ABEL ANKRUM

He was sitting in the dim light of his study beside the window.  Its shade was pulled down and the bright light of day filtered through, giving him enough to read by.  He was reading an old essay from his college days, “The Will to Believe,” by William James. He had reread this essay several months ago, when he was still deep in his depression over the death of his wife and it helped him, he believed.  James had lived through a long depression himself, longer than the two years he, Abel, had suffered, and he thought that he should heed what such a person had to say about the will to believe.  He read for a while and closed his eyes and then read again.  “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds.”

He wondered what James meant by passional nature.  He wished that philosophers would write in planer language.  A couple of months ago he understood James to mean simply our emotional natures, our tendencies to feel certain ways about the circumstances of our lives.  But now he knew that wasn’t the case.

     Options.  Propositions.  Intellectual grounds.  The problem was that life didn’t arrange itself so neatly.  But that precisely was James’ point.  We delude ourselves believing that we believe the things we do for good and sensible reasons, when that isn’t the case at all.  We believe the things we do, most often, unreflectively and because it’s to our advantage to do so.  And sometimes we refuse to believe anything at all, because we have been stomped on by life, or because we think that that makes us superior.  And sometimes we cannot believe, because, and he knew this was true of himself, we lose the will.  Something goes out of us, and the world turns dull.  What once was filled with vibrant colors becomes gray and misty and loses all interest, and only that deep stomach-pain keeps us in touch with ourselves.

     He thought about these things.  Again, he had withdrawn into the dimness of interiors--his living room with the shades pulled down during the day and the lights off at night, or his bedroom, or his study, with its recliner chair in which he would sit, read, sleep, and once again grow thin from lack of eating or eating so little that it hardly mattered.

     He knew what was happening to him--the descent into melancholy and despair.  He knew, also, that what was happening was dangerous.  He might never come out of it.  He wanted to, but he couldn’t find within himself that passional nature, that will, he needed to do it.  He reached the point where he didn’t care, and didn’t care to care.  It was only his reason that told him he wanted to, or that he should want to--that part of him that knew what was happening but which was helpless to motivate him.  He sat as he used to, trying to read.  But words stopped him.  Writers used words taking for granted that their readers understood them.  But words stopped making sense to him, because they seemed to open abysses of darkness and confusion in his mind, taking on meanings that their authors could not have foreseen and dragging him always deeper into his willessness, like these two words, “passional nature.”  The emotional tendencies and habits of feeling accumulated during a lifetime that make us respond reflexively to the world around us, and our will to be, to persist as who and what we are.  Passion.  Passional.  What he willed.  The words conjured up Veda, always Veda, Veda as his passion, Veda as what he willed.  And Veda as the loss of will, the loss of passion.  She was connected to everything in his life.  Every nuance of every feeling, every thought, every act.  She was purpose and purpose was gone.  There was no ground, no ground for choice, intellectual or otherwise. 

     He lived twenty years with Veda and now two years without her.  He came out of his loss of will for a while like a turtle emerging from its shell, regaining his appetites but still dragging the weight of his funk, into which he would retreat, especially at night, when he got into bed and the lights were turned off, and he could still smell Veda in the house.

     It was the woman next door who precipitated his first emergence.  Her name was Lila, and her life was more complicated than a Chinese puzzle box.  For a few weeks he helped her cope with her problems, and for a while he thought he might be falling in love with her.  She was younger than him and he found her attractive, and she had a capacity to get intimate that broke through his hesitancies and inhibitions.  It was the loss of her son that brought them together physically.  Her mother had herself made the boy’s legal guardian and came one Sunday morning to take him away.  But she didn’t stop there.  She also had an injunction against Lila’s seeing the boy for the next full year, the longest that she could legally manage, despite her wealth and influence.

     They had both suffered the loss of the person closest to them, and he thought he could fill that emptiness for her as she was doing for him.  As Lila told her story, she was a victim of social snobbery and a tyrannical mother who cut her off from the family for persisting in a relationship that was furiously disapproved of.  When this relationship resulted in her pregnancy, the family stepped in and bought the young man off.  But she ran away and had her child on the lam, always broke, but staying ahead of her family’s efforts to find her.

     They persisted, however, and on several occasions they nearly took possession of the boy, which the mother was intent on doing to punish her daughter.  But Lila managed to get away and disappear each time, and the search would begin all over.  He knew her as Lila Park, but her real name was Serena Van Brunt.  She had broken with the family and refused to acknowledge that name.  The break had cost her everything and made her desperate.  All ties to her former life were erased and replaced with hatred.  Her family, as far as Abel knew, even her brothers and sister, had earned that hatred.  First by their interferences, then by their shameful manipulations, and lastly by their own vengeful actions against her.

     In the first days after the loss of her son, Abel had comforted her, bringing her solace by his understanding of what she was feeling.  In these first days he felt himself coming to life again, rediscovering those feelings and stirrings that he first knew with Veda and on which he built a life with her.  He would look at Lila and, seeing her respond to him, would feel a new life taking shape.  He swung wildly from too deep a hopelessness to too much hope in too short a time, so when it ended, his collapse was swift and total. 

     Lila, it turned out, was still in touch with the father of her son, the man whom the family thought it had sufficiently paid to disappear from her life.  When she told him of her mother’s taking of the boy, he came for her and together they left with a crazy plan to kidnap him and disappear--wild talk of fleeing to Mexico or Canada--neither of them having resources to live more than a week after quitting their jobs.  Abel gave them money enough to last a couple of months if they were frugal.  And when they left, he was dizzy with their happiness and expectations of success.  For several days he managed to keep from sliding by thinking about them.  But in the end, he had gone more than a little mad, not going to work, sitting in the dark all night, feeling numb, and convinced Lila was a hallucination, a dream, from which he had wakened to find himself cut off from Veda forever and unable to deal with the loss.

     He knew there were things he could do and places he could go to seek help.  He could visit a mental health center, get drug therapies, ask for spiritual counseling from a priest, or he could take a pseudo-narcotic like ecstasy or take prozac and live in a stupor of happiness, or take matters in his own hands and get out and do things, take up some activity that would have a healing effect, like fishing, or boating, or photography, or any one of a million other things with which the masses fill the hours of respite between work and sleep.  The possibilities were endless.  He knew.  He knew. 

     But he distrusted “professionals,” for he knew how they would classify him, and once classified, would think of  him--not as a man with a personal history who had lost the one person who had made his life meaningful, his wife, his lover, and without whom he felt no desire to live, but as an “obsessive” of a certain type, with certain characteristics, which can be treated in this way instead of that; or as a walking pile of chemical imbalances that can be “restored” by a dose of this or a dose of that; or as a spiritual drifter, a sinner, who put a woman in place of God in his life, and who was in need of some “attitude adjustment” and a proper sense of humility.  In the hands of such professionals, he would be a thing, manipulated in the interest of maintaining their standing--this was the case with Veda.  He had seen it.  Her doctors weren't treating a dying woman, they were hot in combat against her cancer.  Veda's death was horrible.     

     He was wary of professionals, especially of their zealotry.  Every one of them knows better than you who and what you are and what’s good for you.  God, how he hated the thought of them.  In those days when he listened to the news, he used to despise the know-it-alls who set themselves up as the cholesterol guards for humanity, the skinny bald-headed anti-smoking warriors who manned the front lines in the battle against Joe Camel in order to save the future of our children, the exercise mongers, the bran eaters with their mouths dry from munching hay, the anti-popcorn lobby, the righteous guardians of public morality who preached against movies and television, peeked into our bedrooms, and counted our heads in their churches.  And then there were the cold-eyed warriors who extracted fantastic testimony from bewildered children in order to persecute their parents for child molestation, and the right-to-lifers who killed those they disagreed with--he despised those people who made a mission out of improving humanity, making us healthy, wealthy, and wise, and moral!  Damn them all, he thought, and hovered with the protectiveness of a mother hen over his melancholy.

     He went back to reading.  The prose was soothing even if he bumped into words that started him raving and made him feel like he had lost his reason as well as his will.  He just wanted to be alone.  To sit.  In the dimness beside the window with the shade down.  Just enough light.  That’s all.  He didn’t want help.

     Here was another true sentence by James--”If your heart does not want a world of moral reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one.”  But again he bumped into words that opened abysses.  “Moral reality.” Reality was not moral or immoral.  It was not chaotic, maybe, for it obeyed laws, physical laws, biological laws.  Every living thing dies.  That’s law.  It’s neither moral nor immoral.  But then there is Veda’s death.  That too was biological law.  What wasn’t law was how he felt, his sense of loss that was inconsolable.  This is not law, he thought.  This is me. 

     People kill each other all the time.  And worse.  The rapes of Bosnian women by Serb soldiers in the camps, and the abandoning of the children born from those rapes.  The Rwandan massacres.  The Syrian government’s war against its own people.  People go on living.  People hate and that hate somehow makes the murderousness of men tolerable.  We hate the bastards.  Hate is useful, it makes us vengeful.  So, motivated, we get our revenge.  And then we get over it.  But he and Veda loved each other.  Death in love.  The love that survives is inconsolable, for there are no substitutes.  Hate fills the hollowness in the stomach, like food, gives us energy.  But the absence of the beloved!  Nothing fills that hole.  Memory only makes it deeper.

     Moral.  What did the word mean, anyway?  Lila’s mother was “moral”--she had the force of law on her side to certify it.  She took the child away and had the right to do so.  Would the judge from whom she got this right--and the injunction to keep Lila from seeing her own son--have made this possible if he believed what he was doing was immoral?  If Lila was caught trying to kidnap her son, she would be prosecuted and sent to jail.  Would the prosecutors act against her if they thought what they were doing was immoral?  Yet wasn’t the mother a relentlessly vindictive woman and wouldn’t Lila be acting morally by kidnapping her son back?  Moral and immoral are meaningless words.  He knew James was talking about the incompatibility of the scientific and religious world views.  He didn’t care about that issue.  He was an engineer and was trained as a scientist.  It was a dead issue for him.  He had a deeper problem, a problem with life, with the will to believe it was worth living. 

     He dropped the book on his lap and closed his eyes, remembering when Veda, before she got sick, worked on a case prosecuting a woman who not only killed her husband’s mistress, the woman with whom he had been cheating on her for so long, and not only killed the living child he had with her, but also tore the fetus of a second child out of her womb.  That was hatred.  Her husband, on coming to the apartment and seeing the grisly scene, had called the police and then killed himself.  That was love.  He thought now about the decisiveness of that man.  By contrast, he was stuck in limbo, able neither to end it nor get on with it. 

     He picked up the book and reread the sentence.  He would have to change the words to make its thought apply to himself—“If your heart does not want it, your head will assuredly never make it happen.”  But it’s not your head that makes things happen, anyway.  And it’s not your head that makes you believe.  First there has to be the desire.  That’s where everything begins.  In the passional nature.  In the will.  “If your heart does not want it....”

     And there is no will, not even the will to die.  But then he read on, leaving his questions unanswered.  And in the next paragraph, another sentence stopped him, and he paused for a long while before rereading it—“The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth’s existence.”  He thought about James’ example of this.  The man who shows signs of interest in a woman begets in her an interest in himself, a condition which soon matures into a relation of love.  The desire begets the facts.  If he waited for her to show signs of interest in him before declaring his own in her, no relation would have emerged.  The desire must be lived before it can create its own world of facts.

     What he lacked was the desire, the will.  Without this, no facts, no world, no truths.  He was dead.  But couldn’t he bring the desire into existence?  Wouldn’t the desire bring into existence that which made up the object of the desire?  He was losing himself in the thought.  He would try.  On this he made a resolution.  He would try to desire.  It seemed stupid.  Try to desire.  What?  He had no idea.  To desire desire?  The thought made his head ache.  It was senseless.  He put the book down and got up from the old recliner.  He stood for a moment wrestling with an impulse to raise the window shade.  Then he turned and walked out of the little room.

     He began to pace through the rooms downstairs.  The living room, dining room, kitchen, den--round and round, asking himself the one question over and over, “What do I want?”  And it wasn’t just for a few minutes that he paced round and round, asking himself the question, often out loud; he paced for hours, he paced until his legs ached, he paced until his mind went blank, and he closed his eyes and paced in the dark.

     The problem wasn’t that answers came which he examined and rejected.  The problem was that nothing came.  He knew what he was doing was pointless, that what he was trying to make happen couldn’t happen, that it was wholly artificial, something he got from a book, a half-baked idea.

     He stopped.  He realized that he had worked up a sweat, that his shirt under his arms and down his back was drenched, and the hair on the back of his neck was soaked.  He felt fatigued and said out loud to himself, “I want to sit down.”  His knee ached, too, the knee that always ached.  So he went to the kitchen and sat in the chair beside the window.  He noticed then that a sheet of paper folded in quarters was stuck in the door.  Someone was here, he thought.  He wondered if whoever it was saw him through the door window.  He tried to imagine what effect that would have--peeking in and seeing him pacing round, his eyes closed, his shirt drenched with sweat.  He felt a sudden pang of guilt and shame, and, alert with interest, thought, “I’m really crazy.  I’m a six-ounce tin of mixed nuts.” 

     But he got up anyway and opened the door, and when the paper fell, he stooped to pick it up.  He unfolded it and saw that it was a handwritten note from Harry, the chief engineer of his section of the company and his boss.  The note read as follows:

          Dear Abel:

          There are too many things to do for me to go on                worrying about your personal problems.  You’re a              good man, Abel, and you’ve been with us for a long        time.  I hate to lose you, so this is what I’m              going to do.  I’m putting you in for six-weeks               vacation and signing off on it.  I hope when you               return, you’re back to being your old self again.         If you’re not, well, listen Abel, we can’t humor             you forever.  I tried to call, but you don’t               answer your damn phone, and I was here yesterday,          banging on the door.  Your car’s right beside               the house, not even in the garage.  I know you’re         there, Abel.  I hope to God you get your act              together.  You’re on vacation starting from today.         Make it work. 

                                  Harry

     He hadn’t been to work for a week, the first time he had done that since Lila left.  He had only missed a few days then, and things returned to normal, like after Veda died.  When she died he wanted to work--he worked too much.  But it kept him sane.  Yes, the phone, he didn’t want to answer it.  And as for the banging on the door, he simply hadn’t heard it.  He couldn’t remember hearing it, anyway.  Did he leave the car out?  He couldn’t recall.  He must have.  He wondered if Harry saw him.  He could see Harry out there looking in at him, shaking his head.  Damn, he thought.  I’ve really gone off the chart. 

     Six weeks.  Can a crazy man get sane in six weeks?  In the last week he had gotten worse.  Make it work.  Make it work.  What would he do?  What did he want to do?  He thought again about not going to work for a week.  He hadn’t even collected his mail.  So he got up and went outside.  It was late but still light with that evening sunlight that makes colors glow and the air shine with clarity.  He limped down the long gravel drive to the mailbox beside the road, and when he opened it, it was stuffed.  He pulled everything out, trying to sort what he’d throw out from what he’d have to open and tend to as he walked painfully back up the drive.  He saw a letter postmarked from British Columbia, with Canadian stamps, and addressed to him as Abel Ankrum, as though the writer knew him.  No Mr. in front of his name.  He placed this one on top of the pile and when he got back to the kitchen, he opened it first.  It was a letter from Lila with a check in the amount of five hundred dollars in partial payment of what she owed.  She had got her son back, and together with Karl, the boy’s father, they had all three made it to Vancouver, where they were living and applying for residency.  They were happy.  She hoped he was OK.  They owed it all to him.  Without his help they couldn’t have attempted it. 

     He sat again and felt weary.  He knew what he wanted.  He had known all along.  He wanted the one thing that life in its cold impersonal fatedness made impossible, and so he couldn’t admit it to himself, for to do so would have deepened his despair.  But he knew.  He put his head in his hands and felt that encroachment in his throat which he suppressed, but only after an effort.  He forced himself to go through the mail.  The bills he set aside and when he threw the rest of the mail away, he got his checkbook and wrote out the checks and put them in the return envelops and went back outside and pulled up the red flag on the mailbox, put the mail in, and then went to his car.  He got in and started the engine, checking the gas.  He had a full tank.  Good, he thought.  He got out, leaving the engine running.  He went in and got his wallet, checked to make sure his credit cards and license were there and still unexpired, he got his check book, went up to his bedroom and threw a pile of underwear and socks and shirts and a couple of pairs of pants into a gym bag, grabbed his toiletries and stuffed them in, and in less than ten minutes he was on the road.  As he drove, he checked to see how much cash he had, and he had plenty--about two hundred dollars.  That would do for a start.

     He was on his way.  He was on vacation.  He was going to Vancouver.  He felt better.  He felt like he had made a momentous decision, one that was going to change his life.  He knew that whatever happened, nothing would be the same.  He hit traffic almost immediately after getting out of his neighborhood, and the anger he felt made him smile.  He cursed as he sat in traffic on the Expressway.  Bumper to bumper.  This is life! he thought.  Always comes up short of what we need, desire, want, expect.  He smiled.  He felt good. 

     He drove through the early evening and crossed the George Washington bridge into Passaic and Paterson, and finally got to cruising Interstate 80 about ten p.m.  He had no plans, no idea how long he would drive, where he might stop for the night.  He wasn’t hungry and he wasn’t sleepy, but he would have to stop for gas.  He’d think about eating and sleeping when they forced themselves on him.  Meanwhile, he knew that the interstate would carry him very near to his brother when he reached the Chicago area.  He thought about stopping there and maybe spending an afternoon, the night even if his brother insisted.  He’d let his sense of how welcomed he felt determine that. 

     He turned on the radio.  It seemed like his only choices were talk shows and Top Forty selections.  Since he couldn’t listen to the music, he tuned into one of the talk shows.  But after a while, the mindless badgering of the host and the splenetic voices of the callers turned him off.  People were so intent on stating their crazy, inarticulate, half-dreamed-up opinions and the hosts urged them to such crazier and crazier ideas that he just couldn’t listen. It seemed pathological.  Everybody was obsessed with adultery, adultery in high places and low.  Politicians, entertainers, sports commentators--the hatred and disgust were palpable in people's voices.  It was amazing how people seemed to find out for the first time that some men and women have sex outside of marriage.  The universities were crammed when he went to college.  Are these the same people? he thought.  Did the next generation succumb to a mental disorder that we haven’t diagnosed yet?  A kind of intellectual AIDS?  At no time in human history has mankind been so well informed--about everything under the sun--and at no time, it seemed to him, have people been so disconnected from the world they live in. 

     He tried to find a station that he could turn on just at the threshold of his hearing, with music that soothed instead of adrenalized his nerves.  But he couldn’t find anything, so when he needed gas, he stopped at a place that had a general store and bought some CDs.  These were what he needed. 

     They were not his preferred music, the piano jazz of Ahmad Jamal and Oscar Peterson, the lovely tempos of Brubeck and Miles Davis, and then Bach, mostly, but Handel also, and Mozart and Vivaldi and the nocturnes by Chopin and the tone poems by Liszt.  These he would get the first chance he could.  But the ones he bought would do--an album of “The World’s Most Romantic Concertos” and “Love Songs by the Great Masters” and such like assemblages packaged in ribbon-printed boxes, with scenes of fabulously beautiful women sitting at candlelit tables with men from GQ hanging all over them.

     All that talk about adultery seemed stupid.  He couldn’t understand the vapidity and the moralizing, the intensity of people’s condemnations, the hatreds they felt.  He had not turned on the radio or television in months, not since Lila left.  Nor had he read a newspaper.  He had fallen out of the world, and its obsessions were mysterious to him.  But listening to the talk without really knowing the context made him feel like he was sane and everyone else had gone over.  The CD began playing The Warsaw Concerto, and he listened, turning it up so he could hear it better over the sound of the tires on the pavement.

     He drove, happy, wide awake, on and on till dawn, and was reaching Youngstown, Ohio, just over the border with Pennsylvania.  Here he thought he’d put up for the day, have a meal, take a room and shower and shave, then sleep until he had had enough.  He felt free, a freedom that was partly due to his being on vacation, and partly due to his sense of not having plans, of being just “out there” and following his nose.  But the feeling of freedom, he knew, was also due to his not feeling the depression and hopelessness quite so intensely.  He wouldn’t call what he felt buoyant, but he didn’t have that constant sinking feeling he had to struggle with every day. 

     Desire creates its own world of facts, he thought.  Certainly this was true for Lila.  But it wasn’t as true for her family.  But maybe it was.  They live in a world materially different from what it might have been if they had healthier and more liberal desires regarding Lila.  If they are bitter about her, isn’t that bitterness a truth brought about by their own wants, their own imperatives, concerning her?  We sleep in the bed we make, isn’t that the idea?  The truths of the world we live in are dependent upon our own actions, which are driven by our desires and made possible by faith in the fact that what we desire is not only good but shared by others in our social world.  That’s what James was saying.  He recalled the one image he had of Lila’s mother, her attempt to embrace her daughter in the yard behind the house.  Did she believe what she was doing was good, that her motives would be generally approved by the social world?  Was she that deluded?  And then he recalled the talk shows’ obsession with adultery, and the shrill tones of the men and women invited to dial in their rage, the vindictive vengefulness and resentment in their voices, the spleen and ill will of both host and callers.  He shook his head.  It’s a crazy world.

     He coasted off the interstate when he reached Youngstown and transferred to Route 11, hoping to find a small motel.  He drove by the Holiday Inns and Comfort Inns and Best Westerns looking for a mom and pop place, some place where he could be alone and wouldn’t have to mingle with tourists, or many of them, anyway.  He came to Route 46 and turned south towards a little town called Smith’s Point.  He hoped he would find a place there.   And he wasn’t disappointed.  There was a little motel of about twenty rooms called The Grande Point, and it was empty, having only one car in front, which probably belonged to the desk clerk or the owner, if they weren’t the same person.  The motel was neatly kept and had a strip of lawn beside the walkway in front and flowers in big pots beside each door.  He liked the place.  The sun was coming full against the white doors and glaring off the windows, making the flowers crackle with color.  He checked in and asked the woman at the desk where he might get breakfast, and she told him to go to the cafe half a block up.  He went into his room and dropped his gym bag on the bed, zipped it open and removed his shaving cream and razor and tooth brush and paste and went to the bathroom, and when he was done, he came out and dressed and left for breakfast.

     He walked up the block in the direction he was told, wearing khaki trousers and a green pull-over shirt.  It was still early, just after seven.  The sky was cloudless and it would be a hot day--it was Friday, the twenty-eighth of August, and the whole country was in the grip of a heat wave.  But now it was fine, cool, bright, and clear, and the town was just waking up and getting in motion.

     The cafe was small, and there were only two men, sitting across from each other at a booth having coffee, and a young girl, about fourteen, sitting by herself at another booth.  He took the booth next to hers and, by force of habit formed by his depression, sat with his back to her.  When the waitress came he ordered eggs and hash browns and orange juice. Since he was the only one ordering, the meal came quickly, and he ate, realizing that it was his first food in almost two days.  When he was done, he felt stuffed, and he knew that the feeling would keep him from sleeping.  So he decided to take a walk before going back to the motel.  He left a dollar on the table and rose to leave, and when he paid at the register and was walking through the door, he saw the girl pass his table and reach for the bill and then he heard the waitress shout, and in half a moment, the girl had flown by him and was racing quickly up the block.  The waitress came through the door and hollered obscenities at her as she put distance between them.  He gave the waitress another dollar and told her to forget it, if the girl needed money that bad he didn’t mind.

     She was not inclined to be kind, however, saying that the girl was nothing but trouble, a hardened criminal already, whose mother was worse.  She had gotten into so much trouble this summer that she was surprised she was still walking the streets.  Twice already she had been caught shoplifting food in the supermarket.  And she had been caught trying to sell the garden hose she swiped from the neighbor across the street.  She had brazenly taken it right off the house!  She was bad and was headed for worse.  Abel felt duly fortified by that little bit of town gossip and started out on his walk, continuing in the direction he started when he left the motel.  About a block further up, there was a town park, empty at this hour, yet well-trimmed and attractive, with a little pond and flower beds and children’s playground equipment, and picnic tables, and barbecues. 

     At a bench on the other side of the pond he saw the girl who had stolen the waitress’ tip.  She saw him and recognizing him immediately got up and disappeared behind some tall lilac bushes, behind which he could see the roof of what he assumed were the restrooms.  Curious, he ambled slowly over there and sat in the same bench.  Sure enough, the girl was there, watching him, and when he didn’t seem threatening, she came back to the bench and sat beside him.  She asked him his name and if he was going to do anything about her.  He said no, he wasn’t.  Then, sitting and talking, they had exchanged a lot of information about themselves, as strangers sometimes will do.  She asked him if he had children, and he told her about Veda and about his sister and brother and his nieces and nephews.  He told her then where he was going, where he lived, and the story about Lila and her mother.  She told him about her mother and her mother’s endless troubles, and her desire to get away, and drew parallels between herself and Lila, only that her mother wasn’t rich, and she didn’t have any brothers or sisters or a father, and she didn’t have a boyfriend, either.  She didn’t have any friends.  She hated her life in Smith’s Point, which had, she said, no point.

     He felt sorry for her, so he gave her fifty dollars and hoped that her having it didn’t get her into more trouble.  She was dazed by the cash, holding it in her hand like it was a heavy weight.  She rose and shoved the bills into the right pocket of her shorts.  He asked her what she would do with it, and she said that she would buy some clothes for when school starts.  He thought of the waitress’ opinion of the girl and felt even more badly for her, so he told her to give him her address and when he got back home, he would send her a letter and let her know how his trip went and he would send her more money then.  She did this avidly, and believed him, and was on the edge of tears as she leaned over her knee to write on the paper he had given her.  He was touched by how completely she trusted him, with no sense of skepticism, no “hardened” criminal’s sense of “what’s in it for you?”  She was an innocent, he thought, and was innocently grateful.  She had no suspicions that he might be a predator but accepted him at his word.  He liked her all the more for that.  He left her feeling blue again, not for himself, but for her.  Kids having to fend for themselves.  It was too common a story, even in these small towns where everyone knew everyone else.  But pity was scarcer in these towns, perhaps because everyone did know everyone else.  It’s hard to pity the kid next door when she’s just swiped your tip.  He made his way back to the motel and in only a few minutes after he got into bed, the morning well on its way to noon and the air beginning to heat up, he was sound asleep.

     He slept the day away.  When he woke, he looked at his watch, and when he saw it was five-twenty, he leapt up.  But then he sat down on the edge of the bed and said, “What’s the hurry?  I’ve got no deadline.”  And he lay back down and cushioned his head on the pillows and yawned and looked at the ceiling and thought about what he’d do next.  First, he wanted to buy some CDs to finish his trip and then he’d find his way back to the interstate and head west towards Chicago.  He figured he’d drive through the night again and reach his brother’s by mid-morning.  It would be a Saturday, so the chances were good he’d be home.  He rolled off the bed and showered and shaved and dressed in the same clothes he put on in the morning.

     He walked up the block to the cafe where he had breakfast and took the same booth.  There were more people here now, but the place wasn’t crowded.  When a waitress brought him the menu, he was disappointed to see that they served mostly hamburgers and sandwiches, salads and soups.  He wasn’t interested in any of the items, so he ordered a piece of blueberry pie and coffee.  He drank a lot of coffee, for he would be driving, and he thought he’d need the caffeine.  The smell of hamburger meat grilling in the back made him slightly nauseous, and he felt a bit wobbly when he left.  He returned to the motel, settled up at the desk, and got directions to a store where he could buy CDs.  He drove around Smith’s Point, saying to himself, “What’s the Point?” and thinking about the girl he met that morning.

Actually, the town was attractive, with old, well-kept homes, old trees overhanging the residential streets, numerous parks and playgrounds, and, best of all, it wasn’t overcrowded.  He could live here, he said to himself.  He found the music store, which was still open, and which also had a coffee bar and a small outdoor cafe.  He found what he was looking for, and decided to have another coffee and sit outside.  It was very pleasant and different from the world he knew on Long Island.

     Finally, he headed out.  And just as yesterday, it was dusk when he found his road.  Soon he turned his thoughts toward his brother.  His brother was two years older, married with four children, and was an MD who specialized in plastic and reconstructive surgery.  He was a decent guy, a care giver who tried to get Abel to come to Chicago after Veda’s death, and who came to spend time with him on Long Island in those first six months.  But Abel wasn’t taking advice and fell exactly into the hole his brother warned him against.  His brother’s name was Vaughn Ankrum, a weird collection of letters they used to laugh at when they were kids--the two vowels in his first name were a,u and the two vowels in his last name were a,u, so Abel used to call him “Eh, you.”  He hadn’t seen his brother now in over a year and a half.  But that wasn’t unusual, since when Veda was alive, they would often go two or three years between visits. 

     He stopped for gas twice, the second time just as the sun was coming up, and this time he had a small meal in the little all-night restaurant that made up part of the gas station.  He was the only one there and it was lonely and dim and lacked newspapers, for they hadn’t come yet.  But he got back on the road and in another hour was nearing the east side of Chicago.  His brother lived on the west side, in a little town called Naperville, about forty minutes from downtown.

     It wasn’t too early when he pulled up.  His brother was a decent guy, but he was also a social animal, and success in the social world was symbolized for him by a conspicuous lifestyle.  His house had to have “curb appeal,” he once said, referring to Abel’s old 19th century two-story tucked away from the world in a dead end on the edge of a man-made pond that had gone wild generations ago and was sheltered by trees that also in later years had begun to obscure the house too.  Even with directions it was hard to find the place.  Not Vaughn.  His house was shoved in the face of the world, a giant building with a four-car garage, stained in earth tones and landscaped so expensively that keeping it up was probably a full time job for two men.

     “It isn’t too early,” he said to himself.  It was a little after seven, actually, and for a Saturday morning, unless the family was planning on an outing, it was really still too early.  What should he do?  Go off and find a place to have breakfast and come back later or try now to see if they’re up, and in the process wake them up?  What the hell, he thought.  They weren’t expecting him.  He didn’t call ahead.  He’d go off and let them sleep.  But just then the door opened and he saw his brother step out, in a long navy blue robe, for the newspaper sitting on the front step.  “In luck,” he thought.  He honked his horn, and as the door was closing, it paused and pushed open again, and his brother looked out at him, not recognizing him.  So he honked again and then got out of the car and hurried up the drive to the walk that led to the front door.  His brother had a big smile on his face and stood there waiting for him.  When he reached the door, they embraced, and his brother then shook his hand, put his arm over his shoulders, and guided him in. 

     When his sister-in-law Maria saw him, she gave a little shout, and then she put her hands on his upper arms and shook him and said how thin he was, and then she started worrying, saying he wasn’t caring for himself and what did he do to lose so much weight, he looked terrible.

     “What have you been doing?” his brother asked, and Maria added, “You’re staying for a while, I hope, so I can fatten you up.”  And he hugged her and felt a shuddering pull on his emotions, and his eyes got bleary.  They noticed, and for a moment they all stood looking at each other. 

     “Well,” Maria said, “we’re just getting breakfast ready, so you can sit with us and tell us all about it.”

     “Where are the kids?” he asked. 

     “We’re alone for the weekend,” Maria said, “little Vaughn is at a baseball camp, and the girls are all sleeping over with friends, a last wild weekend before school starts.”

     “When does Vaughn come home?” Abel asked, for he was looking forward to seeing him.

     “Actually, the camp was only three days, Thursday through today, and he’ll be home in time for supper.”

     “Good, good,” Abel said, “I’ll see him then.”

     “Why, aren’t you staying for a while?” his brother asked, concerned that Abel, looking like he did, was on some kind of emotional swing, for he knew of his brother’s depression. 

     Abel told them the story of Lila and of his impulse to see her when he got the letter.  They passed alarmed glances at each other as he told the story.

     “This woman is no business of yours,” his brother said.  “She’s trouble.  No good can come from going there.  No good for you, anyway.  She’s got what she wants.  You’d be a third wheel.  Why do you want to go there?  It’s not healthy, Abel.  Do you have a thing for this woman?”

     “What if I do?” Abel said.  “If I didn’t go there, whatever ‘thing’ I had would lie empty and dead in me.  But my going there might change her, might make happen what I want to happen.  If it didn’t, it didn’t.  I’d come home.”

     They were both unhappy with this reasoning.  Maria said the woman wouldn’t be parted from that man, couldn’t he see that?  The impulse was just an impulse, his brother said, he could understand that.  But to act on it was mad.  What are you thinking? he demanded. 

     After breakfast, they told him to go sit in the sun beside the pool while they got dressed.  He took another cup of coffee with him and the newspaper and sat at a table that had its umbrella down.  Everything in Abel’s own yard looked like it had grown in the Pleistocene, but here the shrubbery and trees and flowers, the ornamental bushes, the lawn, everything was perfect, everything fit into a pattern that was made to fit the larger “design for life” that he knew his brother consciously worked to make a reality for his wife and children. 

     Instead of reading the paper, he fell to contemplating his brother.  How would he take life without Maria?  Would his “design for life” sustain him through the years without her?  Or would his life collapse?  He was a doctor.  But he wasn’t a regular doctor, that is, he didn’t work the trenches against disease and death.  He was a plastic surgeon, he “designed” people’s beauty, sucking fat from their thighs and busts, or making busts where nature had been skimpy, removing wrinkles from ladies’ faces.  Oh, he did good, too.  Repairing cleft palates, reconstructing breasts that were lost to cancer.  But it was like his brother to find an area of medicine in which he could set his own hours and keep his work from encroaching on his private life.

     He felt that what Vaughn lacked was passion, that his vision of life was not embedded in realities.  Abel needed bedrock to sink his life into.  All of a sudden what had been foundation for him had disappeared, and he collapsed, and ever since he lived in the disorienting atmosphere of chaos.  If he couldn’t believe in God, how could he believe in a landscaped yard?  That’s the problem with the world, he thought.  We have no bedrock and nobody seems to know it.  His own discovery of its absence was accidental.  But he had to find it again or life would always be as meaningless for him as it was in the dark days after Veda’s death.

     He had been sitting for quite a while, for he finished the coffee, and they were still not down.  He knew they were talking about him, having a regular conference up there in their bedroom, planning what to do with him.  “So what?” he thought, they were family, they meant well, they only wanted what they thought was best for him.  That didn’t mean he had to let them rule him.  He’d listen to their entreaties and go his own way when he was ready.  Perhaps he’d spend a few days here, let Maria fatten him up, that’d make her happy, and he was too thin, he could use a little of her care. 

     Just then, Maria came out onto the patio and told him that Vaughn was on the phone with a hysterical girl from a town in Ohio called Smith’s Point, and that this girl wants to talk with him.  She had a look of disbelief on her face, like he was some kind of lunatic. 

     He got up and went inside with her and she showed him to a phone.  He picked up and heard a girl’s voice crying hysterically and his brother’s voice saying, “calm down, calm down, try to take a few deep breaths, Abel will be here in a minute.”

     So he said, “I’m here, is this Alicia?  Alicia?  What’s the matter?” 

     And Alicia began sobbing and through her tears she made him understand that she had been savagely beaten by her mother when she found the fifty dollars, that she was in a hospital, that her mother threw her out of the house, that she had none of the money left, and that police and social workers were coming to take her away, that they were going to put her in jail, and on and on in a stream of incoherencies and terrors that left both Abel and his brother speechless.  After he calmed her down, he got from her the name of the hospital, and Vaughn made her understand that she should put a doctor on the phone.

     It took a while, but finally a case worker came to the phone and explained much the same thing that Alicia had said, only she detailed her condition, which was very bad.  Her mother had really done a job on her.  The police and the Child Services division of the Department of Social Services were investigating, and it was likely that they would make her temporarily a ward of the state and place her in a foster home when she was ready to leave the hospital.  Otherwise, there was nothing to worry about.  Her condition wasn’t life threatening.  She questioned Abel about his connection with her and finally put Alicia back on the phone.

     Abel asked her what she wanted, and Alicia asked if he couldn’t come for her.  He paused a long time.  He was torn.  He didn’t know this girl.  He had spent about an hour and a half with her and had given her some money.  He couldn’t understand why she would want him to come for her, he was a stranger.  He must have had an impact on her that he was unconscious of.  And he had given her too much money, he realized that.  It was an unreflective and immoderate act of generosity, just the kind of thing he’d do in the condition he was in.  He didn’t think there’d be such fallout.  But he didn’t think at all.  What happened to her was his fault.  So he said he would come, but that she shouldn’t get her hopes up about him, because the Child Services people weren’t likely to let him take her away.  But he’d come.  She quieted down and asked him to hurry.  He said he would take a plane to Youngstown as soon as possible and he’d be there before too long.  She said “Thanks” in a voice that made him melt with pity.

     Now he had to face his brother and sister-in-law.  He was embarrassed and didn’t know how to explain about this tip thief, this hose-stealer, this shoplifter of supermarket sausages whose mother beat her in a fit of rage for having fifty dollars stuffed in her pocket.  She lived in an obscure town almost exactly midway between his own house and his brother’s.  A pivot point, he thought and laughed. 

     “How did she know where to call you?” they demanded.  So he told them about talking with her in the neighborhood park after she had swiped the tip and that he told her he was going to visit his brother and where his brother lived, and that he told her about Lila, too, and her son and her mother, and that she had told him all about herself.  They couldn’t believe he had had such a conversation with a child.  He felt the redness creep up his neck and flush his cheeks. 

     “What’s the matter with you?” his brother asked, “Have you lost all sense of proportion?  What business did you have talking to a kid like that?  I swear, Abel, I think you’re regressing.  I’m beginning to wonder if you’re competent yourself.”

     His brother was angry.  Abel was behaving stupidly.  His plan to visit Lila was really half-baked.  He could see that now.  And what he did with this girl--what motive did he really have talking to her like that?  He began to wonder.  Was what he did really stupid? 

     “Well,” Maria said, “you can’t go back there, you have no place, no right, and you’d be sending all kinds of wrong messages by going.  I forbid it.  Vaughn.  Talk to him, I know he plans to go back.  Make him not.”

     “You can’t. . . .”

     “Stop,” Abel said, interrupting his brother.  “I’m responsible for what happened to that girl.  I have an obligation now and I intend to see it through.”

     “Be prepared for some powerful suspicions of you and your motives.  Those people are going to interpret your little tryst with this girl in the worst possible way.  You know what the country is like these days!  You may even find yourself in jail,” his brother said in a tone of utter annoyance, putting his hand on his shoulder, adding, “And I’m not going to bail you out.  If you go, you go against my best advice, and I’m not bailing you out.” 

     “You said that,” Abel replied. 

     “Abel, you’d be more than stupid to go back there, you’d be undermining your own future,” Maria said.

     “Listen,” Abel said, “that kid needs comforting.  Even if I can’t help her any other way, I can do that.  And I promised her I would go.  What else can I do?  Can I use the phone?”

     They both turned their backs on him and walked out of the den where Abel had taken the call.  He made reservations for a flight later in the day and told his brother he’d need directions to O’Hare.  But Vaughn said he’d take him and that he or Maria would come to get him when he returned. 

     “Abel, Abel, Abel,” he said, “you do make your life harder than it needs to be.”

     He thought about that, about making his life harder than it needs to be.  It was true.  And that thing about his competence.  That was true, too.  But so what?  It was his life.  His way, competent or not.  If he was mad, wasn’t it because he wanted to be?  Why be rational about everything, why should he behave like a logarithm?  Is that supposed to be an accomplishment?  Life was hard, life was very hard for this girl, Alicia.  Maybe what happened was bad, but maybe some good will come of it.  He felt sorry for the girl.  Was that wrong?  When the waitress told him she was a hardened criminal, he didn’t believe it.  When he told Alicia that he’d send her more money after he got home from his trip, she seemed so grateful, so believing, that he pitied her and was saddened to the point of feeling that sinking in his gut again.

     When he reached the hospital and entered her room, she was lying on her back, asleep.  When he stood beside her, he was unprepared for what he saw.  Her face was black and blue, her lips were swollen, and her eyes were so swollen that he didn’t think she could open them.  She had an IV inserted into a vein on the top of her right hand, and the arm was all black and blue.  He couldn’t see the other arm, but he could see that at the bottom of her neck around the clavicle she was also black and blue.  She was terribly beaten.  God.  The poor kid.  He pulled a chair up and sat beside her, quietly, hoping not to wake her.  A nurse came in and asked if he was Mr. Ankrum, and he said that he was.  She wakened at the sound of their voices and started to cry when she saw him.  He took her hand and said hello and said he would be sitting by her, not to worry about him leaving.

     She gestured by shaking her head yes.  He leaned in close to her and said he was sorry she was hurt so bad.  “Can I go home with you?” she asked. 

     “I don’t know, Alicia.  We’ll have to see.  If they let you, sure.  Why not?  You’d like that?”

     And she shook her head that she would.  He knew he shouldn’t be saying these things, that he was setting her up for disappointment.  So he said, “Alicia, don’t put too much hope in that happening.  The Child Services people probably won’t let you go home with me.” 

     “Why not,” she moaned, making sounds that were distorted by the swelling of her lips.

     “Because I don’t live here in Ohio, and you are a citizen of Ohio, and also because I’m not a relative, I have no rights to you.”

     “But that’s what I want,” she said through her black and blue lips. 

     “Whatever happens, Alicia, I’m here now, and I’ll stay for as long as I can.”

     He sat beside her and told her about his plane trip and she tried to tell him about her mother, but he quieted her when he saw how it pained her.  After a while, the nurse returned with another woman, an older woman with short gray hair dressed in a black two-piece suit with a dark blue blouse under her jacket, whom she introduced as Alicia’s case worker.  The woman asked if she couldn’t have a talk with him, and he felt his stomach fall.  “Here it comes,” he thought.  He braced himself and stood up and asked her where she wanted to go, and she said that there was an office available on the ward.  He turned to Alicia and took her hand and whispered in her ear that he had to leave but would be back soon, and she said OK, and then, seized by an idea, she pulled his hand and he lowered his head again to hear her whisper, “Ask them if I can go home with you!”  He kissed her on the forehead and said that he thought the subject would come up.  “But don’t be too hopeful,” he said, and left her. 

     When they entered the office, he found two other people already seated, and they stood and were introduced.  One of the others was a policeman in plain clothes, and the other was from the FBI.  Both were men. He thought, from what his brother had said, that he was going to get the third degree.

     And he wasn’t wrong.  They were suspicious of him, suspicious of the fifty dollars, of his motive for giving it to the girl, and they wanted to know what he had got in return; but most of all, if he was a stranger to her, as she had insisted earlier, and now he was insisting himself, why did she want so much to go with him, and why would he fly from Chicago, at a moment’s notice, to come to her?  They believed there was more to the story than either of them, Abel and the girl, was telling, and they were determined to get to the bottom of it.  Their suspicions were obvious, and by the nature of their questioning, Abel could tell they thought he was involved in some kind of conspiracy with her mother, who was already in custody.

     “God,” he said, “I had a conversation with the kid in that little park, and we sympathized with each other, that’s all.  The poor kid doesn’t get much sympathy.  Not even from you people, even after she’s been beaten like that.  It’s the sympathy, only that, she’s responding to.”

     “Perhaps you’re right, Mr. Ankrum,” the FBI agent said,           “but we don’t believe in sympathy, yours or anybody’s.  We want to know why a man comes traveling across country from Long Island to, where did you say? Vancouver?” and Abel shook his head yes, “gets off the Interstate at a city like Youngstown, goes by all the big motels, the big restaurants, the pools and spas and whatnots, and makes his way to Smith’s Point, a tiny little town with nothing distinctive about it, which has only the one little motel with a greasy-spoon half a block away, and then within an hour of arriving has this meeting with a fourteen-year-old girl in a local park, gives her fifty dollars, and flies back instantly from Chicago when the girl calls.  Whim and sympathy don’t seem to us, Mr. Ankrum, likely enough explanations.”

     He wanted to say, “So arrest me,” but he was afraid they would do it.  They had been over the story now a dozen times, and he wasn’t sure what they suspected him of.  They kept coming back to the beating and to the girl’s mother.  How was he involved with her?  The agent implied over and over that he had knowledge of her doings.  They were convinced his appearance at Smith’s Point was not an accident, not a result of whim or chance, as he was saying.  As Abel thought about them and their suspicions, he knew they would be checking up on him at home, and when the FBI talked to Harry, they would find out that he had more or less disappeared from work for about a week, and Harry would tell them of his erratic behavior over the last several months. 

     Adding those details to the present ones, Abel had a glimpse of paranoia, the real thing, a fleeting but terrifying peek into the dark mirror of the soul where hellish mysteries flashed their existence like sheet lightening across a summer night’s sky; he felt he had been seized by what made people so cynical, with all their mistrust of disclaimers and protestations of innocence, their obsessions with scandals and cover-ups, with character-destroying accusations of adultery and lurid sexual crimes, a world in which men are--his brother was right--ipso facto villains, and especially so in their relations with women, not to mention girls. 

     And then there was the paranoia caused by suspicions that everybody is guilty of something—the corrupting influence of money and the hunger for ever more intense and varied gratifications being so widespread.  It was a paranoia that saw nobody as innocent, that foreswore innocence as a possibility in anybody’s behavior.  But even worse, there were all those movements springing up in the wake of 2016, Charlottesville, the Parkland High School, and Black Lives Matter in state after state, men and women arming themselves against the changes in the world, convinced that our leaders and law enforcement are evilly intent upon destroying our freedoms. 

     His behavior, as seen through these heavy duty goggles, certainly looked suspicious.  If they worked on him long enough, he began to wonder, would he begin confessing to some absurd plot involving the girl and her mother--like smuggling drugs, or girls, even, to be used by men in high places, to be used maybe for snuff films, or some other horrid thing, things that people actually do, and which these guardians of the public safety see themselves as crusaders for tracking down and stopping?  They are the unthanked St. Georges, slaying the dragons of civil corruption.  “God,” he thought, “I’m a dragon!  I’m done for.  Who knows what has been going on under the surface of this sleepy town?”

     But the old woman, who was silent throughout the questioning, and who was present because it had fallen to her as the girl’s case worker to decide what was to be done about her and who had, therefore, an interest in learning more about Abel, and who was present also because the FBI used her as the means to what they called an “informal” talk with Mr. Ankrum, turned out to be an advocate--an unexpected ally.  As the case worker on the scene, she was the first to speak with the girl and Abel, and her instincts were telling her that they had experienced one of those connections that are all too rare—a mutual understanding had occurred between them, a moment when each had given to the other that apprehension and recognition which is like balm to the soul.  Neither Able nor the girl could explain what had happened, she knew, so she broke in during the pause, when Abel had his glimpse of the horror, and told the two men that they had overlooked an important fact.

     “Mr. Ankrum returned,” she observed, “when the girl told him she had been beaten by her mother.  Why would he do that, knowing she was hospitalized and that the police were questioning her?  I heard her tell him she was afraid the police were going to put her in jail.”

     “Why did the girl fear she would be put in jail?” the FBI man inquired.

     “Because she had been so neglected by her mother that she had to steal for her daily maintenance--the tip off Mr. Ankrum’s table at the cafe, for example--and then all of a sudden she had fifty dollars.  She was afraid she couldn’t explain it and that everyone would think she stole it.  Don’t forget, she’s only a child, still.  She wanted him to come and wants to stay with him because he may well be the only person in her life who sympathized with her. It’s all so pathetic if you think about it.”

     “She’s right,” Abel said, “why would I come back?” relieved she had raised the question for him, for in his state, he couldn’t think anymore.  He was frightened and responding impressionistically to his questioners, all his capacity for logic, his engineering skills applied to problem solving, long since dissipated by the intensity of suspicion the two men expressed in their attitudes and tones of voice. 

     They sat stony faced, looking at him, considering whether to continue with the questioning.  Abel had asked what they thought he was guilty of, but neither of them offered to explain.  So he told them that he was abandoning his plans to go to Vancouver and was returning to Chicago to get his car and then going home.  On his way back he would stop again to visit the girl.  And finally, the long grueling session had ended.  The men left.  Whether they were satisfied or still harbored suspicions he had no idea.  But he felt like he had a brush with unreason, and the touch, ever so weblike against his psyche, unsettled him and left him sweating and nervous.  He sat for a moment with the old lady, saying nothing, and she herself offering nothing. 

     When he returned to the girl’s room, she was awake, waiting for him.  He told her he was going to sit beside her for the rest of the night, or for as long as they would allow him, and they would talk in the morning.  She should feel better then he told her.  Perhaps they would have breakfast together.  He leaned over and kissed her forehead, and in a few minutes she was asleep. 

     She was so trusting, this girl.  He felt for her.  On the way up the corridor, he asked the case worker, whose name he could not remember now, if there was any chance of her coming to live with him.  She said none at all.  She added that if he remarried there might be a slight chance.  But she doubted it even then.  Well, he thought, there’s always more than one way.  He would stay in touch with her.  Send her money.  Make sure she isn’t abused or neglected again.  He would be a presence in her life.  Perhaps she could even spend vacations with him.  They wouldn’t prevent that, he thought.  They weren’t cruel.  Most importantly, he would make sure she never lacked again.  He could do that.  And if she was ever treated badly, he would blow his top and make the system pay. 

     But if she wanted to live with him, why would they prevent her?  After all, she’s not a baby, she’s fourteen.  Old enough to know her own mind.  What would they do if she said, “I want to live with Abel Ankrum and that’s what I’m going to do.  Tough cookies.  Good-bye.”  What could they do?  Put her in jail?  What would they do to him if she did that?  Put him in jail?  It’s all so stupid.  The state and its crusaders.  The guardians of public morality.  The know-it-alls.  The professionals who know everybody’s business better than they know it themselves.  They all have turf to protect.  How he hated them.  Her coming to live with him, however much she wanted it, however deeply and profoundly she might need it, could never happen because it would fly in the face of all professional wisdom about what is best for her, despite the fact that he might come to love her more deeply than her own father did, and her mother, for that matter.  The social workers know better than us the depths of our own hearts.

     What would they do?  What could they do?  He sat back and thought about her.  Once again life in its cold impersonal fatedness seemed to make impossible the one thing he wanted.  But he no longer felt a need to sit in the dark, though that was exactly what he was doing.  But this was a different kind of dark.  They both were in it, he and the girl, and that gave him a purpose.  He could feel her lying there.  She had a grip on him.  She was tough.  Somehow, he knew, they would work their way out of this dark, for she was no loser, this girl.  If anybody could beat the system, she could.  He sat back and smiled.  He liked her more and more.