“Why are you here?” she asked him from the top of the stairs.

“Well,” he said.

“Are you in the army?”

“Yup.”

“Why did they let you come home?”

He had hung up his jacket, and turned smiling to her. “You weren’t listening,” he said. “I didn’t think you were. I explained it to the folks. If I sign up now, I get a month’s leave right off the bat. I don’t go in till September. Special deal.”

She looked down at him looking up at her. She hadn’t listened, had hid in her room for the last two days.

“I was thinking,” he said. “I promised a while ago I’d teach you to drive. That would take about a month. Does that sound good?”

She would not exult or unbend or giggle or do anything stupid. Nothing he had done or offered warranted that. September was far away, but it was already coming closer, closer now by a minute than when he had made his offer. “I’m not old enough to get a permit,” she said. “Not till January.”

It was another of those objections that he didn’t deign to hear. He only stood smiling, and waited for her to come down the stairs. And soon she did.

5.

Once again it is May and the walls of my house have grown thin

And the windows where I wait and watch are wide open.

How high it is up there where the tops of the trees are speaking sign

And the swallows are turning, white bellies, blue backs, in the sun!

Before any human eye has seen it, before even mine,

They see the jonquil-colored taxi at the court’s end turning in.

Now rejoice, all you Courts and Drives and Circles bearing him on!

Now lift up your heads oh you Gateses and Flynns

And be you lifted up oh you houses of Wozniaks and Paynes!

Cast off your junipers and dismiss your stone foundations

And rise up into the heights of the new air like lost balloons!

In her room in Tower 3, she beat out the lines with two fingers on Ben’s typewriter. The secret, for her alone to know, was that hidden among the many rhymes and half rhymes and slant rhymes that ended them there was one unsaid: the name they were all intended to rhyme with or against. She tried as she typed to remember May: not the last lost May but the May before that, back before. And she could not. But she remembered the poem, she only needed to string the lines like beads, or like the balls of an abacus, to make them come out right and add up.

See: they have given him back his eyes in exchange for their gun,

The one they made him carry; but his clothes are still olive and dun,

The color of wet fallen leaves, and the bag he has brought with him

Buckled and strapped and long enough to stuff a dead child within.

He hadn’t actually been wearing his uniform when he came home, nor did he come home in a taxi; George had gone to the bus station to get him, and Kit had been at school and only seen him when she rushed into the house, having run home from the bus, hot in her wool skirt and sweater, dropping her books on the floor of the hall.

Once again it is May and the walls of my heart have grown thin

And the tall small windows are lifted up so my princeling may come in.

She wrote a note and put it and the poem in an envelope and carried it out into the day, now turning gray and hostile, the snow freezing again as the sun went down. In the Comparative Literature Department on the third floor of the liberal arts tower, the secretary pointed to the wall of pigeonholes where mail for professors could be left. And there it was, with a little typed paper slipped into the brass frame: I. I. Falin. There was nothing else in the box. She saw him, Falin, just turning to come out of the chairman’s office, nodding a farewell, as she slipped out the door.

When she returned to Tower 3 she found that she had a roommate. She was sitting on the unused bed smoking a cigarette, in a wrinkled khaki raincoat, her bags around her, as though she were waiting for a train.

“Aha,” she said, looking up at Kit’s entrance and smiling reluctantly.

“Aha,” said Kit. “I wondered.”

“Yeah well,” the other said, not quite an apology, but not quite in annoyance either.

The university had chosen for Kit a roommate who was also starting her freshman year in the second semester, and who was also a year older than her class: she related this to Kit with what seemed a grudging satisfaction. Her name was Fran. She was from New York City, and had come here for the music school, because, she said, it was world-class and she hadn’t got into Juilliard.

“What do you play?” Kit asked.

“Viola,” Fran said, with a wonderfully gloomy enunciation, as though she were answering a different question (What are you in for? maybe). And there by her feet was indeed a violin case, but too big. “I might do philosophy instead though,” she said. She dragged deeply on the cigarette, and let the thick smoke out her mouth to be drawn up her nose—what Kit had heard called a “French inhale.”

“I don’t mind starting late,” she said. “It means at least you’re not in a Class of. You know, like Class of 1965. We’re not.”

“Why are you?” Kit asked. “Starting late, I mean.” As soon as she said it a hard hollow opened in her breast, for it was evident that if Fran told her story, Kit would have to tell hers.

Fran shrugged. “My parents took me to Europe for six months,” she said levelly. “They had decided to get a divorce, and wanted time to be with me. To, you know, be a family for me.”

“Oh.”

She stubbed out the smoke. “They had this whole plan they thought was secret. Of course I knew. They announced it, the divorce, at the end of the trip. In Amsterdam.”

“Oh.”

“We’d just been to Anne Frank’s house.” She shook her head in grave contempt. “It’s all right. I hope they’ll be happy. I never want to go back there, though.”

“Europe?”

“Amsterdam. Cold and gray and the damn canals and the damn rain.”

“Amster, Amster, dam dam dam.”

Fran looked at her and after a moment’s puzzlement laughed, seeming to surprise herself by doing so, or to be amazed at Kit for causing it. “So what about you?”

“Ah,” said Kit, shrugging, know-nothing.

“What are you going to be studying?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I didn’t come with as much as you.”

“What courses are you taking?”

“Well, French,” said Kit. “Psychology. World Literature, and you know, Composition. And a course in poetry.”

“Writing it or reading it?”

“I think both.”

“You a poet?”

Kit shoved her hands into her pockets. Like Fran she hadn’t taken off her coat.

“Oh that reminds me,” Fran said. “You got a phone call. The proctor or monitor or whoever she is put a note under the door.” She pointed to the pink slip on the desk Kit had claimed. A professor had called to tell Kit she was welcome in his class, but (the note read) he hadn’t said what class it was.