Page 69

'Of course I can walk,' he said. He went toward the delivery entrance, but stopped on the threshold. 'It's dark out there,' he said. 'You're setting me up, aren't you? How many of them are there -- out there?'

I led him to the front lobby door and turned on the outside light. I'm afraid that this was the light that woke up Father. 'Goodbye,' I told the man in the white dinner jacket, 'and Happy New Year.'

'This is Elliot Park!' he cried, indignantly.

'Yes,' I said.

'Well, this is that funny hotel, then,' he concluded. 'If it's a hotel, I want a room for the night.'

I thought it best not to tell him that he didn't have any money on him, so I said instead, 'We're full. No vacancies.'

The man in the white dinner jacket stared at the desolate lobby, gawked at the empty mail slots, and at the abandoned trunk of Junior Jones's winter clothes lying at the foot of the dingy stairs. 'You're full?' he said, as if some truth about life in general had occured to him, for the first time. 'Holy cow,' he said. 'I'd heard this place was going under.' It wasn't what I wanted to hear.

I steered him toward the main door again, but he bent down and picked up the mail and handed it to me; in our haste to prepare for the party, no one had been to the mail slot

at the front lobby door all day; no one had picked up the mail.

The man walked only a little way out of the door, then came back.

'I want to call a cab,' he informed me. There's too much violence out there,' he said, gesturing, again, to life in general; he couldn't have meant Elliot Park -- at least not now, not since Doris Wales had gone.

'You don't have enough money for a cab,' I informed him.

'Oh,' the man in the white dinner jacket said. He sat down on the steps in the cold, foggy air. 'I need a minute,' he said.

'What for?' I asked him.

'Have to remember where I'm going,' he said.

'Home?' I suggested, but the man waved his hand above his head.

He was thinking. I looked at the mail. The usual bills, the usual absence of letters from unknowns requesting rooms. And one letter that stood out from the rest. It had pretty foreign stamps; osterreich said the stamps -- and a few other exotic things. The letter was from Vienna, and it was addressed to my father in a most curious way:

Win Berry

Graduate of Harvard

Class of 194?

U.S.A.

The letter had taken a long time to reach my father, but the postal authorities had found one among them who knew where Harvard was. My father would say later that getting that letter was the most concrete thing going to Harvard ever did for him; if he'd gone to some less-famous school, the letter would never have been delivered. That's a good reason,' Franny would say, later, 'to wish he'd gone to a less-famous school.'

But, of course, the alumni network at Harvard is efficient and vast. My father's name and 'Class of 194?' was all they needed to discover the right class, '46, and the correct address.

'What's going on?' I heard my father calling; he had come out of our family's second-floor rooms and was on the landing, calling down the stairwell to me.

'Nothing!' I said, kicking the drunk on the steps in front of me, because he was falling asleep again.

'Why's the front light on?' Father called.

'Get going!' I said to the man in the white dinner jacket.

'I'm happy to meet you!' the man said, cordially. 'I'll just be trotting along now!'

'Good, good,' I whispered.

But the man walked only to the bottom step before he seemed overcome with thought again.