Falling Rocks Narrowing Road Cul-De-Sac Stop

The day Morgan Myles arrived in L_____ as the new county librarian, he got a painful boil under his tongue. All that week he was too busy settling into his new quarters to do anything about it beyond dribbling over his mother's hand mirror into a mouth as pink and black as a hotel bathroom. Otherwise, he kept working off the pain and discomfort of it in outbursts of temper with his assistant, Marianne Bolger, a frail, long-legged, neurotically efficient, gushingly idealistic, ladylike (that is to say, Protestant) young woman whom he hated and bullied from the first moment he met her. This, however, could have been because of his cautious fear of her virginal attractiveness. On his fourth day in the job, he was so rude to her that she turned on him, called him a Catholic cad and fled sobbing behind the stacks. For 15 minutes, he went about his work humming with satisfaction at having broken her ladylike ways; but when she failed to come trotting to his next roar of command and he went tearing around the stacks in a fury looking for her, he was horrified to find her sitting on the floor of the Arts section still crying into her mouse-sized handkerchief. With a groan of self-disgust, he sat on the floor beside her, put his arm around her shoulder, rocked her as gently as if she were a kid of 12, told her he was a bastard out of hell, that she was the most efficient assistant he had ever had in his life and that from this on, they would be doing marvelous things together with "our library." When she had calmed, she apologized for being so rude and thanked him so formally, and so courteously, and in such a ladylike accent that he decided that she was a born bitch and went off home in a towering temper to his mother, who, seeing the state her dear boy was in, said, "Wisha, Morgan love, why don't you take that gumboil of yours to a doctor and show it to him? You're not your natural nice self at all. You're as cranky as a bag of cats with it."

At the word doctor, Morgan went pale with fear, bared his teeth like a five-barred gate and snarled that he had no intention of going next nor nigh any doctor in this one-horse town. "Anyway," he roared, "I hate all doctors. Without exception of age or sex. Cods and bluffers they are, the whole lot of them. And you know well that all any doctor ever wants to do with any patient is to take X rays of his insides, order him into hospital, take the clothes down off of him, stick a syringe into his backside and before the poor fathead knows where he is, there'll be half a dozen fellows in white nightshirts sawing away at him like a dead pig. It's just a gumboil. It doesn't bother me one bit. I've had dozens of them in my time. It's merely an act of God. Like an earthquake or a crick in the neck. It will pass."

But it did not pass. It went on burning and smarting until one windy, sun-struck afternoon in his second week, when he was streeling miserably along the Dublin Road, about a mile beyond the town's last untidy lot and its last unfinished suburban terrace. About every ten minutes or so, the clouds opened and the sun flicked and vanished. He held the collar of his baggy tweed overcoat humped about his neck. His tongue was trying to double back acrobatically to his uvula. Feeling as lost and forlorn as the gray heron he saw across the road standing by the edge of a wrinkled loch, he halted to compose. O long-legged bird by your ruffled lake/ Alone as I, as bleak of eye, opaque.... As what? He unguardedly rubbed his undertongue on a sharp tooth, cursed, the sun winked and he was confronted by one of destiny's infinite options. It was his moment of strength, of romance, of glamor, of youth, of sunshine on a strange shore. A blink of sunlight fell on a brass plate fastened to the red-brick gate pillar beside him, Dr. Francis Breen.

The gate was lined with sheet metal. Right and left of it, there was a high cut-stone wall backing on a coppice of rain-black macrocarpa that extended over the grass-grown border of the road. The house was not visible. He squeaked the gate open, peered timidly up a short curved avenue at it, all in red brick, tall, turreted and bay-windowed. An empty-looking conservatory hooped against one side of it (intended, presumably, for the cultivation of rare orchids). Along the other side, a long veranda (intended, doubtless, to shelter Dr. Francis Breen from Ireland's burning tropical sun). He opened his mouth wide as he gazed, probed with his finger for the sore spot and found it.

It did not look like a house where anybody would start cutting anybody up. It did not look like a doctor's house at all. It looked more like a gentleman's residence, although he did remember the American visitor to Dublin who said to him that every Irish surgery looked as if it had been furnished by Dr. Watson for Sherlock Holmes. As he cautiously entered the avenue, he observed that the gate bore a perpendicular column of five warning signs in blue lettering on white enamel. No Dogs. No Canvassers. No Hawkers. No Circulars. Shut The Gate. He advanced on the house, his fists clenched inside his overcoat pockets, his eyebrows lifted to indicate his contempt for all doctors. Twice on the way to the front door he paused, as if to admire the grounds, really to assure himself that no dog had failed to read the No Dogs sign: A born city man, he feared all living animals. He was very fond of them in poetry. He took the final step upward to the stained-glass door, stretched out his index finger, to tip, to tempt, to test, to press the brass bell knob. (An enamel sign beneath it said, Tradesmen to the rear.) His mother had spoken of a deficiency. She had also mentioned pills. He would ask this sawbones for a pill, or for a soothing bottle. He would not remove his shirt for him. And he would positively refuse to let down his pants. "Where," he foresaw himself roaring, "do you think I have this boil?"

A shadow appeared behind the door. He looked speculatively over his glasses at the servant who partly opened it. She was gray and settled, but not old, dressed in black bombazine, wearing a white starched apron with shoulder frills. When he asked for the doctor, she immediately flung the door wide open, as if she had been eagerly expecting him for years and years; then, limping eagerly ahead of him, dot and carry one, down a softly upholstered corridor, she showed him into what she called "the dachtar's sargery," quacking all about "what an ahful co-eld dayeh it iss Gad bliss itt" in what he had already scornfully come to recognize as the ducks' dialect of this sodden, mist-shotten dung heap of the Shannon's delta.

Left to himself, he had time only to be disturbed by the sight of one, two, three barometers side by side on the wall, and one, two, three, four clocks side by side on the mantelpiece; relieved by an opposite wall lined with books; and enchanted by a dozen daintily tinted lithographs of flying moths and half a dozen hanging glass cases displaying wide-winged butterflies pinned against blue skies, when the door was slammed open by a tall, straight, white-haired, handsome, military-looking man, his temper at boiling point, his voice of the barrack square, the knuckles of his fist white on the doorknob as if he were as eager to throw out his visitor as his Bombazine had been to welcome him in. Morgan noted that his eyes were quiet as a novice of nuns, and that his words were as polite, and remembered hearing somewhere that when the Duke of Wellington had given his order for the final charge at Waterloo, his words to his equerry had been, "The Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to Field Marshal von Blücher and begs him to be so kind as to charge like blazes."

"Well, sir?" the doctor was saying. "Would you be so kind as to tell me what you mean by entering my house in this cavalier fashion? Are you an insurance salesman? Are you distributing circulars? Are you promoting the Encyclopaedia Britannica? Are you a hawker? A huckster? A Jehovah's Witness?"

At these words, Morgan's eyes spread to the rims of his lake-size glasses. He felt a heavenly sunlight flooding the entire room. He raised two palms of exultant joy. More than any other gift of life, more than drink, food, girls, books, nicotine, coffee, music, more even than poetry and his old mother (whom he thought of, and saw through, as if she were a stained-glass image of the Mother of God), he adored all cranks, fanatics, eccentrics and near lunatics, always provided that they did not impinge on his personal comfort, in which case he would draw a line across them as fast as a butcher cuts off a chicken's head. More than any other human type he despised all men of good character, all solid citizens, all well-behaved social men, all mixers, joiners, hearty fellows and jolly good chaps, always provided that he did not require their assistance in his profession as librarian, in which case he would cajole them and lard them and lick them like a pander, while utterly despising himself, and his job, for having to tolerate such bores for one moment. But here before his eyes was a figure of purest gold. If there were any other such (continued on page 170)Falling Rocks(continued from page 98) splendid crackpots in L_____, then this was heaven, nor was he ever to be out of it.

"But," he protested gaily, "you are a doctor! I have a gumboil! We are the perfect match."

The old man moaned as if he had been shot through by an arrow of pain.

"It is true that I am, by letters patent, a man licensed to practice the crude invention called medicine. But I have never practiced, I have never desired to practice and I never do intend to practice medicine. I know very well, sir, what you want me to do. You want me to look down your throat with an electric torch and make some such solemn, stupid and meaningless remark as 'You have a streptococcal infection.' Well," he protested, "I will do nothing of the kind for you. Why should I? It might be only a symptom. Next week you might turn up with rheumatic heart disease, or a latent kidney disease, as people with strep throats have been known to do. You talk airily of a gumboil. You may well be living in a fool's paradise, sir. Even supposing I were to swab strep out of your throat and grow it on a culture medium, what would that tell me about the terrible, manifold, creeping, subtle, lethal disease processes that may be going on at this moment in the recesses of your body as part of that strep infection, or set off by it? The only thing I, or any other doctor--bluffers and liars that we all are--could honestly say to you would be the usual evasion. 'Gargle with this bottle three times a day and come back in a week.' By which time nature or God would have in any case cured you without our alleged assistance. I know the whole bag of tricks from the Hippocratic collection, the treatises of Galen and the Canon of Avicenna down. I suppose you imagine that I spent all my years in Dublin and Vienna studying medicine. I spent them studying medicos. I am a neurologist. Or I was a neurologist until I found that what true medicine means is true magic. Do you know how to remove a wart? You must wait on the roadway to the cemetery until a funeral passes, and say, 'Corpse, corpse, take away my wart.' And your wart will go, sir! That is true medicine. I believe in miracles because I have seen them happen. I believe in God, prayer, the imagination, the destiny of the Irish, our bottomless racial memory--and in nothing else."

Morgan's left hand was circling his belly in search of manifold, creeping, secret diseases.

"But, surely to God, Doctor," he whined, "medical science can do something for a gumboil?"

"Aha! I know what you're up to now. X rays! That's the mumbo jumbo every patient wants: And neither will I suggest, as you would probably like me to suggest, that you should go to hospital. All you would do there would be either to pass your infection to some other patient or to pick up his infection from him. I will have nothing to do with you, sir. And please keep your distance. I don't want your beastly infection. If you want to mess about with your gumboil, you will have to go to a doctor. If you wish me to pray for your gumboil, I will pray for it. But I refuse to let you or anybody else turn me into the sort of mountebank who pretends he can cure any tradesman's sore toe or any clerk's carbuncle in one second with a stroke of his pen and a nostrum from the chemist's shop. Good afternoon to you, sir. You are now in the hands of God!"

Morgan, stung by arrogance and enraged by fear, roared back at him a line fit for his memoirs.

"And good afternoon to you, sir! From one who is neither clerk nor tradesman, higgler nor hawker, huckster nor hound-dog, but, by God's grace, a poet whose poems will live long after," hand waving, "your butterflies have been devoured by the jaws of your moths."

The old man's rage vanished like a ghost at cockcrow. He closed the door gently behind him.

"A poet?" he asked quietly. "Now, this is most interesting." Courteously, he indicated a chair. "Won't you sit down? Your name is?"

"Morgan Myles," Morgan Myles boomed as if he were a major-domo announcing Lord Byron.

"Mine is Dick Breen. Yours is more euphonious. I can see it already on your first book of verses. But a poet should have three names. Like American politicians. Percy Bysshe Shelley. George Gordon Byron. Thomas Stearns Eliot. William Butler Yeats. Ella Wheeler Wilcox. You have a second name? Taken at your confirmation? Arthur? There we have it! First Poems. By Morgan Arthur Myles!"

Morgan, like most men who are adept at flattering others, could never resist flattery himself. He waggled his bottom like a dog. His grin was coy but cocksure. Three minutes later, the doctor was tenderly parting his lips and illuminating the inside of his mouth. He extinguished the torch. He lifted his eyes and smiled into Morgan's.

"Well, Doc?" Morgan asked fearfully. "What did you see there?"

"You are not even," his new-found friend smiled, "about to give birth to a couplet. Just a blister." He sat at his desk. "I will give you a prescription for a gargle. Rinse your mouth with this three times a day. And come back to me in a week. But if you wish to get better sooner, come sooner, any evening for a drink and a chat. I have no friends in L_____"

"Nor have I!"

Within a week they were bosom cronies.

• • •

From start to finish, it was a ridiculous friendship. Indeed, from that day onward, to the many of us who saw them every day after lunch walking along O'Connell Street arm in arm like father and son, or nose to nose like an aging ward boss with a young disciple, it seemed an unnatural business. Can the east wind, we asked one another in wonder, lie down with the west wind? A cormorant mate with a herring? A heron with a hare? An end with a beginning? We gave their beautiful friendship six months. As a matter of fact, we were only two years and 11 months out.

Even to look at, they were a mismatch: the doctor straight and spare as a spear, radiating propriety from every spiky bone of his body, as short of step as a woman and as carefully dressed from his wide-brimmed bowler hat to the rubber tip of his mottled, gold-headed Malacca cane; the poet striding beside him, halting only to swirl his flabby tweeds; his splendid hydrocephalic head stretched behind his neck like a balloon; his myopic eyes glaring at the clouds over the roofs through the thick lenses of his glasses; a waterfall of black hair permanently frozen over his left eye; his big teeth laughing, his big voice booming, he looked for all the world like a peasant Yeats in a poor state of health. What they could possibly have in common was beyond us. The only one of us who managed to produce any sort of explanation was our amateur psychiatrist, Father Tim Buckley, and we never took him seriously, anyway. He said, with an episcopal sprinkle me O Lord with hyssop wave of his hand, "They have invented each other."

Now, we knew from experience that there was only one way to handle Tim Buckley. If he said some fellow was a homosexual because he had fallen in love with his hobbyhorse when he was five, you had to say at once, "But, Tim, why did he fall in love with his hobbyhorse when he was five?" If he said that it was because the poor chap hated his mother and loved his father, you had to say at once, "But, Tim, why did he hate his ma and love his da?" If he then said that it was natural for every child to prefer one parent to another, you had to say at once, "But, Tim, why...." And so on until he lost his temper and shut up. This time, however, he was ready for our counterattack.

"They have invented each other," he said, "for mutual support, because they are both silently screaming for freedom. Now, what is the form of slavery from (continued on page 248)Falling Rocks(continued from page 170) which all human beings most want to be free?"

"Sex," we conceded, to save time, knowing our man.

"Passion!" he amended. "For this agony there are only three solutions. The first is sin, which," he grinned, "I am informed on the best authority is highly agreeable but involves an awful waste of time. I mean, if you could hang her up in the closet every time you were finished with her, that would be very convenient, but. Then there is marriage, which, as Shaw said, is the perfect combination of maximum temptation and maximum opportunity. And there is celibacy, which, I can say with authority, as the only member of the present company who knows anything at all about it, bestows on man the qualified freedom of a besieged city where one sometimes has to eat rats. Of our two friendly friends, the older man needs approval for his lifelong celibacy. The younger man needs encouragement to sustain his own. Or so they have chosen to imagine. In fact, neither of them really believes in celibacy at all. Each has not only invented the other; he has invented himself."

The silence was prolonged.

"Very well," he surrendered. "In that case, have your own mystery!"

Of course, we who had known Dick Breen closely ever since we were kids together in L_____ knew that there was nothing mysterious about him: He had simply always been a bit balmy, even as a four-eyed kid. When his parents sent him to school in England, we saw much less of him; still less when he went to Dublin for his M. B. and from there on to Austria for his M. D. After he came back to L_____ to settle down for life in the old Breen house on the Dublin Road, on the death of his father, old Dr. Frank, and of his mother, we hardly saw him at all. We knew about him only by hearsay, chiefly through the gossip of his housekeeper, Dolly Lynch, passed on to Claire Coogan. Father Tim Buckley's housekeeper, and gleefully passed on by him to the whole town.

That was how the town first heard that the brass plate on his gate pillar--his father's, well polished by chamois and dulled by weather--would never again mean that there was a doctor behind it; about his clocks and his barometers; about his collection of moths and butterflies; about the rope ladder he had coiled in a red metal box under every bedroom window; about his bed always set two feet from the wall, lest a bit of cornice should fall on his head during the night; about the way he looked under the stairs for hidden thieves every night before going to bed; that his gold-knobbed Malacca cane contained a sword; that he never arrived at the railway station less than half an hour before his train left; that he hung his pajamas on a clothes hanger; had handmade wooden trees for every pair of his handmade boots; that he liked to have his bootlaces washed and ironed; that his vest pocket watch told the time, the date, the day, the year and the points of the compass, and contained an alarm buzzer that he was always setting to remind him of something important he wanted to do later on, but whose nature he could never remember when the buzzer hummed over his left gut--very much the way a wife will leave her wedding ring at night on her dressing table to remind her in the morning of something that by then she has incontinently forgotten.

So! At most a bit odd. Every club in the world must have elderly members like him--intelligent and successful men of whose oddities the secretary will know one, the headwaiter another, the bartender a third, their fellow members smile at a fourth. It is only their families or, if they live for a long time in a small town, their townsfolk who will, between them, know the lot. Dick Breen might have gone on in his harmless, bumbling way to the end of his life if that brass plate of his had not winked at Morgan Myles, and if Father Tim Buckley--was he jealous?--had not decided to play God.

• • •

Not that we ever called him Father Tim Buckley. He was too close to us, too like one of ourselves for that. We called him Tim Buckley, or Tim, or even, if the whiskey was fluming, Bucky. He was not at all like the usual Irish priest, who is as warm as toast and as friendly and understanding as a brother until you come to the Sixth Commandment, and there is an end to him. Tim was like a man who had dropped off an international plane at Shannon; not a Spencer Tracy priest from downtown Manhattan, all cigar and white cuffs, parish computer and portable typewriter, fists and feet, and there is the end to him; perhaps more like an unfrocked priest from Bolivia or Brazil, so ungentlemanly in his manners as to have given acute pain to an Evelyn Waugh and so cheerful in spite of his scars as to have shocked a Graham Greene; or still more like, among all other alternatives, a French workers' priest from Lille; or, in other words, as far as we were concerned, the right man in the right place; and as far as the bishop was concerned, a total disaster. He was handsome, ruddy and full-blooded in a sensual way, already so heavy in his middle 30s that he had the belly, the chins and (when he lost his temper) something of the voracity of Rodin's ferocious statue of Balzac in his dressing gown; but he was most himself when his leaden-lidded eyes glistened with laughter, and his tiny mouth, crushed between the peonies of his cheeks, reminded you of a small boy whistling after his dog or of some young fellow saucily making a kiss mouth across the street to his girl. His hobby was psychoanalysis.

His analysis of the doctor was characteristic. He first pointed out to us, over a glass of malt, the sexual significance of pocket watches, so often fondled and rubbed between the fingers. He merely shrugged at the idea of ladders unfolding from red containers and said that swords being in swordsticks needed no comment. Clocks and barometers were merely extensions of pocket watches. (The wrist watch, he assured us, was one of the great sexual revolutions of our age--it brought everything out in the open.) But, above all, he begged us to give due attention to Dick Breen's mother complex--evident in his love of seclusion behind womblike walls, dark trees, a masked gate; and any man must have a terrible hate for his father who mockingly leaves his father's brass plate on a pillar outside his home while publicly refusing to follow his father's profession inside it. ("By the way, can we ignore that No Dogs sign?") The looking for thieves under the stairs at night, he confessed, puzzled him for the moment. Early arrival for trains was an obvious sign of mental insecurity. "Though, God knows," laughing in his fat, "any man who doesn't feel mentally insecure in the modern world must be out of his mind." As for the beautiful friendship, that was a classical case of narcissism: the older man in love with an image of his own lost and lonely youth.

"Any questions?"

No wonder he was the favorite confessor of all the nubile girls in town, not (or not only) because they thought him handsome but because he was always happy to give them the most disturbing psychological explanations for their simplest misdemeanors. "I kissed a boy at a dance, Father," they would say to some other priest and, as he boredly bade them say three Hail Marys for their penance, they would hear the dark slide of the confessional move dismissively across their faces. Not so with Father Tim! He would lean his cheek against the grille and whisper, "Now, my dear child, in itself a kiss is an innocent and beautiful act. Therefore, the only reason prompting you to confess it as a sin must be the manner in which the kiss was given and the spirit in which it was received, and in this you may be very wise. Because, of course, when we say kiss, or lips, we may--one never knows for certain--be thinking of something quite different...." His penitents would leave his box with their faces glowing and their eyes dazed. One said that he made her feel like a Magdalen with long floating hair. Another said he made her want to go around L_____ wearing a dark veil. A third (who was certain to come to a bad end) said he had revealed to her the splendeurs et misères de l'amour. And a fourth, clasping her palms with delight, giggled that he was her Saint Rasputin.

We who met him in our homes, with a glass in his fist and his Roman collar thrown aside, did not worry about what he told our daughters. We had long since accepted him as an honest, innocent, unworldly man who seemed to know a lot about sex-in-the-head--and was always very entertaining about it--but who knew sweet damn all about love-in-the-bed, not to mention love at about 11 p.m. when your five kids are asleep and the two of you are so edgy from adding up the household accounts that by the time you have decided once again that the case is hopeless, all "to go to bed" means is to go sound asleep. But we did worry about him. He was so outspoken, so trustful of every stranger, had as little guard over his tongue as a sailor ashore, that we could foresee the day when his bishop would become so sick of getting anonymous letters about him that he would shanghai him to some remote punishment curacy on the backside of Slievenamuck. We would try to frighten him into caution by telling him that he would end up there, exiled to some spot so insignificant that it would not be marked even on one of those nostalgic one-inch-to-the-mile British Ordnance maps of 1899 that still--indifferent to the effects of time and history, of gunshot and revolution--record every burned-out constabulary barracks, destroyed mansion, abandoned branch railway, 18th Century "inn," disused blacksmith's hovel, silenced windmill, rook-echoing granary or "R. C. Chapel," where, we would tell him, is where our brave Bucky would then be, in a bald-faced presbytery, altitude 1750 feet, serving a cement-faced chapel, beside an anonymous crossroads, without a tree in sight for ten miles, stuck for life as curator, nurse and slave of some senile old parish priest with a mass-concrete body. He would just raise his voice to spit scorn at us; like the night he gobbled us up in a rage:

"And," he roared, "if I can't say what I think, how the hell am I going to live? Am I free or am I not free? Am I to lie down in the dust and be gagged and handcuffed like a slave? Do ye want me to spend my whole life watching out for traffic signs? Falling Rocks! Narrowing Road! Cul-De-Sac! Stop! My God, are ye men or are ye mice?"

"Mice!" we roared back with one jovial voice and dispelled the tension in laughter so loud that my wife looked up in fright at the ceiling and said, "Sssh! Ye bastards! If ye wake the kids, I'll make every one of ye walk the floor with them in yeer arms till three in the morning. Or do ye think ye're starting another revolution in yeer old age?"

"We could do worse," Tim smiled into his double chin.

Whenever he smiled like that, you could see the traffic signs lying right and left of him like idols overthrown.

• • •

It was a Sunday afternoon in May. The little island was deserted. He was lying on the sun-warmed grass between the two others, all three on their backs, in a row, their hats on their faces. They were neither asleep nor awake. They were breathing as softly as the lake at their feet. They had driven at their ease that morning to the east side of the lake past the small village of Mountshannon, now looking even smaller across the level water, rowed to the island (Tim Buckley at the oars), delighted to find every hillocky green horizon slowly bubbling with cumulus clouds. They had inspected the island's three ruined churches, knee-deep in nettles and fern, and its Tenth Century Round Tower that had stood against the morning sun as dark as a factory chimney. They had photographed the ruins and one another, and then sat near the lake and the boat to discuss the excellent lunch that Dolly Lynch always prepared for "the young maaaster" on these Sunday outings: her cold chicken and salad, her handmade mayonnaise, her own brown bread and butter, the bottle of Liebfraumilch that Dick had hung by a string in the lake to cool while they explored the island, her double-roasted French coffee, flavored, the way the maaaster always liked it, with chicory and a suspicion of cognac. It was half an hour since they had lain back to sleep.

So far, everything about the outing had been perfect. No wonder Morgan had jackknifed out of bed that morning at eight o'clock and Dick Breen had wakened with a smile of special satisfaction. Before Morgan had come, exactly two years and 11 months ago, it had been his custom, at the first call of the cuckoo, to take off now and again (though not so often as to establish a precedent) on specially fine Sundays like this, with Father Timothy Buckley, in Father Timothy's roomy secondhand Peugeot--Dick did not drive--in search of moths and butterflies, or to inspect the last four walls, perhaps the last three walls, of some Eighth Century Hiberno-Romanesque churchlet, or the empty molar of some Norman castle smelling of cow dung, purple mallow, meadowsweet and the wood smoke of the last tinkers who had camped there. After Morgan had come, he had begun to drive off every fine Sunday with Morgan in Morgan's little Ford Prefect. Still, noblesse oblige, and also if the journey promised to be a rather long one, he had about twice a year suggested to Morgan that they might invite Father Timothy to join them; and Tim had always come, observing with amusement that they indulgently allowed him to bring his own car and that they would, after loud protestations, allow him to do all the driving, and that he also had to persuade them forcibly to allow him to pack the luggage on the seat beside him, so as to leave plenty of room--at this point they would all three laugh with the frankest irony--for their lordships' bottoms in the soft and roomy rear of the Peugeot. This luggage consisted of Dick's two butterfly nets, in case one broke, three binoculars and three cameras, one for each, two umbrellas for himself and Morgan, the bulging lunch basket for them all, two foam-rubber cushions, one for his poor old back, one for Morgan's poor young back, and a leather-backed carriage rug so that the dear boy should not feel the cold of the grass going up through him while he was eating his lunch and enjoying--as he was now enjoying--his afternoon siesta.

Retired, each one, into his own secret shell of sleep, they all three looked as dead as they would look in 15 years' time in one of the photographs they had taken of themselves an hour ago. The day had stopped. The film of the climbing towers of clouds had stopped. The lake was silent. The few birds and the three cows they had seen on the island were dozing. Thinking had stopped. Their three egos had stopped. Folk tales say that when a man is asleep on the grass like that, a tiny lizard may creep into his mouth, devour his tongue and usurp its power. After about an hour of silence and dozing, some such lizard spoke from the priest's mouth. Afterward, he said that he had been dreaming of the island's hermits, and of what he called the shortitude and latitude of life, and of how soon it stops, and that those two selfish bastards beside him were egotistical sinners, too concerned with their comfort as adolescents to assert their dignity as men. "And I?" he thought with a start and woke.

"In Dublin last month," his lizard said hollowly into his hat, "I saw a girl on a horse on a concrete street."

"What?" Morgan asked drowsily, without stirring.

"A girl on a horse," Tim said, removing his hat and beholding the glorious blue sky. "It was the most pathetic sight I ever saw."

"Why pathetic?" Morgan asked, removing his hat and seeing the blue Pacific sweep into his ken.

"She was riding on a concrete street, dressed as if she were riding to hounds. The fantasy of it was pathetic. Miles away from green fields. But all the girls are gone mad on horses nowadays. I wish somebody would tell them that all they're doing is giving the world a beautiful example of sexual transference. They have simply transferred their natural desire for a man to a four-legged brute."

"Balderdash," said Morgan and he put back his hat as Dick patiently lifted his to ask the blueness what all the poor girls who haven't got horses do to inform the public of their adolescent desires.

"They have cars," Tim said and sat up slowly, the better to do battle. Morgan sat up abruptly.

"So," he demanded, "every time I drive a car I become a homosexual?"

Tim considered the matter judicially.

"Possibly," he agreed. "But not necessarily. There are male cars for women and female cars for men. For women? Clubman, Escort, Rover, Consorte, Jaguar, Triumph. Fill 'em up and drive them at seventy miles an hour! What fun! For men? Giulietta. Who's Romeo? Morris Minor. The word means Moor--symbolical desire for a small Negress. Mercedes? Actually, Mercedes was the daughter of Emil Jellinek, an Austrian entrepreneur who became involved with Daimler-Benz. Also means Our Lady of Mercy. Symbolical desire for a large virgin. Ford Consul? Consuela, Our Lady of Consolations. Volvo? Vulva. Volkswagen. Double V. Symbolical_____"

"Well, of all the filthy minds!" Morgan roared.

Dick sat up with a sigh. His siesta was ruined. His anger was hot upon his humor and his honor.

"I do think, Father Timothy, that you, as a priest of God...."

Tim scrambled to his feet, high above him, black as a wine tun against the pale sheen of the lake.

"A priest, a presbyter, an elder, a sheik, an old man, a minister, a pastor of sheep? What does that mean? Something superior, elegant, stainless and remote from life like yourself and Master Poet here? An angel, a seraph, a saint, a mystic, a eunuch, a cherubim, a morning star? Do I look like it? Or like a man fat from eating too much, wheezy from smoking too much, sick and tired from trying to do the job he was called on to do? A priest of God is a man with a bum and a belly, and everything that hangs out of a belly or cleaves it, with the same appetites and desires, thirsts and hungers as the men and women, the boys and the girls he lives and works with. It may be very nice for you to look at us before the altar at St. Jude's all dressed up in our golden robes, swinging a censer, and to think, 'There is heavenly power, there is magic.' But I have no power. I'm nothing alone. I merely pretend to a power that is an eternity beyond me. When I was in Rome, as a student, a priest in southern Italy went mad, ran down to the bakery to turn the whole night's baking into the body of God and from there to the wine factory to turn every flask and vat of flowing wine into the blood of the Lord. But did he? Of course not. Alone, he hadn't the power to make a leaf of basil grow. But I will pretend to any boy or girl who is troubled or in misery that I have all the power in heaven to cure them, do mumbo jumbo, wave hands, say hocus-pocus, anything, if it will only give them peace. And if that doesn't work, I tell them the truth."

"You are shouting, Father," Dick said coldly.

Tim controlled himself. He sat down again. He laughed.

"Ye don't want to hear the truth. Too busy romanticizing, repressing, rationalizing, running away, when everybody knows the pair of ye think of nothing but women from morning to night! Your moths, Dick, that come out in the twilight, your easy girls, your lights o' love, fluttering against your windowpanes? Do you want me to believe that you never wish you could open the window to let one in? I saw you, Morgan, the other day in the library fawning over that unfortunate virgin Bolger, and a child could see what was in the minds of the pair of ye. And what do you think she thinks she's doing every time she goes out to the yard to wash your car with suds and water? Why don't you be a man, Morgan, and face up to it--one day you'll have to be spliced. It's the common fate of all mankind."

"It hasn't been yours, Father," Dick snapped.

"Because I took a vow and kept to it, logically."

"Pfoo!" Morgan snarled at him. "You know damned well that logic has as much to do with marriage as it has with music."

Tim looked at him with the air of a small boy who is thinking what fun it would be to shove his Auntie Kitty down the farmyard well.

"You know," he said slyly, "you should ask Fräulein Keel about that the next time she is playing the Appassionata for you," and was delighted to observe the slow blush that climbed up Morgan's face and the black frown that drew down the doctor's eyebrows. The silence of his companions hummed. He leaned back.

It was about two months ago that Frau Keel had come to L_____ with her daughter, Imogen, and her husband, Georg, an electrical engineer in charge of a new German factory at the Shannon Free Airport complex. He was about 50 and a Roman Catholic, which was presumably why he had been chosen for this Irish job. His wife was much younger; blonde, handsome, curly-headed, well corseted, with long-lashed eyes like a cow. Hera-eyed, Morgan said; dopey, Dick said; false lashes, Tim Buckley said. She was broad of bosom and bottom, strong-legged as a peasant, and as heavy-shouldered, one of those abundant self-indulgent, flesh-folding bodies that Rubens so loved to paint in their pink skin. Imogen was quite different; small, black-a-vised, black-haired, her skin like a bit of burned cork. She was a belle laide, of such intensity, so packed and powerful with femininity that you felt that if you were to touch her with one finger, she would hoop her back and spring her arms around you like a trap. Morgan had met her in the library, let her talk about music, found himself invited by her mother to hear her play and unwisely boasted about it to Tim Buckley.

In the sullen silence, he heard the lake sucking the stones of the beach. The clouds were less bright. The doctor said primly that he wanted to try his hand with his butterfly net. Morgan said gruffly that he wanted to take some more pictures before the sun went down. Together they walked away across the island. Tim reached for his breviary and began to read the office of the day. " 'Let us then be like newborn children hungry for the fresh milk....' "

The delicate India paper of his breviary whispered each time he turned a page. Presently a drop of rain splashed on his knuckles. He looked about him. The sun still touched the island but nowhere else. The lake hissed at the shore. He stood on a rock but could see no sign of his companions. Were they colloguing with the Tenth Century? He packed the lunch basket, rolled up the rugs, loaded the cargo, sat in the stern of the boat, opened an umbrella, lit his pipe and waited. He did not care a damn what they thought about him. He was sick of them. No doubt, when slaves fall in love they feel freer....

They returned slowly and silently. Little was said as he rowed them to the mainland, and less on the way back to L_____, because the rain became a cloudburst and he was alone peering into it. On previous excursions, he had always been invited to dine with them. He knew he would not be this evening: a snub that Morgan aggravated by assuring him that they must all meet soon again "on a more propitious occasion." He gave them a cheerful goodbye and drove off along the rain-dancing asphalt. To the Devil with their four-course dinner. His freedom was more important to him. Anyway, there were a dozen houses in town where the wife would be delighted to give him a plate of bacon and eggs.

• • •

Dick said nothing until he had poured their usual aperitif--a stout dollop of malt.

"That," he said as he handed the glass of whiskey to Morgan deep in the best armchair on the side of the turf fire, "is probably the last time we shall meet his reverence socially."

Morgan looked portentously over his glasses at the fire.

"A terrible feeling sometimes assails me," he said, smacking each sibilant, "that Timothy John Buckley has a coarse streak in him."

Dick took the opposite armchair.

"I would call it a grave lack of tact. Even presuming that La Keel has not already told him that she is a patient of mine."

"Imogen?" said Morgan, sitting straight up. "Good God! Is there something wrong with her?"

"Imogen? Oh, you mean the child? I was referring to the mother."

Morgan sat back. "Oh, and what's wrong with that old battle-ax? Are you beginning to take patients?"

Dick frowned.

"I have done my best to avoid it. The lady, and her husband, ever since they heard that I studied neurology in Vienna, have been very persistent. As for what is wrong, I should not, ethically speaking, as a doctor discuss the affairs of any patient, but, in this case, I think I may safely speak to you about the matter. A. Because I can trust you. And B. Because there is nothing whatsoever wrong with the lady."

"Then why did she come to consult you?"

Dick answered this one even more stiffly.

"She speaks of her cycles."

Morgan, like an old lady crossing a muddy road, ventured between the pools of his inborn prudishness, his poetic fastidiousness and his natural curiosity:

"Do you by any chance mean she has some sort of what they call woman trouble?"

"If you mean the menopause, Madam Keel is much too young for that. She means emotional cycles. Elation-depression. Vitality-debility. Exultation-despair. The usual manic-depressive syndrome. She says that ever since she came to Ireland, she has been melancholy."

"Jaysus! Sure, aren't we all melancholy in Ireland? What I'd say that one needs is a few good balls of malt every day or a dose or two of cod-liver oil. If I were you, Dick, I'd pack her off about her business."

Dick's body stirred restively.

"I have made several efforts to detach myself. She insists that I give her comfort."

Morgan looked over his glasses at his friend.

"And what kind of comfort would that be?" he asked cautiously.

"That," his friend said, a trifle smugly, "is scarcely for me to say."

Morgan glared into his glass. For a moment he wished Bucky were there to crash through the Narrowing Roads, the Cul-De-Sacs, the Falling Rocks.

"It is a compliment to you," he said at last, soapily.

"I take small pride in it, Morgan. Especially since she tells me that she also gets great comfort from her pastor."

Morgan rose to his feet, dark as a thundercloud, or as a Jove who has not shaved for a week.

"What pastor?" he demanded in his deepest basso.

"You have guessed it. Our companion of today. The Reverend Timothy Buckley. He also gives great comfort to Herr Keel. And to the girl. He holds sessions."

Jehovah's thunder rumble rolled.

"Sessions?"

"It is apparently the latest American-Dutch ecumenical idea. Group confessions."

"The man," Morgan boomed, "must be mad! He is worse than mad. Who was it called him Rasputin? He was born to be hanged! Or shot! Or poisoned! That man is e-e-e-evil. You must stop this monstrous folly at once. Think of the effect on that innocent poor child."

"I have no intention whatsoever of interfering," Dick fluttered. "It's a family affair. I have no least right to interfere. And I suspect she is not in the least innocent. And she is not a child. She is eighteen."

"Dick!" Morgan roared. "Have you no principles?"

A mistake. It is not a nice question to be asked by anybody. Suppose Morgan himself had been asked by somebody if he had any principles! How does any of us know what his principles are? Nobody wants to have to start outlining his principles at a word of command.

"I begin to fear," Dick said huffily, "that in all this you are not thinking of me, nor of Frau Keel, nor of Herr Keel, nor of my principles, nor of any principles whatever but solely of the sexual attractions of Fräulein Keel. She has hairy legs. A well-known sign of potency."

At which moment of dead silence Dolly Lynch opened the door, put in her flushed face and in her slow, flat, obsequious Shannon voice said, "Dinner is i-now-eh sarvedeh, Dachtar." Her employer glared at her. Why was she looking so flushed? The foul creature had probably been outside the door for the last three minutes listening to the rising voices. By tomorrow the thing would be all over the town.

They entered the room in silence. She served them in silence. When she went out, they maintained silence or said small polite things like, "This spring lamb is very tender," or, "Forced rhubarb?" The silences were so heavy that Morgan felt obliged to retail the entire life of Monteverdi. Immediately after the coffee, in the drawing room, he said he had better go home to his mother and, with fulsome thanks for a splendid lunch and a marvelous dinner, he left his friend to his pipe and, if he had any, his principles.

• • •

Morgan did not drive directly to his cottage on the Ennis Road. He drove to the library, extracted from the Music section a biography of Monteverdi and drove to the Keels' flat in O'Connell Square. It was Frau Keel, majestic as Brünnhilde, who opened the door, received the book as if it were a ticket of admission and invited him to come in. To his annoyance he found Buckley half filling a settee, winking cheerfully at him, smoking a cigar, a coffee in his paw, a large brandy on a small table beside him. Herr Keel sat beside him, enjoying the same pleasures. Through the dining-room door he caught a glimpse of Imogen with her back to him, clearing the dinner table, her oily black hair coiled, as usual, on either side of her cheeks. As she leaned over the table, he saw the dimpled backs of her knees. She was not wearing stockings. The dark down on her legs suggested the untamed forests of the north.

"Aha!" Herr Keel cried, in (for so ponderous a man) his always surprising countertenor. "It is Mr. Myles. You are most welcome. May I offer you a coffee and a good German cigar? We had just begun a most interesting session."

Morgan beamed and bowed ingratiatingly. He almost clicked his heels in his desire to show his pleasure and to conceal a frightening thought. "Is this one of Bucky's sessions?" He beamed as he received the cigar and a brandy from Herr Keel, who bowed in return. He bowed as he accepted a coffee from Frau Keel, who beamed in return before she went back to her own place on a small sofa of the sort that the French--so he found out next day from a history of furniture--call a canapé, where she was presently joined by Imogen. Thereafter, he found that whenever he glanced (shyly) at Frau Keel, she was staring anxiously and intently at Buckley, and whenever he glanced (shyly) at Imogen, she was looking at himself with a tiny smile of what, crestfallen, he took to be sly amusement until she raised her hairy eyebrows and slowly shook her midnight head, and he heard a beautiful noise like a bomb exploding inside his chest at the thought that this black sprite was either giving him her sympathy or asking sympathy from him. Either would be delightful. But then her eyebrows suddenly plunged, she shook her head threateningly, her smile curled, anger and disapproval sullied her already dark eyes.

"As I was saying," Father Tim was saying, magisterially waving his cigar, "if adultery is both a positive fact and a relative term, so is marriage. After all, marriage is much more than what the Master of the Sentences called a conjunctio viri et mulieris. It is also a union of sympathy and interest, heart and soul. Without these, marriage becomes licensed adultery."

"I agree," Frau Keel sighed. "But no woman ever got a divorce for that reason."

Buckley pursed his little mouth into a provocative smile.

"In fact, people do divorce for that reason. Only they call it mental cruelty."

"Alas," said Briinnhilde, "according to our church, there is no such sin as mental cruelty and therefore there is no divorce for that cause."

"There are papal annulments," Herr Keel said to her coldly, "if you are interested in such things."

"I am very interested," she said to him as frigidly, which was not the kind of warm domestic conversation that Morgan had read about in books.

"You were about to tell us, Father Tim," Imogen said, "what you consider unarguable grounds for the annulment of a marriage."

Sickeningly, Buckley beamed at the girl; fawningly, she beamed back. She! The Hyrcanian tigress! Had this obese sensualist mesmerized the whole lot of them? But Morgan could not, as Buckley calmly began to enumerate the impediments to true wedlock, center his mind on what was being said, so dumfounded was he to find that nobody but himself seemed to be forming images of the hideous realities of what he heard. All he could do was to gulp his brandy, as any man of the world might in such circumstances, and struggle to keep his eyes from Imogen's hirsute legs. (Where had he read that Charles XII had a woman in his army whose beard was two feet long?)

"It is not," Buckley said, "a true marriage if it has been brought about by abduction. It is not a true marriage if either or both parties are certifiable lunatics. It is not," here he glanced at Keel, "a genuine marriage if the father marries the daughter," smiling at Imogen, "nor if the sister marries the brother. It is not marriage if by error either party marries the wrong person, which can happen when a number of people are being married simultaneously. If both parties conspire and murder the wife or husband of one of the parties, it is not a really good marriage. Nor if either party persuades the other party into adultery beforehand by a promise of marriage afterward. It is not marriage if the male party is impotent both antecedently and perpetually. Nor if a Christian without dispensation marries a Jew or other heathen...."

At which point they all started talking together, Imogen declaring passionately, "I would marry a Jew if I damn well wanted to," and Georg Keel demanding, "How can you prove impotence?" and Frau Keel protesting with ringed fingers, "Kein Judeten! Kein Judeten!," Buckley laughingly crying out, "I agree, I agree," and Morgan wailing that it was all bureaucratic balderdash, all of them quashed suddenly into silence by the prolonged ringing of the doorbell. Keel glanced at his watch and said testily, "Who on earth ...?" Imogen, unwilling to lose a fraction of the fight, rushed to the door and led in the latecomer. It was the doctor.

Morgan had to admire his comportment. Though he must have been much taken aback to see all his problems personified before him, the old boy did not falter for a moment in his poise and manners. He formally apologized for his late call to Frau Keel, who revealed her delight in his visit by swiftly patting her hair as she passed a mirror, making him sit beside her, fluttering to Imogen to sit beside Morgan, and yielding him a brandy glass between her palms as if it were a chalice. He accepted it graciously, he did not allow it to pass over him, he bowed like a cardinal, he relaxed into the company, legs crossed, as easily as if he were the host and they his guests. Morgan observed that the cuffs of his trousers were wet. He had walked here in the rain. He must be feeling greatly upset. But by what?

"Are you a friend of this dirty old doctor?" Imogen whispered rapidly.

"I know him slightly. I like you very much, Imogen."

"He is a vurm!" she whispered balefully. "You are another vurm. You both turned Father Tim from the door without a meal."

"Neither," said Tim, resuming control, "is it a marriage if it is clandestine; that is, performed secretly."

"I would marry in secret if I wanted to," like a shot from Imogen.

"It wasn't my house," Morgan whispered. "I wanted him to stay."

"What does 'secret' mean?" Keel asked petulantly.

"I know you lie," she whispered.

"It means failing to inform your parish priest."

"That's more bureaucratic fiddlesticks!" Morgan said, and an electric shock ran up his thigh when Imogen patted it approvingly.

"That," Tim said dryly to him, "is what the Empress Josephine thought, but her failure to obey the regulation meant that the Pope was able to allow the emperor to eject her from his bed and marry again."

"Then," Keel agreed, "it is a wise precaution."

"It's bosh!" Morgan declared. "And cruel bosh."

"Good man!" Imogen said, and gave him another shock, and Frau Keel turned inquiringly to her pastor, who said that the rule might be useful to prevent bigamy but was no reason for dissolving a marriage, whereat she said. "Then it is bosh!" and her husband, outraged, proclaimed, "In my house, I will allow nobody to say I am defending bosh!" but she waved him aside, clasped her paws, beamed at Father Timothy and cried, "And now, for adultery!"

"Alas, madam, adultery by either party is not sufficient cause to annul a marriage."

"So, we women are trapped!"

"While you men," charged Imogen, glaring around her, "can freely go your adulterous ways."

The doctor intervened mildly.

"Happily, none of this concerns anybody in this room."

"How do you know what concerns me?" she challenged, jumping to her feet, her gripped fists by her lean flanks, her prowlike nose pointing about her like a setter. "I, Imogen Keel, now, at this moment, vant to commit adultery with somebody in this room."

Morgan covered his face with his hands. Oh, God! The confessions! She means me. What shall I say? That I want to kiss her knees?

"Imogen!" Keel blazed at her. "I will not permit this. In delicacy! Not to say, in politeness!"

"Please, Georg!" his wife screamed. "Not again!" She turned to the company. "Always I hear this appeal to politeness and delicacy. It is an excuse. It is an evasion. It is an alibi."

"Ha!" Imogen proclaimed, one hand throwing toward her father's throat an imaginary flag or dagger. "But he has always been excellent at alibis."

Keel slammed his empty brandy glass onto the coffee table so hard that its stem snapped. How fiery she is! Morgan thought. What a heroic way she has of rearing her head back to the left and lifting her opposite eyebrow to the right. A girl like that would fight for her man to her death--or, if he betrayed her, to his. Has she, he wondered, hair on her back? Father Tim, amused by the whole scene, was saying tactfully but teasingly, "Imogen, there is one other injustice to women that you must hear about. It is that you will in most countries not be permitted to marry, no matter how much you protest, until you have arrived at the age of fifteen and your beloved at the age of seventeen."

She burst into laughter and they all laughed with relief.

"Finally," he said tristfully, "priests may not marry at all."

"They are nevertheless doing so," the girl commented pertly.

He looked at her, seemed to consider saying something, drank the last drop of his coffee and did not say it. Frau Keel said it for him, compassionately.

"Only by giving up their priesthood."

"Or more," he agreed, in a subdued voice.

"The whole caboodle," Imogen mocked.

They talked a little about current examples of priests who had given up everything. The subject trailed away. Keel looked at the window. "Rain," he sighed, in so weary a voice that the doctor at once rose and all the others with him. As the group dissolved toward the entrance hall of the apartment, Morgan found himself following behind with Imogen.

"What have you against the doctor?" he asked her.

"He is just like my father. And I hate my father. The only good thing I say about your doctor is that he helps my mother put up with my father."

He must drive Dick home. Dick must go on helping Frau Keel. They must talk about the best way to handle Buckley in future. They must have Georg Keel on one of their excursions. If the girl was lonely, perhaps Keel would like to bring her with them. She was a superb, a wonderful, a marvelous girl, so heroic, so wild, so passionate. The very first thing they must do is to have Buckley to dinner, and maybe Buckley would bring the girl with him.... Just then, he heard Dick ask Keel if it were too late for them to have a brief word together before he left. If this meant the old fool was falling back on some ridiculous, bloody point of principle about treating Frau Keel.... As he was making his way to Dick to offer him a lift home, Frau Keel absently shook his hand, handed him his hat, opened the door, bade him good night and the door closed on her voice suggesting to Imogen to drive the good father to his presbytery in her little car. A minute later, he was in the street cursing.

There was not a soul in sight. The rain hung like vests around the lamplights of O'Connell Street. When his car refused to start, his rage boiled against the stupid Bolger, who must have let water (or something) get into the petrol. After many fruitless zizzings from the starter, he saw Imogen's little blue car with the priest aboard shoot past in a wake of spray. More zizzings, more pulling at the choke, a long rest to deflood the carburetor and the engine roared into life, just as Keel's Mercedes, with Dick aboard, vanished through the rain toward the bridge and the Dublin Road. He circled wildly, followed their taillights, halted 20 yards behind them outside Dick's house, dowsed his lights, saw Dick get out and Keel drive away. He ran forward to where Dick was unlocking his iron gate and clutched his arm beseechingly.

"Dick! I simply must talk to you about Buckley. What is he doing to all those people? What is he doing to that Imogen girl? For God's sake, what's going on in that Keel family? I won't sleep a wink unless you tell me all you know about them."

The doctor marveled at him for a moment and then returned to his unlocking.

"I do not feel disposed," he said in his haughtiest voice, holding the gate six inches ajar for the length of his reply, "to discuss such matters at twelve o'clock at night, on an open road, under a downpour of rain, and all the less so since, so far as I can see, nothing is, as you so peculiarly put it, 'going on' that is of any interest to me. Everything seems perfectly normal and in order in the Keel family, except that Herr Keel is a total idiot who seems unable to control his wife, that she seems to me to have developed a most unseemly sexual interest in Father Timothy Buckley, that she is intent on divorcing her husband, that their daughter, who is both impertinent and feckless, is a nymphomaniac, who has quite obviously decided to seduce you, and that I am very glad to say that I need never again lay eyes on them for the rest of my natural life. And now, sir, good night to you."

With which he entered his drive, banged the metaled gate behind him and his wet footsteps died into a voice from his front door wailing, "Oh, Dachtar, Dachtar! Wait for me! I have the umberella here for you. You'll be dhrowneded all together with that aaahful rain...."

Morgan spat on the gate, turned and raced for his car, which resolutely refused to start. He implored it until its exhausted starter died into the silence of a final click. He got out, kicked its door soundly and then, overwhelmed by all the revelations he had just heard, especially the one about Imogen and himself, walked home through the empty streets of L_____, singing love songs from the Barber and Don Giovanni at the top of his voice to the summer rain.

• • •

One of the more pleasantly disconcerting things about willful man is that his most table-thumping decisions rarely conclude the matter at hand. There is always time for a further option. Every score is no better than half time. Viz.:

1. That July our poor, dear friend Tim Buckley left us for a chin pimple of a village called Four Noughts (the vulgarization of a Gaelic word meaning Stark Naked) on the backside of Slievenamuck. We loyally cursed his lordship the bishop, while feeling that he had had no option. For weeks the dogs in the streets had been barking, "Im-o-gen Keel." At the farewell party, Tim assured us that the bish had neither hand, act nor part in it. He had himself asked his lordship for a transfer. He asked us to pray for him. He said sadly that he believed he was gone beyond it. The die was cast, the Rubicon crossed, it was the ides of March. And so forth and so on.

One effect of this event (Dolly Lynch reporting, after her usual survey of her master's wastepaper basket) was that Mr. Myles had been invited to dine with the dachtar at his earliest convenience.

2. That August we heard that Frau Keel was claiming a separation from her husband a mensa et thoro; that she was also applying for a papal annulment of her marriage on the ground of his impotence, which meant that she was ready to swear that Imogen was not his child. Herr Keel, we gathered, had knocked her down, broken one of her ribs with a kick and left for Stuttgart swearing that he would foil her if it cost him his last Deutsche mark.

Mr. Myles was by now dining every week with the doctor, who was also (Dolly Lynch's knuckle suspended outside the dining-room door) seeing Frau Keel regularly, who (Dolly Lynch's hand on the doorknob) was also in constant consultation, through Imogen, with Father Tim Buckley in his exile on Slievenamuck.

3. That September, Tim Buckley disappeared suddenly from Four Noughts, Imogen Keel disappeared from the Keel flat and both were reported to have been seen at Shannon airport boarding a plane for Stockholm. This blow brought us down. His way of living life had been to tell us how to live it. Now that he was starting to live it himself, he was no better than any of us. He was the only one of us who had both faced and been free of the world of men, of women, of children, of the flesh. Now we knew that it could not be done. You must not put your toe into the sea if you do not want to swim in it.

Myles was by now dining with Dick three times a week; friendship glued by gossip.

4. October. And dreadful news from Stuttgart. Herr Keel had accidentally killed himself while cleaning a shotgun. When the news came, Morgan was having tea with Frau Keel. She collapsed, calling for the doctor. Morgan drove at once to Dick's house and brought him back to her.

For the rest of that month, Myles was dining every night with the doctor.

5. By November, Dolly Lynch reported that Mr. Myles had stopped dining with the doctor, but Frau Keel, she spat, was coming as often as "tree taimes every bluddy wee-uk." When we heard this, we looked at one another. Our eyes said, "Could it be possible?" We asked Morgan. He was in no doubt about it.

"Buckley was right!" he stormed. "The man is a sexual maniac! A libertine! A corrupter of women! A traitor and a liar! As that foolish woman will discover before the year is out."

It was a spring wedding and the reception was one of the gayest, most crowded, most lavish the town had ever seen. The metal sheeting was gone from the gate, the cypresses cut down, the warning signs inside the gate removed, the brass plate removed, the conservatory packed with flowers, the only drink served was champagne. The doctor became Dick to every Tom and Harry. For the first time, we found out that his wife's name was Victorine. With his hair tinted, he looked ten years younger. Long before the reception ended, he was going around whispering to everybody, as a dead secret, that his Victorine was expecting.

6. Morgan, naturally, did not attend the wedding. He took off for the day with Marianne Bolger, and they have since been taking off every fine Sunday in her red Mustang, together with Morgan's mother, in search of faceless church-lets in fallow fields where the only sound is the munching of cattle. His mother prepares the lunch. Marianne reads out his own poems to him. They both feed him like a child with tidbits from their fingers. But who knows the outcome of any mortal thing? Buckley--there is no denying it--had a point when he insisted that man's most ingenious invention is man, that to create others we must first imagine ourselves, and that to keep us from wandering, or wondering, in some other direction where a greater truth may lie, we set up all sorts of roadblocks and traffic signals. Morgan has told his Marianne that he has always admired the virginal type. It is enough to put any girl off her stroke. A wink of a brass plate in a country road set him off on one tack. A wink from her might set him off on another. What should she do? Obey his traffic signs or acknowledge the truth--that he is a born liar--and start showing him a glimpse of thigh?

Heaven help the women of the world, always wondering what the blazes their men's next graven image will be.