Other people arrived and went again as she sat there engaged in her experiment, filling up gradually like an alchemist’s retort. Jackie explained to them what she was up to and they nodded or kidded her gently and took a drink or didn’t. There was a silent auto mechanic, a friend of Max’s, who brought beer; his hands were stronger and his fingernails more atrociously broken and stained than any she had ever seen. There were Fred and Joanne, he a graduate student in Poli-Sci and she his wife, a graduate student too but in Sociology.

“Saul, you dirty Semite,” Fred said, taking Saul’s arm in a sudden grip. “My report to the district office is thin, very thin. They will want more. Where are the plans?”

Saul almost laughed, though he didn’t seem amused, and it had to be explained to Kit that Fred was the FBI guy, or was pretending to be.

“In any meeting of any group on the Attorney General’s list, one of them is going to be an agent,” Fred said. “A mathematical certainty.”

“In any meeting over a certain size,” Saul said.

“Where two or three are gathered together in my name,” Fred said solemnly.

Kit had only a slight idea what the Attorney General’s list was and couldn’t be certain when Fred was joking or if his joking bothered Saul or Max. He disputed coolly with them as Jackie puffed on his pipe and looked from one to another in admiration or amusement. Fred had been a member (one of only four or five) of the already defunct Nietzsche Study Group, and when the hour grew late he led them in singing the group’s marching song:

“Nietzsche loves me, this I know

Zarathustra told me so

Little ones to US belong

They are weak but WE ARE STRONG.”

“I slept on their couch last summer when I couldn’t find a room,” Jackie told her when they’d left. “They’d just got hitched. Not a big apartment, let me tell you, but I guess they needed that little bit of money I gave them. Fine, except that night-long—night-long—they’d lie in their room on this bigole bed and rock and carry on, the bed squeaking and them singing out—well you know.”

“Jeez,” Kit said. “Oh my God.” She didn’t exactly know.

“Tough,” said Max. “For a single man such as yourself.”

“Very tough,” Jackie said. “I’d lie there with sweat on my brow and just gnaw my wrist, just gnaw my wrist.”

Kit shook with laughter, not altogether understanding his discomfort. Everyone watched her laugh and laugh, nodding at one another as though confirming that she was passing through the expected phases of her journey in the right order. She pushed the daffodil glass toward the pitcher and bottle standing before Jackie.

“Got to pace yourself now,” Jackie said, which Kit thought was funny too; but soon a new wave of feeling rolled over her, swallowed in with the sticky sweetness (all the ice was gone) and replacing her. This one felt lofty, or deep, or both; she felt lofted out of her own deeps, which she saw beneath, or tasted, in dread and wonder. “Deeps,” she said. “Lofted.”

“Uh-oh,” Jackie said.

She wanted to talk about poetry; about Falin, about Baudelaire in Paris and Keats in Rome. “For long,” she said, “I have been half in love with easeful death. Called him sweet names in many a honeyed rhyme, to take into the air my quiet breath.” She drank. “My quiet breath.”

“Now now,” Jackie said softly.

“Eternity’s hostage,” she said. “Captive in time.”

“Yes?”

“That’s what a poet is. Falin told us that. It’s in a poem by Patsernak,” she said. “I mean Prasternak. Pasternak.”

“‘Eternity’s hostage,’” Jackie said thoughtfully. “I like that.”

“Captive in time,” Kit said. “Captive in goddamn time.”

“What makes you wonder about Falin,” Rodger said, “is why they did that in the first place. Kicked him out. You know? What was in it for them? The comrades. What was the threat to them, the big danger? One poet.”

“The unacknowledged legislators of the world,” Kit said. “Of the world.”

“Anyway, why not just shoot him?”

“Listen,” Saul Greenleaf said. “If they could shoot poets, they would have shot Pasternak. They can shoot anybody but poets. You know this young guy, what’s his name, Vosnesensky, they filled this sports stadium to hear him read. Fifteen thousand people. For poetry. Try that at Wrigley Field.”

“Then tell me what they’re doing throwing this one out,” Rodger asked. “If they love poets so much.”

“I didn’t say they love them. I said they can’t shoot them. The people love them. The bosses are afraid of them.”

“Here,” Jackie said, “they can say anything they want. Look at Ginsberg. Nobody’s talking about exiling Ginsberg. And for a good reason. Nobody’s heard of him.”

Saul lifted his chin, and rose to his feet. The lamplight gilded his glasses. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” he spoke. “Starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…”

“Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave,” Kit said hollowly. “Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind.”

“Angelheaded hipsters,” Saul kept on, “burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.”

“Quietly they go, the intelligent the witty the brave,” Kit said. She too tried to rise to speak, slipped and fell heavily, still reciting: “I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.” Max and Rodger helped her to her feet. She looked around her at their faces, which resembled the mild interested faces of cows who watch you pass by their meadow. “Edna St. Vincent Millay,” she said. “I feel quite weird.”

“You’re hittin’ a plateau,” Jackie said. “You’ll rise on past that.”

“Oh,” she said. “Okay.” She sat again, with care. The trick was to go slow, and think. She lifted the glass before her, she toasted the room, the clatter of sleet on the window, the world, the unseen. And solemnly drank.

Rodger departed to study. Max got out his guitar, sensing maybe to what point the evening had come; they sought for songs they all knew, or that any of them knew all the way through. Kit had learned “Sloop John B” from the Kingston Trio, Max had learned it from Pete Seeger at a camp for workers’ children; he sang in a high true tenor and she in an earnest cry, eyes closed. He sang other Weavers songs, and Lead-belly, songs of a kind she didn’t know existed:

“Me un’ Marthy, we was standin’ upstairs

I heard a white man say, “I don’t want no colored up there,”

Lawd, he’s a bourgeois man

Hee, it’s a bourgeois town

I got the bourgeois blues, gonna spread the news

all around.”

He taught them a song he said Pete Seeger had learned from activists in Carolina who were organizing sit-ins in Southern cities. It was an old hymn tune maybe, he thought, to which Seeger had added some words of his own:

“Oh, deep in my heart

I do believe

We shall overcome someday.”

Saul Greenleaf wouldn’t sing, saying he had sung enough camp songs in camp, and heard enough Pete Seeger too. Max smiled benignly on him and sang on:

“We’ll walk hand in hand,

We’ll walk hand in hand,

We’ll walk hand in hand someday.”

Kit, riven somehow by that cruel-kind word someday, thought of sitting with Falin in the All Night Cafeteria. Take my hand quick and tell me: what have you in your heart. She thought—she knew, suddenly, for sure—that he had been saying it to her. He’d meant her to answer it, though she didn’t know why he did. And with a visceral suddenness she sobbed, and went on sobbing.