“Where have you been all day?”

“Here and there. I’ve seen you.” Nicely she tapped one of her Luckies from her purple-and-yellow plastic case, which had a little sliding door that opened and shut. She looked at me with flecked green irises whose perfect circles of black seemed dilated. I did not understand my ability to dissolve her composure and in my heart honestly took no credit for it. But her dissolution was welcome to me; it couched a kind of repose I had never known before. As a baby wishes to be put to bed, my hand wished to be between her thighs. I dragged and in haled. “I had a dream about you last night.” She looked away, as if to give herself space in which to blush, “What did you dream?”

“Not quite what you think,” I said. “I dreamed you turned into a tree, and I called ‘Penny, Penny, come back!’, but you didn’t, and I was leaning my face against the bark of a tree.”

She took it a bit dryly, saying, “Why how sad.”

“It was sad. Everything around me is sad these days.”

“What else is sad?”

“My father thinks he’s sick.”

“What does he think he has?”

“I don’t know. Cancer?”

“Really?”

My cigarette was stirring in me its mixture of nausea and giddiness; I wanted to put it out but instead, for her sake, inhaled. The booth partition across from us leaped a foot closer and the girl and the boy had fallen to bumping heads, like a pair of doped rams.

“Sweetie,” Penny said to me. “Your father’s probably all right. He’s not very old.”

“He’s fifty,” I said. “He just turned fifty last month. He always said he’d never live to be fifty.”

She frowned in thought, my poor dumb little girl, and tried to find some words to comfort me, who was so in finitely ingenious at evading comfort. At last she told me, “Your father’s too funny to die.” A ninth-grader, she only had him as a teacher in study-hall; but the whole school of course knew my father.

“Everybody dies,” I told her.

“Yes, but not for a long time.”

“Yes, but at some point that time has to become now.” And with this we carried the mystery to the far rim, and could only return.

“Has he seen a doctor?” she asked, and, as impersonally as an act of weather, her thigh under the table had become tangent to mine.

“That’s where he is now.” I shifted my cigarette to my right hand and casually dropped, as if to scratch an itch, my freed left hand onto my thigh. “I should be with him,” I told Penny, wondering if my profile looked as elegant as it felt, jut-lipped under a plume of smoke.

“Why? What could you do?”

“I don’t know. Be of some comfort. Just be there.” As naturally as water slips from higher to lower my fingers moved to her thigh from my own. Her skirt had a faunish weave.

This touch, though she did not acknowledge it, interrupted the flow of her thought. She brought out jaggedly, “How can you? You’re just his child.”

“I know,” I said, speaking quickly lest she think my touch was more than an accident, an incident of innocent elements. Having gained my place, I expanded it, fanning my fingers, flattening my palm against the yielding solid. “But I’m the only kid he has.” My using my father’s word “kid” brought him too close; his wrinkling squint, his forward leaning anxiety seemed to loom in the unquiet air. “I’m the only person in the world he can talk to.”

“That can’t be,” she said very softly, in a voice more intimate than the words. “Your father has hundreds of friends.”

“No” I said, “He has no friends; they don’t help him. He just told me.” And with something like the questing fear that made my father, in conversations with strangers, gouge deeper than courtesy found common, my hand, grown enormous, seized the snug wealth of her flesh so completely my fingers probed the crevice between her thighs and my little finger perhaps, touched through the muffle of faun-feeling cloth the apex where they joined, the silken crotch, sacred.

“Peter, no,” she said, still softly, and her cool fingertips took my wrist and replaced my hand on my own leg. I slapped my thigh and sighed, well-satisfied. I had dared more than I had dreamed. So it surprised me as needless and in a shy way whorish when she added in a murmur, “All these people.” As if chastity needed an outer explanation; as if, if we were alone, the earth would sweep up and imprison my forearms.

I stubbed out my cigarette and pleaded, “I must go after him.” I asked her, “Do you pray?”

“Pray?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Will you pray for him? My father.”

“All right.”

“Thank you. You’re good.” We both looked back amazed at what we had said. I wondered if I had been guilty of blasphemy, using God as a tool with which to score myself the deeper on this girl’s heart. But no, I decided, her promise to pray did genuinely lighten my burden. Rising, I asked her, “Are you coming to the basketball game tomorrow night?”

“I could.”

“Shall I save you a seat?”

“If you like.”

“Or you save me one.”

“All right. Peter.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t worry so much. Not everything is your fault.”

Now the couple opposite us, classmates of Penny’s, whose names were Bonnie Leonard and Richie Lorah, came out of their nudging trance. In a burst of derisive triumph Richie yelled at me, “The Pumpkin Eater!” Bonnie feeble mindedly laughed, and the air of the place, where I had felt so secure, became dangerous with words aimed at my face. Senior boys sporting adult pockets of shadow under their eyes called to me, “Hey, Eater, how’s your old man? How’s Georgie Porgie puddin’ ‘n’ pie?” Once a student had had my father, he did not forget it, and the memory seemed to seek shape in mockery. An emotion of fermented guilt and fondness would seek to purge itself upon me, the petty receptacle of a myth. I hated it and yet it did give me importance; being Caldwell’s son lifted me from the faceless mass of younger children and made me, on my father’s strength alone, exist in the eyes of these Titans. I had only to listen and seem to smile as sweetly cruel memories tumbled from them:

“He used to lie down in the aisle and holler, ‘Come on, walk all over me, you will anyway’…”

“… about six of us filled our pockets up with horse-chestnuts…”

“… seven minutes to the hour everybody stood up and stared as if his fly was open…”

“Christ, I’ll never forget…”

“…this girl in the back of the class said she couldn’t see the decimal point…he went to the window and scooped some snow off the sill and made a ball… hard as hell at the fucking blackboard…”

“ ‘Now can you see it?’ he said.”

“Christ, what a character.”

“You got a great father there, Peter.”

These ordeals usually ended with some such unctuous benediction. It thrilled me, coming from these tall criminals, who smoked in the lavatories, drank hooch in Alton, and visited Philadelphia whorehouses staffed by Negro women. My obliging laugh stiffly dried on my face and, suddenly contemptuous, they turned their backs. I rethreaded my way to the front of the luncheonette. Someone in the booths was imitating a rooster. In the jukebox Doris Day was singing “Sentimental Journey.” From the rear a chorus of cheers rhythmically rose as the pinball machine, gonging in protest, gave up one free game after another. I looked back and through the crush saw that it was Johnny Dedman doing the playing; there was no mistaking those broad, faintly fat shoulders, the turned-up collar of the canary-yellow corduroy shirt, the baroque head of wavy hair crying for a haircut and scooped behind into a wet ducktail. Johnny Dedman was one of my idols. A senior flunked back into a junior, he per formed exquisitely all the meaningless deeds of coordination, jitterbugging and playing pinball and tossing salted nuts into his mouth. By an accident of alphabetization he sat next to me in one study hall and taught me a few tricks, how to ‘make a wooden popping noise by pulling my finger from my mouth, for instance-though I could never do it as loudly as he. He was inimitable and no doubt it was foolish to try. He had a rosy babyish face and a feathery mustache of pale unshaven hair and an absolute purity of ambitionlessness: even his misbehavior was carried forward without any urgency or stridence. He did have a criminal record: once in Alton, wild on beer at the age of sixteen, he had struck a policeman. But I felt he had not sought this out but rather fell into it coolly, as he seemed on the dance floor to fall into the steps that answered his partner and made her, hair flying, cheeks glowing, ass switching, swing. The pinball machine never tilted on him; he claimed he could feel the mercury swaying in the Tilt trigger. He played the machines as if he had invented them. Indeed, his one known connection with the world of hard facts was an acknowledged mechanical ability. Outside of Industrial Arts, he consistently got E’s. There was something sublime in the letter that took my breath away. In that year, the year I was fifteen, if I had not wanted so badly to be Vermeer, I would have tried to be Johnny Dedman. But of course I had the timid sense to see that you do not will to be Johnny Dedman; you fall into it at birth, ripe from the beginning.