Blue Light

he dermatologist was a tall and intelligent fair-haired man who gave the impression that of all the things that exist in the world the one that interested him least was human skin. Twice a year he inspected Fritz Fleischer's epi­dermis—plagued by psoriasis in childhood, then by sun damage in old age—glancingly, barely con­cealing his distaste. Nevertheless, he kept up with the latest devel­opments in the field. "There's a new technology," he said at the end of one visit, "that flushes out precancerous cells. Before they turn cancerous. It might do well on your face. Blue light."

He spoke with a halting diffidence while averting his eyes from the sight of his nearly nude patient.

"Blue light?" Fleischer echoed.

"The same sort ordinary light-bulbs give off. No UVA, no infra­red. Blue, only brighter. The skin is cleansed with acetone and then painted with delta-aminolevulinic acid. ALA. It sinks in and makes the cells respond. They shatter. It destroys them." A certain enthu­siasm had entered his voice. His bills listed "destruction of lesion" and then some significant charge—$290, say—for spraying a spot with a second's worth of liquid nitrogen.

"Destroys them?"

"The bad ones," the dermatolo­gist insisted, defensively.

"The immature ones?"

Fleischer had learned the term from his previous dermatologist, an older man who, before he in rapid succession retired and died, used to talk lingeringly, lov­ingly, about skin, tilting back in his swivel chair and closing his eyes as if peering into a mental microscope. Precancerous cells, he explained, have simply failed to mature, and the reactive oint­ments—Efudex, Dovonex, Elo-con—that he prescribed helped them to mature. Maturing seemed to be a euphemism for death—an unsightly convulsion of cells that faded away eventually but not before making the patient look as spotty and insecure as a teen­ager. In his mental microscope, Fleischer's former doctor had seen a rosy future when the molecular secrets of skin lay all exposed for manipulation and cure.

The old healer's successor resisted the word immature. with its implied teleology. "The damaged ones," he clarified. He manifested a faint, hurried

enthusiasm: "You'd be a new man. Look 10 years younger."

"A new man?" Fleischer barked out a greedy laugh at the thought, and the other man winced at the sight of the patient's oral membranes. "I'll give it a try," he said, as if snatching at a bargain.

The dermatologist bleakly nodded. "Let Sheela set it up. Mondays and Thursdays are the days we do it. Sixteen minutes and three quarters—that's the exposure time. Seems an odd time, but that's what's been worked out. Less doesn't do the job, and more doesn't seem to add anything. Good luck." While Fleischer was still drawing breath to thank him, the tall, fair man loped around a corner of the hospital's labyrinthine dermatology department and vanished.

Sheela wore a sari, advertising the depart-mpnt'<; rlivprsitv She was short, with daz-

zling round teeth and a skin of smooth Dravidian darkness. Towering awkwardly above her, Fleischer felt disgustingly mottled and leprously pale. "How undressed should I get?"

"Not one bit," she told him in her merry lilt. "Today it is just your face." Using swabs of cotton that felt like a kitten's paws, she stroked Fleischer's face with one colorless fluid and then with another. Her nostril bead glinted in his periph­eral vision as she worked, moving around him as nimbly as an elephant trainer. "Now," she announced, "you must wait an hour, for the skin to absorb. Sit with a magazine." There were others sitting and waiting, men and women mostly as elderly as he, all of a northern European paleness and pink-ness but with nothing conspicuously wrong with what of their skin he could see. We are all, Fleischer thought, victims of the same advertisements, the same airbrushed photos of 20-year-old models, the same absurd American dreams of self-perfection. He would become a new man.

He picked up a tattered month-old edition of People and read of celebrities getting divorced, getting pregnant, confess­ing to unhappy childhoods, adopting an African child. He had never heard of half these celebrities, but then he had been long locked in the financial world, poring over The Wall Street Journal and its columns of figures, its global rumors of col­lapse and merger. Now that he was retired from his Boston firm, he had begun to reread the classics of his college years and discovered that his callow initial impression that they were windy and boring was, surprisingly often, reinforced, with the difference that now he was under no academic obliga­tion to finish them. He spent hours a day walking, with other retirees, the sidewalk above the littered beach, lined with con­dominiums, from which the brown skyscrapers of Boston could be seen shimmering in the distance.

The blue-light device, when he was ready for it, proved to be less elaborate than he had imagined. A large thick horse­shoe shape, it half encircled his head and bathed his face in a humming brightness. His eyes were covered with small cup-shaped goggles; Sheela's voice kept him company in his blindness. "People tell me," she said, "the worst prickling is the first five minutes, and then the discomfort diminishes."

An underemployed investment adviser who had lived near a beach for much of his life, and vainly desirous of the deep tan he could never quite acquire, Fleischer had done more than his share of sunbathing—lying in the sheltering dunes in the windy spring, in the cool fall courting the dying slant rays, floating faceup in the soupy sea of high summer as bright buttons and sequins of reflected sun glittered and bounced all around him. Now, compressed into seconds, the sensations of those prolonged exposures to sun were revived and cruelly

intensified. Light pressed through the substance of the goggles and his eyelids to register red on his retinas. Needles of heat were thrust deep into his face. He could feel, at the tip of each, immature cells bursting like tiny firecrackers.

Sheela poured her lilting voice over his pain: "You've gone two minutes. How is it?"

"Exciting," Fleischer said.

"I can switch the machine off at any time and resume after a break," she said. "Many patients are grateful."

"No, let's get on with it." Fleischer liked talking while blinded; his conver­sational partner, unseen, filled the room, giving the burning radiance a voice.

"My offer is good anytime," the voice continued. "Many patients discover they cannot stand the sensations."

"Tell me," Fleischer said, as the fire consuming his cheeks and brow boiled deeoer beneath his skin, "about Hin-

duism. Does it have a God, or notf

"It has many gods."

"I mean," Fleischer said, as if his agony gave him the rights of a seeker—as if being blinded made him a seer— "beyond all that, Shiva and Shakti and so on, an overarching God, a Ground of Being, as it were." In his mind's eye the needles of light dug in like talons, each tipped with poison.

"We call that Brahman," Sheela's disembodied voice responded. "Not to be confused with Brahma. Brahma, with Vishnu and Shiva, is a major deity, though he has not gener­ated the legends and temples of the other two. People do not love Brahma as they love the other two. But behind them is Brahman. He is what you might call Godhead, beyond describ­ing. He is closest to your Christian concept of God. You have gone now more than six minutes. Almost halfway."

"Does anybody believe in Him? In It?"

"Millions and millions," Sheela assured him, her soft voice stiffening a little. "There are no disbelieving Hindus."

"Does He ask you to feel guilty?" Cell after cell, it seemed to Fleischer, was igniting within him, one micro­scopic sun after another.

Her voice became merry again. "No, we are not like Ameri­cans. We are still too poor for guilt. I do not mean to be flip­pant. Each Hindu feels set down in a certain earthly place and tries to fill that role. Each person from the maharaja down to the crippled beggar is doing what is prescribed. That is what Krishna said to Arjuna on the battlefield in the Bhagavad Gita. 'Be a warrior,' he said, 'and do not trouble yourself with the ethics of killing.' You have done over eight minutes. From now on, most patients assure me, it becomes easier. It will be downhill. Can you feel that yet?"

"At my age," Fleischer announced in his burning blind­ness, through lips numbed by his mask of inward-directed needles, "it's all downhill."

Each of Fleischer's three wives had borne one child—girl, boy, girl. They in turn had each produced two children, all boys, oddly. Odd too was the way they all, against the dispersive ten­dencies of American independence and enterprise, lived within an hour's drive of the suburban condo to which he had retired. Guilty about his inadequate grandfathering—unlike grandfathers in television commercials he never took his grandsons fishing or to a baseball game—he tried to visit each household once a month. In the weeks after his blue-light treatment, he would rather have hidden in his stuffy bachelor condo, its curtains drawn to keep out any further light, while in the corner the tele­vision set muttered and shuffled its electrons like a demented person playing solitaire. (continued on page 156)

BLUE LIGHT

(continued from page 72)

But once a parent, always a parent. Guilty habit drove him forth. His younger daughter lived in a sprawling old farm­house that had lost most of its acres but kept its barn and long side porch. She and her husband, in what seemed to Fleischer a precarious arrangement with the real world, ran a riding stable in the barn and an advertising firm out of their basement—rural bohemians plugged into the World Wide Web. Once his shyest, plumpest child. Gretchen had acquired in midlife a lean, sun-hardened horsewom­an's confidence and a hearty, not always welcome frankness to go with it. "Dad." she greeted him, "what happened to your face} It's so red. Does it hurt?"

"It did. It doesn't now. You should have seen me five days ago. I looked monstrous. Not just red but all swollen, as if I'd been repeatedly punched.'

Gretchen blinked but did not contra­dict him. How could she? She hadn't been there, in the room of merciless blue light. Nevertheless, he felt nettled, entitled to more sympathy than he was getting. He went on, "I've been trying to hide, but I remembered Tommy's birthday was yes­terday, and 1 didn't want him to think I'd forgotten. Here. I got him the elec­tronic King Kong game I think he said he wanted from seeing it advertised on television. I hope it's the same one. The kid who waited on me in Circuit City thought this must be the one I meant, but he didn't seem to know much, and he kept staring at my poor face."

"Poor Dad. Actually, Tommy's birthday was last week. But he'll be thrilled. I'll call him in from the barn. He was help­ing Greg."

"Don't bother, if he's doing useful work. I'll just leave King Kong here."

"Don't be silly, Father. Tommy's always asking 'When is Grandpa com­ing to visit?'"

(jrandpa—Fleischer couldn't identify with the name but on the other hand couldn't think of a better. It was what he had called his own grandfather, with whom he had lived until the dear old man died. Tipping back his head to see through thick bifocals, he had read the newspaper and the Bible in his favor­ite armchair and smoked cigars on the porch and took a nip of whiskey in his bedroom, which smellcd wonder­fully of bygone mores and medicines. For every day of Fritz's young life he awoke to the sounds of his grandfather, coughing his tenacious tobacco cough, muttering to Grandma, walking up and down stairs in his squeaky high-top shoes and shaking down the clinkers in the coal furnace in the basement. When the Depression had hit, his pregnant daughter and out-of-work son-in-law-had taken refuge with him. and they named (heir baby for him.

None of Fritz's grandsons was named Frit/. Tommy, trailing his little brother, leddy, came in from the side porch, The nine-year-old, his bare chest slick with sweat, looked disturbingly pudgy. Teddy, at six, was still wiry, but his hair, blond with bits of barn straw in it, hung uncut to his shoulders, so that only Fleischer's having seen ihe child being bathed at the hospital tolfl him thai this was not a girl. The boys came up lo him lo be hugged yet did noth­ing to help the embrace, standing there limply and refusing lo lifi their faces to give his lips access to more than their ears. "I hope this is something you don't already have," he told Tommy weakly, handing him the long flat package, which had cost him several hours in the shopping and the wrapping, plus sifting through the rack at the local drugstore for a suitably jocose but not obscene or hostile birthday card.

In a flash the boy ripped off the paper and confronted the raging gorilla on the box, its giant jaws wide open to engulf an entire lime-colored automobile. "Yippee!" he cried, in what seemed to Fleischer faked rapture. "This is just the one I asked Mom lor and she didn't get me."

"It looked pretty violent,' his grandfa­ther warily observed. "Why would even a monster chew lumps of metal?" To himself he thought that fewer computer games might take some pounds from the boy's soft, aggressively bare torso.

Gretchen, hearing the critical edge in her father's voice, maternally intervened: "Dad, the latest thinking on that seems to be that violence, however awful, does chil­dren good. It gives their fantasies a form and carries them off. Isn't that Aristotle's old theory of catharsis all over again?"

"I didn't know you read Aristotle. I didn't know anybody still did." To his grandson he said, "Enjoy, Tommy. Teddy, make him give you a turn now and then."

Bui the boys were no longer listening. The older was whining to his mother, "I gotta go balk lo helping Dad." and the younger had given up gazing expectantly al his grandfather. "Next time, leddy," Fleischer told him brusquely. "Today's not your birthday." Still, the boy's unspoken disappointment pained him. The girl­ish child reminded him not of Grelchen at that age bin of the bottomless well of hopefulness he had fell wilhm him al the age of six, against all reason, surrounded as he had been by the Depression and depressed elders. Optimism and a help­less dependence on being loved, he saw with i he reluctant wisdom of age. are the meager survival weapons we bring with us into the world. Fleischer still wanted to be loved, however little he deserved it. He sat wild (Iretchen over cups ol herbal tea. marveling ihat his baby girl, who had haled her own I highs, should have become not only a woman but a leathery one in jodhpurs, practiced in the ways of equestrianism and advertising and moth­erhood and, he dismallv supposed, sex.

Her good-bve kiss when his time came

to leave was firm and startlingly. consid­ering their relation, aimed at the center of his mouth. In backing away, though, she gave him a quick sideways glance, checking on her effect, remarkably— piercingly—like her mother's furtive glance. Corinne had been the youngest of his wives and the least philosophi­cal about his leaving her. She had not wanted to be left; she doubted, more than her two predecessors, her ability to enjoy freedom and create a new attach­ment. Her insecurity, with her watchfully qualified kisses and her hurt look when he expressed views discordant with her own, had been one of the initial fascina­tions; after his two rough-and-tumble, roughly equal matches with women his own age, Corinne brought out his pro­tective instinct. But then her streak of panic, of fearing she could not cope, excited his capacity for impatience and, in the end, cruelty. He had grown stony under her siege, the last year, of pleas and tears. Gretchen had been but seven, a wide-eyed innocent bystander. Corinne had, in a fashion, eventually coped, mov­ing to the South Shore and making one of those postmodern living-together arrangements with a somewhat younger man. Fleischer was secretly offended; he could not believe she was happy. If only she had not shyly held back, giving kisses but then undermining them with a ques­tioning irony—self-protective behavior touching in a daughter but hard to for­give in a wife—Corinne might still be his, a quarter century later. He had loved the infantile, trusting way she had slept, her bare toes sneaking out of the covers and a soft round arm wrapped around her face, its pink elbow up in the air.

Fleischer and Gietchen parted on the long side porch, tidily stacked with wood for the coming winter. His face felt hot; the oblique flash of resemblance to her mother had heated a sore spot within him.

His second wife, Tracy, had taken a good deep tan. They had spent a lot of the days of their brief marriage at the beach together, even though Fleischer burned easily, while she turned the color of a Polynesian. He had hoped some of the melanin would rub oil on him, bin she kepi il all lo herself. Quick to marry, once iheir divorces from other people came through, they had been quick to have a child, a son, Geoffrey. They took him lo the beach early, in his cream-colored oilcloth bassinet, under a layer of muslin to keep oil the sand flies and lo soften the noontime sun. By the time he was two il became clear thai his skin look after his mother's, and no deep sun damage had been inflicted.

Or so it seemed: Fleischer observed that the boy, even in his teens, when his parents had been long divorced, kept an indoor complexion, a sallow refusal of gratuitous exposure. He became as

sober and cautious a man as his mother had been a reckless and dazzling woman. At the beach, when they were still mar­ried to other people, Tracy's white smile had signaled lo him from her brown face from far away, a beacon on the horizon. Then, when she came and stood next to his face where he lay dozing, fuzzily hung-over, on a blanket beside his first wife, her long naked legs had stretched, it seemed, almost to the sky. Oh, those scintillating afternoons on the sand in the sun-loving Sixties! People used baby oil and Bain de Soleil back then, instead of a number-rated sunscreen. Tracy's long-toed bare feet beside his groggy face had bronzed insteps and pale soles and cherry-red nails, and he wanted to lick them, every square inch, but for the sand grains that would have adhered to his tongue.

Geoffrey, nearly 50. and less than five at the time of his parents' divorce, lived alone in a Boston apartment whose only disorder came when his teenage boys visited. Their mother, Eileen, lived a few miles away, in Brighton. They had been separated for four years, with plenty of counseling but no perceptible legal action. In his mind Fleischer often asked his son why the divorce wasn't happening, but he feared the answer, which might have been that his father's hasty behavior had set a traumatizing example. In Fleischer's mind at the time, he was doing Tracy a favor, once the extent of her infideli­ties—ski instructors, local workmen—had become clear, freeing her to find another husband. No such considerate thought urged Geoffrey forward, though Eileen was 10 years younger than he. He had been, like many of his generation, slow to marry. The bride was beautiful, with raven hair and a ruler-straight nose, edgy but demure, perfect and spectacular at the wedding, with her china-white skin. Her dark eyes and thick lashes had made smoldering spots of shadow through the veil. The father-in-law had beamed with pride, gloating, as if over an unexpected inheritance, over the genes she was bring­ing into ihe family line. The Fleischers for

generations, back to Teutonic hunters and gatherers, had been a homely, knobby, unevenly ruddy race; Fritz guessed he wasn't the first psoriatic. Now, Eileen's oldest son. Jonathan, showed her delicacy and precision of feature to rakish effect in a 15-year-old's lengthening frame: in his younger, blonder brother, Martin, those qualities were wed to his father's phleg­matic stolidity to achieve a gentler and more angelic handsomeness. Fritz tried to fulfill a grandfather's duty by visiting his son on the weekends when the boys were visiting.

"How's school?" he would ask them.

"Okay." Martin would answer.

"Sucks," Jonathan would say.

Martin's silence had the innocent purity of there simply being no more he could think to say, but Jonathan's had a deliber­ately withheld quality. He would not even turn his head for a second to acknowledge the presence of his grandfather, concen­trating instead on the television program or book of science fiction or piece of draw­ing (he was artistic) that was engaging him. Fleischer remembered very well the intensity of a child's need to concentrate into the comic book, the model airplane, the stamp collection—deep into the min­iature world that sheltered you from the larger, adult, out-of-your-control world— but his empathy was hard to express. Even Jonathan's blue-black hair, glossily brushed and eccentrically parted in the middle, emanated a desire to repulse. He and his younger brother were enduring a quarrelsome separation that must have seemed endless, a kind of disease eating their adolescence away, and they sus­pected their grandfather and his obscure sins to be behind it all. Or perhaps the boy felt protective ol the mother he vividly resembled; he feared that any friendliness toward his grandfather would lead to an invasion and a betrayal of that large half of his life where she ruled. Or so Fleischer imagined; he imagined that his sins were as evident as the scorched, mottled look on his face, though neither grandson saw fit to comment.

Martin was more mechanical in his interests than artistic, and his elaborate LKGO constructions, his increasinglv polished ventures into carpentry, gave his grandfather some slight opportunity to admire and even, through helplul practical questions, to share. But playing with blocks and tools was decades behind him, and the child's interest, kindled, was doused as he felt his grandfather's fond attention wander oil. Grandchildren are raised in an alien technology, an electronic one of amplified noises and simulated vio­lence too quick and coded for an elderly eye and hand. While he recognized his grandsons as further extensions of him­self, it was Fleischer's own enigmatically wounded child who fascinated him.

"How's it going?" he would ask Geof­frey, letting the question mean whatever his son chose it to mean.

"Okay." he would say. "She's still fussy, but improving." The pronoun she inevi­tably referred to F.ileen. "The last coun­selor helped," he added.

It was apparent to anyone, even to his father and his sons, that nothing would help enough, that the marriage was over for everyone but its two principals. Per­haps it was a family failing, Fritz specu­lated—not knowing how to let go. In his heart he felt still married to all three of his wives: The marriages continued under­ground, through tunnels of fondness and mutual understanding. Sometimes it took one or another of his wives to remind him, when he overstayed or overstepped, that their connections were broken—his­tory, unreality. Women, who have to give more thought to their survival than men, are in the end less sentimental.

"It's hard " was all Fleischer could think to say, sitting with his only son, seeing his own features in the stubbornly sorrowing, aging face and hearing from the next room the nnillled clutter ol his grandsons kill­ing time until they were no longer children and could escape. A helpless, guilty, word­less silence between the two grown men stretched and burned. '16 break the silence, Fleischer asked, "Does my face look red?"

Geoffrey, after a quick glance, answered, "I guess. But it always looks sort of red."

"Really? It got blasted at the hospital two weeks ago. I felt like a sun-dried tomato."

"Nothing much shows now."

Fleischer fell exasperation. "Geoffrey, you're not looking. You're thinking of something else."

"You sound like my wife. That's what she always says."

logether, in silence, the two men con­templated the unfathomable pleasure it gave the younger to still be able to say "My wife."

"Dad, what did you do to your face? It looks beautiful'." So spoke his oldest child, Aurora,

:i month :ifw*r hi*, «••;-

sion with Sheeki.

He blushed, his skin remembering the heat of the blue light. "Really? They blasted my face at the hospital, a month or so ago—I forget ex­actly when. Il was hor­rible at first—swollen, all red. I stopped looking in the mirror when it calmed down a litde."

"Oh, no," his daughter said, beam­ing. "More than a little. Dad. I've never seen your face so smooth. You lk 10 years younger."

He laughed, greedily. "Ten years? That's more than I deserve."

"Why say that? (io for it, I say" Aurora was breezier than Gretchen. happier in her body. Perhaps because of her pre­maturely New Age name, bestowed by her young parents in the first flush of the power and joy

ol engendering lite. Aurora look thought concerning her health and her rapport with the physical world: She jogged and did yoga, cooked along macrobiotic prin­ciples and would have turned vegetarian but for her hush,mil. a tradition-minded Kenyan w ho believed his two sons should be led meat. She was over ">(), a lad amaz­ing to her lather, who more dearly than with his later children remembered her newborn weight in his arms, so perilously light, the tiny thing so indisputably alive, thai his knees hat! begun to tremble. For Tear he would drop her. he had had to sit down on Maureen's firm, narrow bed. there in the base hospital at Fort Bliss. Texas. In those days most young males

went into the Army, though there was more peace than there is now.

Wonderingly. those first two years, as he exchanged Kort Bliss for business school in Philadelphia, he had observed the mi­nute daily extensions of Aurora's grip, with her slowly focusing slate-colored eyes and grasping little lavender-tinged fists, on the world; she had crawled and then walked and then talked with a growing vocabu­lary that slowly shed her dear, irrecover­able toddler solecisms. She had been, he and her mother, Maureen, had joked, an "industrial-strength" child, rarely ill and never injured, the perfect one to practice on. They had thought they would have a number more, but the Fifties consensus was breaking up around them, as easy

contraception and a new morality of sell-seeking came in. Aurora must have been touched by radicalism in her crib, because after her parents divorced during her puberty—it had been the longest of Fleischer's marriages, as it turned out— she manifested a wide variety of erotic attachments, from other girls to college instructors twite her age to musical drug addicts and dark lovers from the third world. ()ul of this shadowy mass of unsuit­able mates Hector Kanogori emerged as a savior: Aurora and he met in a pottery class. He was interested in the arts only as a hobby, a holiday from his serious work as an assistant professor of economics at a state university campus south of Boston.

Mr. and Mrs. Kanogori traveled. When Fleischer, by then in the last days of his marriage to Tracy, and Maureen, herself remarried, had consulted a counseling service about their daughter's heedless, impractical involvements, the therapist, removing the pencil from her Cam­bridge bun, had asked them what Aurora seemed interested in. and Maureen sur­prised her former husband by respond­ing without hesitation. "Travel. ' How do women know these things about one another? Yes, their industrial-strength baby's romances had been modes of trav­eling, and Hector, every other year, took Aurora to Africa and Asia on his aca­demic investigation of developing econ­omies. Their house in Milton brimmed

with masks and beadwork and stat­uettes, souvenirs from their travels.

All very well. Fleischer thought, for them—one more charming, daring black-white couple easing the West's racial conscience— but what about their two boys? Alfred and Daniel, as their grandfather called them—he had trou­ble pronouncing the Kikuyu names also bestowed upon them in ceremo­nies both Christian and pagan—had inherited strands of their mother's blithe sturdiness and their father's prim dig­nity, but these quali­ties dangled, their grandfather felt, in air. Called black in America, they lacked, as they entered manhood, a black American's street smarts and defenses. On their trips to Africa they had been

teased by other boys as ti'tiziingu—whites. In the polite society around them, once the enforced tolerance and diversity of school had been left behind, they had no tribal roots, no matter-of-fact acceptance. Bry­ant Gumbel had managed it, and Ralph Bimche and Tiger Woods, but how many others? Fleischer blamed himself, with his too-white skin and reflexive liberalism, for allowing the seeds of daring in Aurora to flourish unchallenged and to bear such lender, imperiled fruit.

"The skin remembers," Fleischer's old dermatologist had said more than once, dosing his eyes as he visualized the phe­nomenon. Sunburn your bottom once at a nudist beach, fry your nose on an all-day

sail, and the insulted epidermis never tor-gets. Time's blue light flushes out everything immature, ill considered or not considered at all. The world was being populated by his mistakes. It was possible that his adventurous daughter, having seen her mother deserted for a woman who took a better tan, had presented to her father, and to the string of ancestors bleached a sinister while by Europe's fogs, a gift of melanin fetched straight from Africa.

The boys had been his first grandchil­dren. Enthusiastically he had tackled the role of grandfather. He had asked to babysit for them, insisting on it, deter­mined "to get to know them," pushing himself in, sending Aurora and Hector out to a movie they hardly wanted to see. He would share milk and cookies with the boys, read them ethnically suitable stories from the household's large col­lection and, as their parents were about

to come home, demand they go to sleep. They were accustomed to sleeping in a heap, in the African manner, in their par­ents' bed. As an exasperated concession Fleischer would let them share the lower of their bunk beds. There they would fall asleep like bookends, their bottoms touching, bits of bare skin exposed by skimpy pajamas tugged in their final struggle against sleep—a soft sweet brown, a smooth latte, half-and-half.

Last June, having invited the Kanuguris to the Swampscott beach his condo over­looked, he watched the two boys, both taller and broader now than he, strip down to bathing suits worn beneath their jeans and, in the unison of a mutual challenge, race to the still-wintry water and dive in. He was startled by the sight: the breadth of their backs, the flare of the shoulder blades, the oval muscles of their long legs, the erect strength of their necks' tapered columns and their beautiful Achilles ten­dons, the flash and flicker of their naked

pale soles as their feet thrashed in the icv blue water. They were grown men. mag­nificent, potent. If Fleischer had encoun­tered them in a shadowy alley, he would have been frightened. Vet they were his blood. Daniel wore on his broad nose a spattering of the freckles Fleischer had had as a child and Aurora had inherited.

Between these two glimpses—his mulatto grandsons in pajamas and then in bathing suits—there was almost nothing; he had not gotten to know them. Their heads were full of lore and survival strate­gies that had nothing to do with him; they were creatures seen at a distance, under the sea's dark horizon. When thev came out of the water, shivering, toweling them­selves furiously, they seemed to surround Fleischer with chilly saltwater spray and the warmth of healthy flesh.

He told them, "Boys, that was heroic. How could you stand it. for more than a second?"

"It was no big deal." Alfred reassured him. "Once you're in." He was the taller of the two and the more solemn and soft-voiced.

Daniel had a spark of mischief, to go with his freckles. "You should have tried it, Grandpa. It gets your blood moving."

"Next time." Fleischer promised.

But life runs out of next times, at least for non-Hindus. Today Aurora's cheerful manner hid a sorrow: Her boys were gone, Alfred a sophomore at the University of Ari­zona and Daniel a senior at Dccrfield. "How are they doing?" Fleischer asked her.

"Well enough, but not well enough for Hector. I tell him, 'You were exceptional. Always first in your class at mission school, scholarships abroad—all that. I wasn't. Blame me,' I tell him."

"You had another agenda.'

This made her laugh; she saw through this remark to the image her father had of her, of a girl out of control. Her laugh was cut in half as she turned her head aside and showed her profile. Like her mother, she had turned gray early and, also like Maureen, was too vain, too nature-loving and Unitarian, to dye her hair. She is over 50, Fleischer thought. She knows her life has been musllt lived.

Fathering children, he had never pic­tured their gray hairs, their own children. He had just blindly wanted to create little beings who would adore him, bad skin and all, and brighten his life with their sunny innocence. But he had abandoned each, with their mothers, when their innocence gave out. And now each had created another generation, sending root­lets into the world's hard substance. Soon he would be dead. He would never know what his grandchildren would do in the world, how they would earn their keep. Only spirits as ruthless and appetitive as his, Fleischer believed deep down, could survive. The rest were immature cells. centers of sudden pain.