But I hesitated. "I thought how long was up to you. We all thought it was."

"All right. Let's say it is. Throw the Senate to the sharks for all I care. Up to me, all right? Want to go beddy-bye like the rest?"

The parallel knuckle encircling my ankle climbed like a ladder of bone: Laoc.o.o.n seizing a live column. He withdrew the clamp of his power. It was as though he had willed himself back into the mere myth of being Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck. I scorned his Vikings and his Greeks. They were severances and pastiches. They had no whole existence. But his hand was the hand of a man.

"I'm wide awake though-"

"Good. So am I, and so's the moon. A boat-ride, how about it? She got the motor to work, they all say, so how about it? Try it out. When the going's good motor feels like a heartbeat. Prime it for tomorrow, what d' you say?"

"Now?"

"That's the word to live by."

We stumbled downward toward the beach. But it was only I who did the stumbling, caught here and there in a trench, or bang against a stubborn tuft of weed, which grew black as hair in the dark-he walking plainly down, taking his time, in lucid progressions of logical movement without complexity, like a chromatic scale rather than a chord: His walk was as real as his hand. "d.a.m.n-the flashlight," he said when he saw me baffled by what might have been a crater or a mound, uncertain how to spring it; the moon killed perspective. "I forgot the d.a.m.n flashlight. -Did you get one for yourself?" I had not. I looked behind: there was the shining silver stick upside down on the table where he left it, a miniature Doric column far off, a tourist's souvenir of the Parthenon.

But without a beam he could not distinguish among the motors. Shadows of shadows confused their shapes.

On the sand I found a rectangle of clear polished light. It was a little pocket mirror. I held it up to let it flash; instead it blackened into invisibility. A thread of hair clung to it. "Mrs. Purse's," Tilbeck said. -I brushed it clean of granules. Circe on the beach, combing before she lay down with her lover. -But he said: "Clever woman. She was using it to get a back view of some cramped area in one of these machines. Like a dentist's mirror. -I'll be d.a.m.ned if I can tell in the dark which is the one she fixed. Bunch of cripples is all I can see."

He went from object to object, puzzled. Machine parts sprawled as in the aftermath of a ma.s.sacre-members and torsos. Among the mutilated bodies of motors a white fog of moon crept, and going down on his knees Tilbeck crept. His waist and legs disappeared behind the curious form of a machine. He looked like a faun-half man, half motor, the sort of faun a modern imagination might invent. And for a moment I pondered the bright image of the boy coming in the boat, his lower half magicked into keel, meandering toward me through dark swamp pools.

"Should we row instead?" I called.

"With the motor ready? What's the point? Anyhow you've had your fill of it today." And his hands reached from turret to turret, like a blind man's.

"-Throw said rowing makes you sick."

"No, only a little vertigo." He spat toward the sea. "I give up."

"Can't you find it?"

"There's the material for fifteen, sixteen motors here. Only one of 'em's whole. Don't ask me which."

"This one? How about this? This one right here." I tapped with the corner of the mirror on a squat collection of crenelated bars and ridged planes and deep jagged iron mysteries, and in the tilt of the gla.s.s accidentally happened on my face. There in its tiny window I saw my sudden mouth. The milky drizzle of moonlight spattered it. The skin of my lips shone.

"You're only guessing. She's disguised it," he said wrathfully.

I wore the gleaming membrane of my mouth, and turned the mirror to conceal the dazzle. My mouth was a shield; idiot words battered it. "But couldn't this be the part-" it was necessary to speak as if I had seen nothing of myself, and did not know-"it could be the part that attaches to the back of the boat-"

"Stern," he said.

"Stern," I acquiesced. He was crawling toward me. Crystals of sand sheathed his moving haunches like a moon-dappled mail. "This hooked shape here. This sort of halberd-thing. You see it, Nick?"-and tapped again. I had never said his name to him before. A brief hollow music stood in the air; something stiff let out the thin clean line of a ghost-the mirror cracked along the line, and came away in my hands like broken bread, or like the two remembered halves of the vernal ENCHIRIDION.

"Nick?" he said. "Why not Thor? Why not Loki? Why not Apollo?-No, that's not the one. It's got its crotch missing. That other pile two yards down is short a nose. Can't spot Lazarus among cadavers by night. -Sit down yourself, and I'll tell how they named me wrong. I was named all wrong. More's the pity. Well, in my time they didn't call babies Zeus-"

"Or Pan." A hot wetness fled quickly out of my finger. "Stupid-"

"What is it?"

"I cut my hand, it's bleeding-"

"Let me see." He strained close and touched my palm in its crucial center to support the hand. "Bend down, I have to see." I bent, and smelled the floweriness of wine in his shoulder-swiftly he licked the long shining narrow stream. "It's what they do in Sicily for first aid, the country people-to stop a virgin's bleeding, obtain the fresh-sucked saliva of the head of a family-" Another wetness wet my finger. Instantly the air dried it. The same wetness came on my lip. I tasted his saliva on my lip. The taste of the blood from my finger mingled faintly on the inner skin of my lip. Carelessly and silently he entered my mouth. His eye giantly near my eye was a great lily. His hand ma.s.sing at my ankle was a tower. The faculty of taste altered and became skill. Carelessly and silently an evanescent tissue of the wine's floweriness opened a deep secret room. Unseeingness unlocks. Strange and new, I breathed the minotaur.

Then ran.

Up the bleached hill of sand, to the weedy black lawns, to the black wood where leaves like white tongues jittered, to the brook, careless and silent, swirling the gilt yolk of moon, to the three tents compact, intact, folded in, inviolate, to the panicked kings, to the table dense with civilization, ran, ran from the faun, head of a family.

A triangle of brilliance pouring from the flashlight led me into my father's house. It was dark and a ruin. I took off my shoes-their clack on the tiles was like pursuit. A gra.s.s spearlicked moistly up from a crack. I walked on gra.s.s and into the room of kings and into the room where the haunch of piano crouched. There was my bed, alive with minuets.

Following slowly up out of the beach, a small laughter came from the beautiful man.

10.

The next day I slept late on my sofa. When I awoke the sun was dangling from the top of the sky and nothing had a shadow. Tilbeck was gone.

"He's taken the boat to fetch some more groceries," Mrs. Purse explained.

"Has he? But last night he couldn't tell which was the good motor and which were the castoffs->"

"Oh?" said Mrs. Purse. "Were you down on the beach with Mr. T. last night? I attached"-very lightly she paused over this word-"the motor for him early this morning and he left. Harriet Beecher went with him."

"To drop the bottle," Throw said, eating an apple.

"With a note in it," Manny said. "To drop a note you have to be pretty far out."

"An ocean liner would be good," Al said.

"Or a plane," Foxy said, as if mentioning the devil.

"Maybe on the way to Pakistan," Throw said, "we could open a hatch and toss one out."

"Or paint the note in red ink on Dee's bottom and toss Dee out," Sonny suggested.

Mohandas K. Gandhi lay on the gra.s.s, naked and languid. He lay like a meditating plaster cherub executed by a disciple of Michelangelo; perhaps he had fallen off a frieze. His tiny fat b.u.t.tocks looked shockingly white. His little blue shovel was stuck deep into the ground. The handle had no shadow.

"That'll teach him that Purses weren't made to hold wine," said his mother. "The silly thing woke with what I suppose must be a hangover. He cried all morning and after he stopped crying he got like that-detached. I had to take off his clothes to cool him. Have some biscuits," she offered, "I'm afraid we've run out of breakfast cereal. Jam?"

They watched me eat.

"She doesn't say grace," Foxy observed.

"Ssh," said Mrs. Purse.

"She doesn't say Stella either. Maybe she doesn't know any Stella or Grace," Sonny said, sustaining a grin like an advertis.e.m.e.nt.

"I wish you wouldn't be so derivative, Ralph Waldo. You can't ring changes on your old mother forever. She's long since stopped being a belle. Though some people find her attractive enough. We're out of instant coffee too. Would you mind a tea-bag? Throw, stir up the fire and put the water-pail back on and don't dare take it off until there are plenty of bubbles. Speaking of tea," Mrs. Purse addressed me, "what in the world did Mr. T. lure you down to the beach for in the dead of night?"

"He thought I might like a boat-ride."

But there was an unconvincing overtone in this, as though I were myself aware of some fantastic element in what I said even as I dared arrogantly to say it. Shrewdly Mrs. Purse picked at my absurdity: "Mr. T. loves going fast," she reflected.

"So do I," Throw said. "She's already had a fast boat-ride, I gave her a dandy."

"That's pride in you," Foxy said sourly.

"It's not Throw's fault, it was pried out of him," Sonny said.

"Derivative," chided Mrs. Purse. And to me: "Couldn't find the motor could he? That poor man doesn't have enough resourcefulness to fill a hub-cap. He nearly tried to go off without any fuel-he forgot about fuel. I made him put the oars in just in case. He never thought of taking them-said he had full confidence in my repairs. Confidence in the fixings of a Purse, I told him, is subject to change. Change- nickels and dimes, you see-well, I really enjoy hearing that man laugh," she crowed. "And then what did you do?"

"When?"

"After you gave up about the motor."

"Came back up," I said.

"And talked, I don't doubt. Talked a good deal. A lot of family catching-up to do? A lot of that? I shouldn't wonder, father and daughter-charming. I understand you haven't met for some years? A reunion of sorts?"

"A reunion," I agreed. Walt Whitman and Bronson Alcott were wrestling in the gra.s.s; I pretended to be distracted by their shrieks. Overhand over they rolled, the poet On top of the philosopher, and then the philosopher in the ascendant position astride the poet. They shrieked and they rolled, their pale heads full of sc.r.a.ps of straw, their pale joyous barbarian faces patterned with clinging mud; they rolled right over the sculptured baby, they rolled hugging one another right down the hill, they rolled right through the froth of high-grown Queen Anne's lace until the horizon toppled them out of existence.

"Those two," said Mrs. Purse. "They stick to each other like Damon and Pythias. Excuse me, like a demon and a python."

"Derivative!" yelled Sonny.

"Derisible," Mrs. Purse said modestly. "Children are such animals one almost prefers machines. Of course you need switches for both."

"DiRIgible," Sonny interpreted.

"What?" Foxy said, but it was less a sign of incomprehension than a syllable of contempt. He followed his father in being a spiritual, rather than a mechanical, Purse. It pleased him that he had never heard of a dirigible; in morality machines do not matter, and clearly he was in favor of keeping a mind clean of man's folly.

"It flies," Sonny informed an ignorant world. "You fill it with gas. Not gasoline-gas, like laughing gas. Then it goes up, it's lighter than-"

"Incorrigible. What I said, Sonny, was 'derisible'-"

"You said incorrigible."

"Oh, I'd like to flatten you! Purses should be flattened when they come as empty as you. Dirigible, you misp.r.o.nounced it anyhow-well, go fly like one. I'm trying to have a conversation with this young lady, can't you see that, Ralph Waldo? Flee, if you please," commanded his parent, "flee, flee-"

He took it properly-i.e., like a proper noun. "If I can find a dog to light on," he acquiesced, and fled.

"Purses are capital, but too many at once!-give me an occasional bankruptcy. Look at that one there. If you leave a Purse lying around someone's bound to pick it up." The sculpture on the gra.s.s, hearing itself mentioned, suddenly came to life and stuck its thumb in its nose. Mrs. Purse made a sad face. "Your mother's dead? Now that's tragic. Mr. T. told us she died very young, only twenty-two or so, over in England, in Brighton, he said. Isn't that a sort of beach place?"

I abandoned my biscuit with fingers stiffened by shock. Tilbeck dared anything. He dared the lie that plays with life and death. He trusted, I saw obscurely, in a G.o.d like a man-interested more in the phantasmal re-arrangement of justice than in justice. For the sake of a story he struck my mother dead; it gave his story a color to tell it that way. A greyish curl of margin appeared on the surface of the table, just under the biscuit. A shadow. Afternoon was on the point of beginning. "I've never been there," I said. Then I remembered that I had. Jaggedly I amended: "Though I was born there."

Mrs. Purse chose not to remark on the contradiction. Perhaps she decided that to have been born in Brighton was not the same as to have been in Brighton really; full consciousness might have been her criterion. Yet I had the sensation-it was more than a suspicion, and could almost be witnessed physically-that she had made a small note for herself, and tucked it away. "Such a lot of travelers you are!" she breathed out with a moment's absent brightness; then resumed funereally, "Mr. T. said he actually had to farm you out-he'd tried keeping you, tried nursemaids and so on, he said, but it didn't work. He told us he finally had to give you to the Peruvian Amba.s.sador's family to be brought up. in." She was very polite; she looked to me for corroboration, as if she nearly expected me to believe she believed this.

"Not Peruvian," I said dully.

This encouraged her. She gave out a facsimile of eagerness: "But I suppose you speak Spanish fluently?"

"Not fluently."

"That's your modesty doubtless," she acknowledged with disappointment. She had been hoping for total denial, not ambiguity. By "not fluently" did I mean "not at all"? She could not tell. "I wish you'd transfer some of it to Throw-we have a terrible time with that boy's ego. Throw!" she called. He was skipping stones across the brook. It was a sport which Foxy would not partake in: stoning was contrary to the creed of harmlessness. A water-bug might get hurt. Throw thought Foxy thought Foxy might get hurt, and said so. Foxy resented this; it confused compa.s.sion with cowardice. Throw replied that he didn't think doing good meant doing nothing. The two sects competed in argument. Argument proceeded to obstinacy, obstinacy to conviction, conviction to crusade. Stones were hurled, not at water-bugs. Arms and shins and a feature of the face were struck. Martyrs' yells rose up piously. "Throw!" Mrs. Purse pounded on the table with a missile that conveniently came her way. Nothing happened; the Friend continued to war with the minister, D.V. "Will you see about that water? b.l.o.o.d.y nose, good Lord!"

Henry David Th.o.r.eau departed from the field of action and peered into the suspended pail. Mrs. Purse's offspring were complaisant, if only gradually. "Boiling like mad," he said.

"Are you sure? Well don't bleed into the pot Are there bubbles?"

"s.e.xtillions."

"You know how you irritate Purse when you exaggerate. You know he thinks you use that word only because it's got s.e.x in it."

Foxy looked affronted and stroked an elbow. A bruise glowed ih it like an interior flower. "Purse is in the woods," he warned.

"If you don't mind," I said, "I'll let the tea go."

"Maybe you're right. It's too hot for this part of the month. It's too hot for tea and Lord knows it's too hot to drink blood. That must've bled a lot That cut on your finger? It's since yesterday, isn't it? My boys turn into thugs when Mr. T. isn't here to organize them-George Fox is Caliban himself. Bloodshed's common enough here. I see you've not only noticed it but experienced it. Well! Do you find him an affectionate father?"

Bewilderment caught me. She had intended it to. -I said: "We're strangers-"

"That's just what I'm driving at In spite of that, I mean. After such a lengthy separation. It must be hard. Though he's such an easy man to get on with, isn't he? So lovely and hilarious. Day after tomorrow we'll be gone and you'll have him all to yourself on a Purseless island. Prospero and Miranda-Mr. T.'s words. Pretty!" Her forefinger shook at me comically but grimly. "Without Purses the wages of sin never get paid. It is a sin to be a poor correspondent He writes to you though?"

"To my mo-" I began, and stopped.

"Hm?" said Mrs. Purse. "I didn't catch-"

"Sometimes he writes."

"But not often enough. I see. Well, in your case it hardly matters. Blood is thicker than ink. In our case we're likely to lose him forever, though not, if you're with me, not the case itself: Mr. T.'s getting my husband a new traveling case actually-isn't that kind? He's remarkable about giving gifts-very sensitive to one's circ.u.mstances. I hope he thinks of alligator-I was enamored of your alligator thing the minute I set eyes on it. It shows he's just as sensitive about his own flesh. A wonderful man. It's himself he gives, like so few of us. Lord knows how many people have abused the privilege and taken advantage. Now Dee, get up, rise and shine. Make him get up, boys."

The warriors were sulking under a tree.

"He looks asleep," Foxy said, "with his eyes open."

"Maybe he's dead," Throw said.

"What's it feel like?"

"To be dead?"

"No. Drunk."