear the euphoric hymn “Adeste Fideles.” Christmas Eve, with the rain gusting in the doors, and at home after, the little tree glowing in the corner and the gas heater blazing on the grate. How beautiful those tiny blue flames had been. How beautiful that little tree, with its lights which meant the Light of the World, and its ornaments which meant the gifts of the Wise Men, and its green-smelling branches which meant the promise of the summer to come even in the depth of the winter’s cold.

There came to him a memory of a Midnight Mass procession in which the little girls of the first grade had been dressed as angels as they came through the sanctuary and down the main aisle of the church. He could smell the Christmas greens, mingling with the sweetness of the flowers and the burning wax. The little girls had been singing of the Christ Child. He had seen Rita Mae Dwyer and Marie Louise Guidry and his cousin, Patricia Anne Becker, and all the other pesty little girls he knew, but how beautiful they had looked in their little white gowns with stiff cloth wings. Not just little monsters anymore but real angels. That was the magic of Christmas. And when he got home after, all his presents were under the lighted tree.

Processions. There were so many. But the ones to the Virgin Mary he never really loved. She was too confused in his mind with the mean nuns who hurt the boys so much, and he could not feel a great devotion to her, which had saddened him until he was old enough not to care.

But Christmas he never forgot. It was the one remnant of his religion which never left him, for he sensed behind it a great, shimmering history that went back and back through the millennia to dark forests where fires blazed and pagans danced. He loved to remember the crib with the smiling infant, and the solemn moment at midnight when Christ was born into the world again.

In fact, ever after in California, Christmas Eve was the one day Michael held sacred. He always celebrated it as others celebrated New Year’s-for it was for him the symbol of a new beginning: of time redeeming you and all your failings so that you might start again. Even when he was alone he sat up with his glass of wine until midnight, the light of the little tree the only illumination in his room. And that last Christmas, there had been snow-of all things, snow-snow falling softly and soundlessly in the wind at the very moment perhaps when his father had gone through the burning warehouse roof on Tchoupitoulas Street.

Somehow or other, Michael never did go home.

He just never got around to it. He was always struggling to complete a job already over deadline. And what little vacation time he had he spent in Europe, or in New York roaming the great monuments and museums. His various lovers wanted it that way over the years. Who wanted to see Mardi Gras in New Orleans when they could go to Rio? Why go to the South of the United States when they could go to the South of France?

But often Michael reflected that he had acquired everything he had ever longed for on those old Garden District walks, and he ought to go back there to take stock, to see whether or not he was deceiving himself. Were there not moments when he felt empty? When he felt as if he were waiting for something, something of extreme importance, and he did not know what that was?

The one thing he had not found was a great and enduring love, but he knew this would come in time, and maybe then he would take his bride with him to visit his home, and he wouldn’t be alone as he walked the cemetery paths or the old sidewalks. Who knows? Maybe he could even stay for a while, wandering the old streets.

Michael did have several affairs over the years, and at least two of these were like marriages. Both women were Jewish, of Russian descent, passionate, spiritual, brilliant and independent. And Michael was always painfully proud of these polished and clever ladies. These affairs were born in talk as much as in sensuality. Talk the night long after making love, talk over pizza and beer, talk as the sun came up, that’s what Michael had always done with his lovers.

He learned much from these relationships. His egoless openness was highly seductive to these women, and he soaked up whatever they had to teach, rather effortlessly. They loved traveling with him to New York or the Riviera or Greece and seeing his charming enthusiasm and deep feeling for what he beheld. They shared their favorite music with him, their favorite painters, their favorite foods, their ideas about furniture, clothes. Elizabeth instructed him in how to buy a proper Brooks Brothers suit and Paul Stewart shirts. Judith took him to Bullock and Jones for his first Burberry and to fancy salons for proper haircuts, and taught him how to order European wines and how to cook pasta and why baroque music was just as good as the classical music he loved.

He laughed at all this, but he learned it. Both women teased him about his freckles and his heavyweight build, and the way his hair hung in his big blue eyes, and how visiting parents loved him, and about his bad little boy charm, and how splendid he looked in black tie. Elizabeth called him her “tough guy with the heart of gold,” and Judith nicknamed him Sluggo. He took them to Golden Glove boxing matches and basketball games and to good bars for drinking beer, and taught them how to appreciate soccer and rugby games in Golden Gate Park on Sundays if they didn’t already know it, and even how to street-fight if they wanted to learn. But that was more of a joke than anything serious. He also took them to the opera and to the symphony, which he attended with religious fervor. And they introduced him to Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, and the Kronos Quartet.

Michael’s receptiveness, and his passion, tended to seduce everybody.

But his meanness charmed his girlfriends too, almost always. He could, when angry, or even slightly threatened, revert to the grim-faced Irish Channel kid in a moment, and when he did this, he did it with great conviction and confidence and a certain unconscious sexuality. Women were impressed by his mechanical skills as well, his talent with the hammer and nails, and by his fearlessness.

Fear of humiliation, yes, that he secretly understood, and there were a few irrational childhood fears which still haunted him. But fear of anything real? As an adult, he did not know the meaning of it. When there was a cry in the night, Michael was the first one down the steps to investigate.

This was not so common among highly educated men. Neither was Michael’s characteristically direct and lusting and enthusiastic approach to physical sex. He liked it plain and simple, or fancier if that’s what they wanted; and he liked it in the morning when he first woke up as well as at night. This stole hearts for him.

The first breakup-with Elizabeth-was Michael’s fault, he felt, because he was just too young and had not remained faithful. Elizabeth got fed up with his other “adventures,” though he swore they “didn’t mean a thing,” and finally packed her bags and left him. He was heartbroken and contrite. He followed her to New York, but it was no good. He came back home to his empty flat and got drunk off and on for six months of mourning. He could not believe it when Elizabeth married a professor at Harvard, and he was jubilant when a year later she got divorced.

He flew to New York to console her, they had a fight in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he cried for hours on the flight back. In fact, he looked so sad that the stewardess took him home with her when they landed and took care of him for three whole days.

By the time Elizabeth came the next summer, Judith had already come into Michael’s life.

Judith and Michael lived together for almost seven years and no one ever thought they would break up. Then Judith accidentally conceived a child by Michael and, against his wishes, decided not to give birth to it.

It was the worst disappointment Michael had ever experienced, and it destroyed all love between the couple.

Michael didn’t contest Judith’s right to abort the child. He could not imagine a world in which women did not have such a right. And the historian in him knew that laws against abortion had never been enforceable, because no relationship existed quite like the relationship between a mother and her unborn child.

No, he never quarreled with her right, and would in fact have defended it. But he had never foreseen that a woman living with him in luxury and security, a woman whom he would marry in an instant if she permitted it, would want to abort their child.

Michael begged her not to do it. It was theirs, was it not, and its father wanted it desperately and could not bear the thought that it would miss its chance at life. It didn’t have to grow up with them if Judith didn’t want it. Michael would arrange everything for its care elsewhere. He had plenty of money. He would visit the child on his own so that Judith never had to know. He had visions of governesses, fine schools, all the things he’d never had. But more significant, it was a living thing, this unborn baby, and it had his blood in its little veins and he couldn’t see any good reason for it to die.

These remarks were horrifying to Judith. They cut her to the quick. She did not want to be a mother at this time; she didn’t feel that she could do it. She was almost finished with her Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley, but she had her dissertation still to write. And her body was not something to be used merely to deliver a child to another person. The great shock of giving birth to that child, of giving it up, was more than she could possibly bear. She would live with that guilt forever. That Michael did not understand her point of view was exquisitely painful to her. She had always counted upon her right to abort an unwanted child. It was her safety net, so to speak. Now her freedom, her dignity, and her sanity were threatened.

Some day they would have a child, she said, when the time was right for both of them, for parenthood was a matter of choice, and no child should be brought into the world who was not loved and wanted by both parents.

None of this made sense to Michael. Death was better than abandonment? How could Judith feel guilt for giving it away, and no guilt at all for merely destroying it? Yes, both parents should want a child. But why should one parent have the right to say that it couldn’t come into the world? They weren’t poor, they weren’t diseased; this wasn’t a child of rape. Why, they were practically married and could certainly get married if Judith wanted! They had so much to give this baby. Even if it lived with others, think what they could do for it. Why the hell did the little thing have to perish, and stop saying it wasn’t a person, it was on track to be a person, or Judith wouldn’t want to be killing it. Was a newborn baby any more a person, for the love of God?

And so they went back and forth, their arguments sharpening, becoming ever more complex, vacillating between the personal and the philosophical with no hope of resolution.

Finally Michael made his last ditch stand. If Judith would only give birth to the child, he would take it away with him. Judith would never see either of them again. And he would do whatever Judith wanted in return. He would give her whatever he had that she might value. He cried as he pleaded with her.

Judith was crushed. Michael had chosen this child over her. He was trying to buy her body, her suffering, the thing growing inside her. She couldn’t bear to be in the same house with him. She cursed him for the things he’d said. She cursed his background, his ignorance, and above all his stunning unkindness to her. Did he think it was easy what she meant to do? But every instinct in her told her she must terminate this brutal physical process, she must extinguish this bit of life which was never meant, and which clung to her now, growing against her will, destroying Michael’s love for her and their life together.

Michael couldn’t look at her. If she wanted to go, she should go. He wanted her to go. He didn’t want to know the exact day or hour that their child would be destroyed.

A dread came over him. Everything around him was gray. Nothing tasted good or looked good. It was as if a metallic gloom had gripped his world, and all colors and sensations had paled in it. He knew Judith was in pain, but he couldn’t help her. In fact, he couldn’t stop himself from hating her.

He thought about those nuns at school, smacking the boys with the flat of their hands; he remembered the grip of a nun’s fingers on his arm as she shoved him into the ranks; he remembered thoughtless power, petty brutality. Of course that had nothing to do with this, he told himself. Judith cared; Judith was a good person. She was doing what she thought she had to do. But Michael felt as helpless now as he’d felt back then, when the nuns patrolled the halls, monsters in their black veils, their mannish shoes thudding on the polished wood.

Judith moved out while Michael was at work. The bill for the abortion-Boston hospital and doctor-came a week later. Michael sent his check to the appropriate address. He never saw Judith again.

And after that, for a long time Michael was a loner. Erotic contact had never been something he enjoyed with strangers. But now he had a fear of it, and chose his partners only very occasionally and with great discretion. He was careful to an extreme degree. He wanted no other lost children.

Also, he found himself unable to forget the dead baby, or the dead fetus more properly speaking. It wasn’t that he meant to brood on the child-he had nicknamed it Little Chris, but nobody needed to know this-it was that he began to see images of fetuses in the movies he went to see, in the ads for movies which he saw in the papers.

As always movies loomed large in Michael’s life. As always they were a major, ongoing part of his education. He fell into a trance in a darkened theater. He felt some visceral connection between what was happening on the screen and his own dreams and subconscious, and with his ongoing efforts to figure out the world in which he lived.

And now he saw this curious thing which no one else around him mentioned: did not the cinematic monsters of this time bear a remarkable resemblance to the children being aborted every day in the nation’s clinics?

Take Ridley Scott’s Alien for instance, where the little monster is born right out of the chest of a man, a squealing fetus who then retains its curious shape, even as it grows large, gorging itself upon human victims.

And what about Eraserhead, where the ghastly fetal offspring born to the doomed couple cries continuously.

Why, at one point it seemed to him there were too many horror films with fetuses in them to make a count. There was The Kindred and Ghoulies and Leviathan and those writhing clones being born like fetuses out of the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He could hardly bear to watch that scene when he saw it again at the Castro. He got up and walked out of the theater.

God only knew how many more fetus horror movies there were. Take the remake of The Fly. Didn’t the hero wind up looking like a fetus? And what about Fly II, with its images of birth and rebirth? The never-ending theme, he figured. And then came Pumpkinhead, where the great vengeful Appalachian demon grows out of a fetal corpse right before your eyes, and keeps its overblown fetal head throughout its hideous rampages.

What must this mean, Michael tried to figure out. Not that we suffer guilt for what we do, for we believe it is morally right to control the birth of our young, but that we have uneasy dreams of all those little beings washed, unborn, into eternity? Or was it mere fear of the beings themselves who want to claim us-eternally free adolescents-and make us parents. Fetuses from hell! He laughed bitterly at the whole idea in spite of himself.

Look at John Carpenter’s The Thing, with its screaming fetal heads! And what about the old classic Rosemary’s Baby, for God’s sake, and that silly movie It’s Alive, about the monster baby who murdered the milk man when it got hungry. The image was inescapable. Babies-fetuses. He saw it everywhere he turned.

He pondered it just as he used to ponder the magnificent houses and elegant persons in old black-and-white horror films of his youth.

No use trying to talk about all this with his friends. They had believed Judith was in the right; and they would never understand the distinctions he was trying to make. Horror movies are our troubled dreams, he thought. And we are obsessed now with birth, and birth gone wrong, and birth turned against us. And back to the Happy Hour Theater he went in his memory. He was watching The Bride of Frankenstein again. So science had scared them back then, and even further back when Mary Shelley had written down her inspiring visions.

Oh, well, he couldn’t figure out these things. He wasn’t really a historian or social scientist. Maybe he wasn’t clever enough. He was a contractor by trade. Best to stick to refinishing oak floors and stripping brass faucets.

And besides, he didn’t hate women. He didn’t. He didn’t fear them either. Women were just people, and sometimes they were better people than men, gentler, kinder. He liked their company better than the company of men most of the time. And it had never surprised him that, except for this one issue, they usually understood what he had to say more sympathetically than men did.

When Elizabeth called, eager to kindle the old flame, he was happy, very happy, to get on a plane for New York. Their weekend was bliss together, except for his elaborate precautions against conception, a matter which had now become an obsession. They would make it work again, they both knew it. They were one step from a rare moment of fine excitement. But Elizabeth didn’t want to leave the East Coast, and Michael could not imagine Great Expectations in Manhattan. They would write to each other, they would think about it; they would talk long distance. They would wait and see.

As time passed, Michael lost a little faith that he would ever have the love he wanted.

But his was a world in which many adults did not have that love. They had friends, freedom, style, riches, career, but not that love, and this was the condition of modern life and so it was for him, too. And he grew to take this for granted.

He had plenty of comrades on the job, old college buddies, no shortage of female companionship when he wanted it. And as he reached his forty-eighth birthday, he figured there was still time for everything. He felt and looked young, as did the other people his age around him. Why, he still had those damned freckles. And women still gave him the eye, that was certain. In fact, he found it easier to attract them now than when he had been an overeager young man.

Who could say? Maybe his little casual affair with Therese, the young woman he’d recently met at the Symphony, would start to mean something. She was too young, he knew that, he was angry with himself on that score, but then she would call and say: “Michael, I expected to hear from you by this time! You’re really manipulating me!” Whatever that meant. And off they would go to supper and her place after that.

But was it only a deep love that he missed? Was there something else? One morning, he woke up and realized in a flash that the summer he had been waiting for all these years was never going to come. And the miserable damp of the place had worked itself into the marrow of his bones. There would never be warm nights full of the smell of jasmine. There would never be warm breezes from the river or the Gulf. But this he had to accept, he told himself. After all this was his city now. How could he ever go home?

Yet at times it seemed to him that San Francisco was no longer painted in rich colors of ocher and Roman red; that it had become a drab sepia, and that the dull glare of the perpetually gray sky had permanently blunted his spirits.

Even the beautiful houses he restored seemed sometimes no more than stage sets, devoid of real tradition, fancy traps to capture a past that had never existed, to create a feeling of solidity for people who lived moment to moment in a fear of death bordering on hysteria.

Oh, but he was a lucky man, and he knew it. And surely there were good times and good things to come.

So that was Michael’s life, a life that for all practical purposes was now over, because he had drowned on May 1 and come back, haunted, obsessed, rambling on and on about the living and the dead, unable to remove the black gloves from his hands, fearful of what he might see-the great inundations of meaningless images-and picking up strong emotional impressions even from those whom he did not touch.

A full three and a half months had passed since that awful day. Therese was gone. His friends were gone. And now he was a prisoner of the house on Liberty Street.

He had changed the number on the phone. He was not answering the mountains of mail he received. Aunt Viv went out by the back door to obtain those few supplies for the house which could not be delivered.

In a sweet, polite voice she fielded the few calls. “No, Michael isn’t here anymore.”

He laughed every time he heard it. Because it was true. The papers said he had “disappeared.” That made him laugh too. About every ten days or so, he called Stacy and Jim, just to say he was alive, then hung up. He couldn’t blame them if they didn’t care.

Now in the dark, he lay on his bed, watching again on the mute television screen the familiar old images of Great Expectations. A ghostly Miss Havisham in her tattered wedding garb talked to the young Pip, played by John Mills, who was just setting off for London.

Why was Michael wasting time? He ought to be setting off for New Orleans. But he was too drunk just now for that. Too drunk even to call for an airline schedule. Besides, there was the hope that Dr. Morris would call him, Dr. Morris, who knew this secret number, Dr. Morris to whom Michael had confided his one and only plan.

“If I could get in touch with that woman,” he had told Dr. Morris, “you know, the skipper who rescued me. If I could just take off my gloves and hold her hands when I talk to her, well, maybe I could remember something through her. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“You’re drunk, Michael. I can hear it.”

“Never mind that just now. That’s a given. I’m drunk and I’m going to stay drunk, but listen to what I’m saying. If I could get on that boat again … ”

“Yes?”

“Well, if I could get down on the deck of the boat, and touch the boards with my bare hands … you know, the boards I was lying on … ”

“Michael, that’s insane.”

“Dr. Morris, call her. You can get in touch with her. If you won’t call her, give me her name.”

“What do you mean, call her and tell her you want to crawl around on the deck of her boat, feeling for mental vibrations? Michael, she has a right to be protected from something like that; she may not believe in this psychic power thing.”

“But you believe in it! You know it works!”

“I want you to come back to the hospital.”

Michael had hung up in a rage. No more needles, no more tests, thank you. Over and over again Dr. Morris had called back, but the telephone messages were all the same: “Michael, come in. We’re worried about you. We want to see you.”

Then finally, the promise: “Michael, if you sober up, I’ll give it a try. I know where the lady can be found.”

Sober up; he thought about it now as he lay in the dark. He groped for the nearby cold can of beer, then cracked it open. A beer drunk was the best kind of drunk. And in a way it was being sober because he hadn’t poured a slug of vodka or Scotch in the can, had he? Now that was really drinking, that main-line poison, and he ought to know.

Call Dr. Morris. Tell him you’re sober, sober as you ever intend to get.

Seems like he’d done that. But maybe he’d dreamed it, maybe he was just drifting off again. Sweet to lie here, sweet to be so drunk you couldn’t feel the agitation, the urgency, the pain of not remembering …

Aunt Viv said, “Eat some supper.”

But he was in New Orleans, walking through those Garden District streets, and it was warm, and oh, the fragrance of the night jasmine. To think that all these years he had not smelled that sweet, heavy scent, and had not seen the sky behind the oaks catch fire, so each tiny leaf was suddenly distinct. The flagstones buckled over the roots of the oaks. The cold wind bit at his naked fingers.

Cold wind. Yes. It was not summer after all, but winter, the sharp, freezing New Orleans winter, and they were rushing through the dark to see the last parade of Mardi Gras night, the Mystic Krewe of Comus.

Such a lovely name, he thought as he dreamed, but way back then he had also thought it wondrous. And far ahead, on St. Charles Avenue, he saw the torches of the parade and heard the drums which always scared him.

“Hurry, Michael,” his mother said. She almost pulled him off his feet. How dark the street was, how terrible this cold like the cold of the ocean.

“But look, Mom.” He pointed through the iron fence. He tugged on her hand. “There’s the man in the garden.”

The old game. She would say there was no man there, and they would laugh about it together. But the man was there, all right, just as he’d always been-way back at the edge of the great lawn, standing beneath the bare white limbs of the crepe myrtles. Did he see Michael on that night? Yes, it seemed he did. Surely they had looked at each other.

“Michael, we don’t have time for that man.”

“But Mom, he’s there, he really is … ”

The Mystic Krewe of Comus. The brass bands played their dark savage music as they marched by, the torches blazing. The crowds surged into the street. From atop the quivering papier-mâché floats, men in glittering satin costumes and masks threw glass necklaces, wooden beads. People fought to catch them. Michael clung to his mother’s skirt, hating the sound of the drums. Trinkets landed in the gutter at his feet.

On the long way home, with Mardi Gras dead and done, and the streets littered with trash, and the air so cold that their breath made steam, he had seen the man again, standing as he was before, but this time he had not bothered to say so.

“Got to go home,” he whispered now in his sleep. “Got to go back there.”

He saw the long iron lace railings of that First Street house, the side porch with its sagging screens. And the man in the garden. So strange that the man never changed. And that last May, on the very last walk that Michael had ever taken through those streets, he had nodded to the man, and the man had lifted his hand and waved.

“Yes, go,” he whispered. But wouldn’t they give him a sign, the others who had come to him when he was dead? Surely they understood that he couldn’t remember now. They’d help him. The barrier is falling away between the living and dead. Come through. But the woman with the black hair said, “Remember, you have a choice.”

“But no, I didn’t change my mind. I just can’t remember.”

He sat up. The room was dark. Woman with the black hair. What was that around her neck? He had to pack now. Go to the airport. The doorway. The thirteenth one. I understand.

Aunt Viv sat beyond the living room door, in the glow of a single lamp, sewing.

He drank another swallow of the beer. Then he emptied the can slowly.

“Please help me,” he whispered to no one at all. “Please help me.”

He was sleeping again. The wind was blowing. The drums of the Mystic Krewe of Comus filled him with fear. Was it a warning? Why don’t you jump, said the mean housekeeper to the poor frightened woman at the window in the movie Rebecca. Had he changed the tape? He could not remember that. But we are at Manderley now, aren’t we? He could have sworn it was Miss Havisham. And then he heard her whisper in Estella’s ear, “You can break his heart.” Pip heard it too, but still he fell in love with her.

I’ll fix up the house, he whispered. Let in the light. Estella, we shall be happy forever. This is not the school yard, not that long hollow hallway that leads to the cafeteria, with Sister Clement coming towards him. “You get back in that line, boy!” If she slaps me the way she slapped Tony Vedros, I’ll kill her.

Aunt Viv stood beside him in the dark.

“I’m drunk,” he said.

She put the cold beer in his hand, what a darling.

“God, that tastes so good.”

“There’s someone here to see you.”

“Who? Is it a woman?”

“A nice gentleman from England … ”

“No, Aunt Viv-”

“But he’s not a reporter. At least he says he’s not. He’s a nice gentleman. Mr. Lightner is his name. He says he’s come all the way from London. His plane from New York just landed and he came right to the front door.”

“Not now. You have to tell him to go away. Aunt Viv, I have to go back. I have to go to New Orleans. I have to call Dr. Morris. Where is the phone?”

He climbed out of the bed, his head spinning, and stood still for a moment until the dizziness passed. But it was no good. His limbs were leaden. He sank back into the bed, back into the dreams. Walking through Miss Havisham’s house. The man in the garden nodded again.

Someone had switched off the television. “Sleep now,” Aunt Viv said.

He heard her steps moving away. Was the phone ringing?

“Someone help me,” he whispered.