The Sacrifice

Cornelius Platt had had a horror of violence from his earliest years. It was not merely the violence that resulted in damage to flesh or windows, to bones or buildings, but the violence that tended in any way to shake up the natural order of things, whether its manifestation was casual, in riots, or serious, in revolutions, or simply in the shattering of the primeval silence with oaths and obscenities. Platt, a thoughtful youth and a philosophic adult, had from the beginning suspected that those who went about tearing off carpets and covers, pulling down curtains and throwing up sashes, in restless, insatiable quest for the "basic," might in the end only discover that they had made a mess of the living room. For how much was there to any chamber but the grace of its decoration? And how much, when all was badly said and badly done, was there to the human race when it had lost its manners? But this horror of violence had always been accompanied by a very healthy respect for the perpetrators of violence, by a conviction, indeed, that such were the true rulers of the world, either boldly, with a display of brawn, or discreetly, with that same brawn concealed beneath traditional velvet. Platt's notorious father, the artist and sport, from whose custody he had been early removed by his scandalized dead mother's family, had been a proof of where people's real, if not professed, sympathies lay. For all the senior Platt's wenching and extravagance, for all his passion for killing that had started with ducks, matured to rogue elephants and ended with Spanish Loyalists (and his own extinction), his name, even in the minds of his bitterest critics, still evoked the picture of a man. And so his son, through school and college, through early manhood and middle age, right into the evening of his 60s, in the black silk of his court robes, Mr. Justice Platt, heir of the dead adventurer of Barcelona, still looked out with a guarded caution on the world below his bench, a world that, for all its lip service to his mistress of the balanced scales, was stubbornly inclined to equate violence with vigor: in sport, in love, in politics, in art.

Oh, he had made his peace with that world! Few better. He had even snatched success from its massive jaws, under its mane and sleeping, grumbling head. He had made his reputation at the bar and was making another on the bench, reputation for wisdom, temperance and scholarship that fitted with his long, spare, lean build and what he liked to hear described as his Roman profile. More importantly, he had a still beautiful and still loving wife, famed for her work in civil rights, a strong, bright, splendid son who had given up his law practice to go into city government: and a nine-year-old grandson as beautiful as an English boy painted by Romney. It might, indeed, have seemed that, on the threshold of his eighth decade, Cornelius Platt, at least as far as he personally was concerned, had little more to fear from the dreaded violence of the outside world, that he had tiptoed successfully past the sleeping monster.

That it was never too late for life, however, to play dirty tricks came as a small surprise to a pessimist like Platt. Even the dismay of his first discovery of the trick was accompanied by a faint, chilly admiration for the perfect irony of his situation. For what had happened was that the violence that he had so long eschewed had wreaked its revenge by taking up its roosting spot in the heart of Cornelius Platt! Oh, there was no mistaking it. No slightest possibility of error. He found in reading the Times, in watching the news on television, in listening to his morning radio reporter while he shaved, that a faint dull prick in the back of his neck would grow, with sickening rapidity, to a pain through his shoulders, down his back, from where it would clutch at his intestines and then spray upward through his chest. It was rage, rage in him, the judge of judges!

It might have seemed, at first blush, the most natural, even the most banal of all experiences that could arrive at the spotless and polished doorstep of a respected sexagenarian: the indignant conviction that the bottom had been knocked out of society. Was it particularly unusual for a prominent member of the bar, a jurist "with good capon lined," to see doom in the strikes, the muggings, the robberies, the riots of modern urban life? What was his attitude but a typical letter to the Times? Yet Platt knew in his heart, from the very beginning of this new emotional stage, that there was a difference between his reaction and that of his complaining contemporaries. Whereas his brethren of the bench and bar, his friends at the club, his golf and bridge cronies, would purse their lips and cluck and chatter, without particular animosity, with only stertorous disapproval, about the need of law and order; whereas the more reactionary might even postulate, as a kind of temporary necessity, the erection of some super police force, they had all essentially accepted the unrest of the age as they accepted the weather and the income tax. They did not, as he did, have gaudy dreams of a Dies Irae.

For what had slipped into the corners of his guarded heart, what had slunk by the sentries of his judicious toleration, to light up his interior with a fearful glow, was a passionate yearning to see the violators violated. It was a yearning with a force that could make him tremble and feel chills. It could even bring tears, in private, to eyes that stared in luminous shock and dismay at their own image in his shaving mirror. His mind seemed to be turning into a torture chamber of the Inquisition, where modern offenders met a punishment unmitigated by modern humaneness. The muggers who infested the parks and streets, the union chiefs who denied heat or transit to a baffled populace, the ragged undergraduates who shouted obscenities at those who wished only to instruct them were hung by their thumbs, stretched on the rack, flogged and branded, before the throne of a robed and hooded priest who could have been only one person.

Sometimes, in the early morning, waking by Mary Ellen's calmly unconscious body and trembling at the memory of a dream of multiple horrors, he would try to console himself by supposing that many otherwise rational persons were subject to such fantasies and that as long as one never acted upon them, one was morally justified in dismissing them as hallucinations such as might have been brought on by drink or fever. But then he would have to face not one but a pair of reasons against his being entitled to any such relief, the same two reasons that formed the arches on which rested his very life. First, could he be sure, as a judge, that such fantasies might not affect his judgments? And, second, how in such a marriage as his could hatred live beside love?

He had a funny little hope, that lasted for the better part of a year, that he might create a drainage system by way of carefully controlled social conversations that would carry away some of the contamination within him in harmless little streams of anecdote ultimately eliminated by the chemical of human indifference. Thus, at dinner parties, he would contribute to the usual discussion of growing lawlessness the perfect horror story, culled from his wide newspaper reading and high political connections. If the topic was crime, he would offer police details on the latest atrocity; if strikes, some jewel of union intransigeance; if welfare, the most shocking new case of waste and extravagance. And in supplying these items, he was scrupulous to avoid the least appearance of heat; he was always cool and clear, as if seeking only to get at the facts, never to take a position. He would raise an eyebrow in a manner more quizzical than critical; he would appear to invite the amusement of his audience, at most their tolerance of a state of affairs that was, after all, only part and parcel of the poor old human condition.

When Mary Ellen first spoke to him about this little habit, in a taxi returning from a dinner party given by the presiding justice, he recognized that a woman's strength may lie precisely in her contempt for subtlety.

"Why are you so down on welfare?" she asked. "Do you suggest we can do without it?"

"I suggest, my dear, that you have confounded criticism with condemnation. I don't suppose one must approve of waste."

"Don't play the judge with me. Neely. You and your 'brethren' can fool the world that you live in a kind of mental vacuum where any prejudice drops to the floor like a pin, but you don't fool your wives. The people who tell the kind of story you told tonight--that one about mailing welfare checks to Miami--want to abolish welfare."

"I shall try to remember that."

"You don't want to abolish it, do you, darling?"

He knew that she was looking at him now, with her large worried eyes, but he dared not turn to her. Why should she leap to such a disparaging conclusion? Did it not show that, all along, she had secretly suspected him?

"Of course I don't," he tried to assure her. "Perhaps I get too used, in my position, to the detached point of view."

"Because you're always judging? Do you call that detachment? You weigh us all and find us wanting. Don't do it, Neely. The terrible danger of sixty is for the heart to die, years before the body!"

Platt, feeling the full intensity of her concern, stifled a near sob at the sudden bleakness of his own damnation.

(continued on page 150)The Sacrifice(continued from page 138)

"It will never be your danger, my darling!" he exclaimed fervently.

"How grossly you overrate me!" she answered, surprised. "I'm in your boat. Neely. That's how I know."

Platt did not for a minute believe that Mary Ellen's heart was in danger of dying. He did not even believe it of his own. There was nothing dead or even old in the dreadful passions that crackled in his chest. No, alas, the deadest, coldest grate would have been preferable to such a flame.

"Ah, if only I could be like you, dear." he murmured. "I'd be all right!"

Mary Ellen was one of those women whose beauty depends entirely on skin and eyes. Her head, her limbs, her body were long and thin, her hair, a rather shabby blonde, hung down straight and dank, so that her total effect, when she was tired or ill, was osseous, undernourished. But all this was more than redeemed, it was glorified by the glow in her nacreous flesh that made a shimmering background for large, lustrous, hopeful and ultimately rather threatening yellow-brown eyes that seemed to give her interlocutor every last possible chance to be decent, to be good, even to be great, but which, at the same time, had a reservation, hanging there between observed and observer, that if he didn't...! Platt had spent the 30 years of their marriage in distinct awareness of the crackle of the auto-da-fé that was ready to spring into an encompassing glare if the heretic should be finally impenitent. And what had been the murderous temptation of his lifetime but just to be impenitent? If only, at long last, to have the relief of the scorching fire, after all the anticipation? The scorching fire that would match, that might cast out his own?

Mary Ellen, in a word, was good, and her goodness had in it no hint of priggishness, no smallest aspect of fatuity. No, he could never lay that flattering unction to his soul that Mary Ellen's goodness was of the waxed doll's variety that justified his own badness as comfortingly, perhaps even lovingly mortal. Far from it. If there was any room for goodness in the world, a supposition increasingly to be doubted, then there had to be a place for Mary Ellen's goodness, which was premised on the simple faith that one must help everybody. His last chance to scoff at her on the grounds that, loving the whole world, she might have rendered herself incapable of loving an individual, that she might have lost her humanity, her taste, her very character in a kind of misty saintliness, had expired on the day she had elected, with a total commitment that must have satisfied any but a fiend of jealousy, to love him.

It was Mary Ellen's warning that he had in mind when he dodged the responsibility of a "police brutality" case by persuading the presiding justice to reassign the writing of the decision to Judge O'Hara. a former district attorney. Platt joined the majority in quashing the conviction, not even availing himself of the opportunity, which would not have affected the outcome, of siding with Judge Dent, the court's right wing, in his lonely and embittered dissent. But immediately afterward, he was overcome with the darkest depression. For how could he continue to sit on the bench if his decision had been made in reaction to his own animosity? Perhaps, under the law, the conviction should have been sustained. His mind, at any rate, should have been clear of the least bias, for or against the policeman, for or against the accused. God knew, it had been far from that.

Yet if he resigned his position. Mary Ellen would have to know all. He had no excuse of age or health or even of fatigue. She was bound to flare, suspicious as she already was that his problem was moral; and however she might appreciate, even applaud, his move, however high a tone she might take as to what her own soothing, curative role should be in his retirement, there would still be a horror to be smothered, a disgust to be concealed. He would have forfeited her respect, and Mary Ellen could never love where she did not respect. He would have fallen to the rank of one of her wrongdoers, one of her "lame ducks." He would feel the beneficence of her charity, not the sustaining life force of her wifely devotion. It would be far, far worse than her hate.

To lose not only the court but Mary Ellen's love was not to be thought of. What would be left of him but the remnant of a carapace stranded high on the bleak beach of pity? And then, too, did it not behoove him to effect a cure as a duty to society, as well as to himself? Was such a man as he, in Macduff's phrase, fit to live, let alone to govern? For it was just the complication of his case that his mind and judgment remained at all times essentially clear of the contagion. Platt knew perfectly well that the police stick, the machine gun, the armed state were far more pernicious than the evils they purported to correct. He had no illusions about the vicious circle of modern crime and modern punishment. And, even more importantly, he was perfectly convinced that the man who did not love his fellow men was already half dead. There was simply no way for civilized man to live amid the throng of his fellows--cheaters, hypocrites, lechers as they were, cowardly, inhumane, brutal as their behavior might be--without loving them. Oh, yes, if one could not love even the apathetic folk who slammed their windows to shut out the cry of the girl assaulted on the sidewalk below, the folk who would not be implicated even to the extent of picking up a telephone to call the police, one was, compared with enlightened souls, already in the shadow of the tomb. For what was poor shabby humanity but a mob of window slammers? And what was worse than such a mob but the man who hated it?

If the message of the church was love, then the church might be the place for him. He took to going on Sundays again, much to Mary Ellen's surprise, whose own goodness had never needed the support of faith, who even used to say that she liked the idea of personal extinction: but in the Church of the Holy Trinity. Platt found the obstacle of his schoolboy associations too solidly in his path. The prayers were dull, the hymns were dull, the sermons were worst of all. The clean, antiseptic modernity of the church itself, with its bare limestone walls and nonpictorial stained glass, struck him as only coldly handsome. He could not seem to revive any relationship between a savior of mankind and a savior of himself. Perhaps he had trampled it out too completely. The mystic idea of a soul stripped of all its trappings--of flesh, of worldly rank, of ambition, of lust, of very appetite--struck him as not only poor but as somehow ridiculous, as a tricky substitute, in its denial of humanity, for Mary Ellen's "extinction." There was drama in the martyrs, but where was the drama in the Reverend Darlington's holding up to the altar a silver plate stuffed with greenbacks and the discreeter envelopes of those who gave "more"? No, he had burned his bridges to the Protestant God of his early years and he felt that it was unseemly, at his age, to go courting another.

Without assistance from this world and without hope of a next, he began to wonder grimly how long he could continue before some terrible exposure, in his home or on the bench, would overwhelm him. The violence in the world about him and the violence that festered within him were bound, he feared, sooner or later to join forces, sweeping away the pale, interfering integument of Cornelius Platt's body. Yet just when he thought that merger most likely, just when he feared that his inner anger would detonate and blow his physical self to bits, he had the shock of hearing his own voice speak out sharply against his concealed emotions, taking the side of the angels against an angry, red-neck taxi driver who sped him recklessly downtown while denouncing the city fathers as a "bunch of nigger lovers."

"How much longer is the little guy going to put up with it, that's what I (continued on page 210)The Sacrifice(continued from page 150) want to know? It's all very well for people like yourself to be liberals, mister. You live in districts, like where I picked you up, that niggers and Puerto Ricans can't afford. But what about people like me? Where I live, we're afraid to send our kids to school! I tell you, mister, the day is coming when the people of this country are going to take the law into their own hands. And when that day comes, the Ku Klux Klan is going to look like a ladies' sewing circle!"

Platt felt a fierce dusky elation in the pit of his heart at the prospect of the collapse of all hope for Mary Ellen's little civic groups. What an answer to the muggings, to the rapings, to the pilferings, to see stark corpses swinging from street lamps! But what he heard himself say was this:

"Do you realize, my friend, that you are filled with hate? Right up to the brim? Do you realize it's coming out of your very pores? That's no way to live, you know. Not only will it kill your soul, it will kill your body. The adrenaline alone can do it. You've got to get rid of some of that hate. Take it from one who knows!"

The driver had stopped for a light and he turned all the way around now, appalled, to stare at Platt.

"That's a hell of a thing to tell a man," he muttered. "What are you, anyway? Some kind of evangelist?"

"No. I'm just a poor hater like yourself. But I know what it can do to the heart. Take it from me, my friend, I know."

"I don't hate no one," the driver grumbled and was silent. But when Platt paid his fare, the man spurned his tip.

After this, he took the subway to his chambers. It was his theory--and one that few of his fellow New Yorkers would have disputed--that if one could love mankind in the rush hour, it any time. It was underground, in the dreary stations, in the dusty cars, where every cubic inch of space seemed filled as instantly by clothed flesh as it might have been by rushing water, where men and women, dull-eyed and self-absorbed, were crushed against each other without concupiscence, without hate, without charity, without love, with nothing but irritation, a terrible, soul-consuming irritation that wore down the heart and eroded the intestines, that humans were reduced, not to beasts--for do not elephants prop up the wounded, the lame?--but to mere cellular matter, responding with an automatism that only seemed sullen, to electric stimuli. And Platt, jostled or pulled, seated and smothered, looked into eyes a few inches from his own and wondered where Christ was.

It was after the rush hour, however, and after an unusually tense day of oral argument in a bitterly contested labor case, that Platt, much depleted, had his most unnerving experience. He was sitting in an uncrowded car, reading an opinion of the Court of Appeals in the law journal, when two Negro boys, hardly more than 15 or 16 years of age, came chasing each other down the aisle. As they passed Platt, the pursuer caught up with the pursued, seized him by the shoulders and sent him spinning so hard against Platt that he landed in the latter's lap, crushing his journal. Instantly, the boy so thrown recovered himself and pushed his assailant into the lap of the woman opposite. Both boys were shrieking with violent laughter. It could have been dope; it could have been high spirits.

The car remained silent and still, tense and hating, as the boys pushed each other back and forth, screaming and laughing. They were not hostile or belligerent; they were, on the contrary, highly cheerful, except that in their total disregard of the other passengers, in their seeming oblivion to all but their scuffling selves, it was difficult not to read a demonstration of contempt. They might have been in a gymnasium, a park, a back yard. But they were not. Oh, no, they were not.

Platt felt an almost unbearable constriction in his chest and he started, smothering, to cough. It was his first vivid realization of the sharp physical agony to which humiliation could subject a man. That he, a duly elected judge, in a car full of white men, should be so treated and so submit! No, no. It was too much, hideously too much. Suddenly, with a gasping, grating relief in his throat, he threw back his head and screamed:

"How much will you all take from these nigger bastards? How much will you all take, for Christ's sake, before you string them up?"

Then his throat closed, as if a huge hand had squeezed it, and as he struggled for breath, red lights, like rockets, seemed to come hissing in upon him. Finally, there was a hideous rending pain in his chest and a sense of grayness everywhere, and he heard Mary Ellen's voice, very distinct, but low and rapid:

"Can you hear me, Neely? You're perfectly all right. It wasn't a heart attack at all. It was just the heat of the subway after those pills you've been taking for your cold. Dr. Kilbourne says you're perfectly sound."

Platt opened his eyes and saw a white wall behind Mary Ellen's drawn countenance. He made out, too, the corner of a reproduction of a Van Gogh landscape.

"I'm in a hospital?" he murmured.

"You're at St. Joseph's. You fainted in the subway. Fortunately, Timmy Kohler, Judge O'Hara's law clerk, was in the same car. He called the police at the next station and they got you here."

"Otherwise, you'd have ended up at Bellevue."

Platt, hearing this second voice, turned to see his son, Bobby, on the other side of the bed. The young man was all smiles, all sympathy, all love, but his father could only turn away from him with tears of shame.

"Was I hurt?" he asked. "Was I hit?"

"No, dear," Mary Ellen said soothingly. "It wasn't anything that happened to you. You just fainted, that's all. I know it's not like you, but--"

"But those boys? Didn't they do anything?"

"What boys?"

"He must mean the two boys that Timmy said were squabbling in the car," Bobby intervened. "Don't you remember, Ma? He said one of them brushed up against Dad. It may have been the surprise and shock that started this off."

Platt looked now from his son to his wife and wondered if he could read some faint suspicion in the latter's lowered eyes. But, no, she was straightening his sheet with a brief, efficient gesture. She had served as a Gray Lady in that very hospital in World War Two.

"And I didn't say anything? I didn't cry out?"

"No, darling, apparently you just slumped in your seat. You join the great multitude of those for whom the subway has proved too much. I know you turned down an official car on principle, but you're going to have to take it now."

Platt closed his eyes in the bliss of his release. For if some private devil had made up the hideous farce of his outburst in that subway car, might not that same devil of hallucinations have created others? As he thought now of those two boys fighting, it seemed to him that his animosity was quite gone. Indeed, he seemed to have no attitude at all in their respect but a vague and soothing benevolence. He turned his head on the pillow, his eyes still closed. Surely, this would have been the time to die. If there was a state of grace, he was in it now.

This episode was followed by a suspension of anxiety, and Platt began cautiously to wonder if his mental disease had not abated, if, like some rare cancerous growths, despaired of by doctors, it had not suddenly and blessedly simply shriveled away. He no longer traveled by subway, as Mary Ellen absolutely prohibited it, and he found that he was working hard and well again. He even wrote two opinions on the police power of the state that were hailed by civil-liberties groups. At dinner parties, he was able now to censor his old habit of documenting disasters, and he had glimpses of an approaching old age when he might sitin the sun in a rose garden of human understanding, accepting and being accepted. Was it too much to hope? It was.

The blow that was now to fall seemed to have been heralded by his fantasies as the murders in Shakespeare are heralded by bloody images. His whole life was to take on the semblance of a poetic melodrama, too ghastly not to be real. And the victim was not himself--how easy that would have been!--but Bobby's child, Alex, aged nine, the boy as beautiful as the painting by Romney, as gay and precocious as a lad in a tale by Henry James, the adored of his little family, the idol of Mary Ellen.

At noon on a winter day, Platt was summoned from the bench by his law clerk to meet the chief of police, green-faced, in his chambers. Alex' body had been found in a men's toilet in Central Park after his nurse, alarmed at the time he had been away, had called a policeman. The child had not only been stabbed to death--he had been castrated. Whether the act of mayhem had been committed before or after death it was impossible to determine. The fiend or fiends had escaped without clue.

It seemed to Platt in later days that he had lacked the very time for the question of a personal reaction. The first thing had been to arrange that the mutilation of the child be kept from his parents and grandmother. The next had been to tell them without deranging their minds. Platt's horror at their horror left little room for the horror of what he had seen at the morgue. And then there were the newspapers and the frenzied hunt for the criminals, who were never found. The only consolation, a small one, had been in knowing that he bore the knowledge of the mutilation alone.

What preoccupied him most in the gray days that followed was Mary Ellen's collapse. Bobby and Bobby's wife were nothing less than heroic, but Mary Ellen seemed to have crumpled into a formless heap. For days, she sat in an armchair by the window in her bedroom, her eyes fixed dully on the wall of the building opposite. For weeks, she refused to go out of the apartment. All her old activities were abandoned. She hated the universe now, except for Bobby; and although she said nothing overtly hostile to Platt, he knew that somehow, for some arcane reason, she blamed him.

When the doctor suggested a cruise, Mary Ellen made no objection. She simply shrugged and permitted her packing to be done for her.

"I might as well be on the high seas," was all she said. "At least Bobby will worry less about me."

But the big ship did nothing for her. Slumped in her deck chair, an unopened novel on her lap, the light wholly gone from her skin, she exuded the sullen acceptance of the postoperative patient who knows, without being told, that the surgeon couldn't "get it all out." She refused to meet anyone or even to smile at her fellow passengers.

"Pigs," she would simply mutter to herself. "Pigs."

Platt was haunted by the idea that the same hate that had eaten into his heart before the fainting fit in the subway might now be gnawing at hers. It was not, God knew, that he felt any enthusiasm for his cruisemates or for the big vessel that bore them over the Mediterranean, a huge, gaudy balloon painted with cartoonlike faces. Everything on board reminded him of death.

He saw it in the sagging shoulders and dropped jaws and brilliant shirts of the old men; he saw it in the stiff ankles and big buttocks and soft sweaters of their slowly moving wives. He saw it in the compulsive shopping in the bazaars, in the shrill sessions of bingo, in the ineluctable rubbers of bridge. He saw it in his own gaunt face, thrust at him by innumerable mirrors at close quarters, the face of another corpse on a boatload of eating, defecating zombis.

But there was still a compensation that obviously did not exist for Mary Ellen. There was still the compensation of the totality of disillusionment. For what did his fellow travelers represent but the very opposite of all the types who used to outrage him? In the annihilation of the last vestige of his respect for man, he had annihilated the last vestige of his hate. A kind of peace had descended over him, a peace as flat and wide and inanimate as the Ionian Sea around him. But might it not still turn into the peace of God?

One day, approaching Crete, without sight of land, a benign brilliant day, he told Mary Ellen the whole story of his inner troubles. She hardly looked at him as he talked but allowed her eyes, half closed, to rest on the sharp line of the horizon over that dead water.

"Why do you tell me this?"

"Because I know you have always suspected that my detachment was a failure to care about people. It was the fear of caring too much--the wrong way. The fear of hating."

"And now you're free of it? Is that what you're saying? You find you don't hate as much as you thought you did?"

"I shouldn't say 'find.' I should say 'hope.'"

"And that's what poor Alex will have accomplished by dying? To have cast the hate out of his grandfather's heart?"

Platt, with rigidly tightened lips, followed her gaze to the horizon. He needed a minute to poke about in the bludgeoned house of his heart to see what had been broken. But for all the brutality of the onslaught, it seemed to be still intact.

"It will be one of his accomplishments, perhaps."

"Making his tragedy, I suppose, worth while?"

"It sounds very selfish, very egocentric of me, when you put it that way. No doubt, you want to punish me for having anything left at all. It's perfectly natural."

She looked at him at last and her yellow-brown eyes showed the first flicker that he had seen since the tragedy. But love was not the cause.

"What I can't bear is your seeing everything in terms of yourself!"

"How else can I see it? The condition of being human is the condition of being selfish. One is glad that Christ died for one."

"Oh, spare me that, at least!"

Her face now, at a distance of not more than two feet, might have been a face in the subway, expressing not so much hate as the total rejection of love, rejection, anyway, of him and his love. Then her eyes clouded again as, with the faintest of shrugs, she turned back to the sea and into herself, pushing him off, in the manner that one animal pushes another off, unless it wants to eat it or copulate. To Mary Ellen, the crowding bodies of other people had no function but to annoy.

He reached over to pat her hand and met, as he had expected, with no response. Then he rose to walk down the deck and to gaze over the stern rail at their tumbled wake. He had achieved an equanimity that, however precarious, might contain his clue to the future. There was not to be happiness in it, certainly, but neither might there have to be any great misery. The event that he had dreaded for 30 years had happened: Mary Ellen's love was gone; her light was out. She had become as merely mortal, as mechanically human, as the fancied individuals in the subway. That amorphous crowd of straphangers had grown, with Alex' death, to include everyone, even Mary Ellen. Like little particles of zinc, they had merged with the larger trembling mass.

But this, the nightmare, had been only a nightmare. He had survived. For what he had discovered was that his love for Mary Ellen did not, after all, depend on her love for him. It existed of and by itself and it might survive all her scoffing, all her cruelty, even all her hate. He would look after Mary Ellen, and this love, now proven so tough, so durable, so oddly independent, might expand indefinitely to take in the approaching coast of Crete and the whole of the big dirty world that he had left behind.