"I feel so silly," said Sarah.

"You don't believe you're beautiful?" said her grandmother.

"I know I'm beautiful," said Sarah. "I look in a mirror, and I think, 'I'm beautiful.' "

"What's wrong, then?" said her grandmother.

"Beautiful is such a funny thing to be," said Sarah. "Somebody else is ugly, but I'm beautiful. Walter says I'm beautiful. You say I'm beautiful. I say I'm beautiful. Everybody says, 'Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,' and you start wondering what it is, and what's so wonderful about it."

"You make people happy with your beauty," said her grandmother.

"You certainly make me happy with it," I said.

Sarah laughed. "It's so silly," she said. "It's so dumb," she said.

"Perhaps you shouldn't think about it so much," said her grandmother.

"That's like telling a midget to stop thinking about being a midget," said Sarah, and she laughed again.

"You should stop saying everything is silly and dumb," said her grandmother.

"Everything is silly and dumb," said Sarah.

"You will learn differently as you grow older," her grandmother promised.

"I think everybody older just pretends to know what's going on, that it's all so serious and wonderful," said Sarah. "Older people haven't really found out anything new that I don't know. Maybe if people didn't get so serious when they got older, we wouldn't have a depression now."

"There's nothing constructive in laughing all the time," said her grandmother.

"I can cry, too," said Sarah. "You want me to cry?"

"No," said her grandmother. "I don't want to hear any more about it. You just go out with this nice young man and have a lovely time."

"I can't laugh about those poor women who painted the docks," said Sarah. "That's one thing I can't laugh about."

"Nobody wants you to," said her grandmother. "You run along now."

Sarah was referring to an industrial tragedy that was notorious at the time. Sarah's family was in the middle of it, and sick about it. Sarah had already told me that she was sick about it, and so had her brother, my roommate, and so had their father and mother. The tragedy was a slow one that could not be stopped once it had begun, and it began in the family's clock company, the Wyatt Clock Company, one of the oldest companies in the United States, in Brockton, Massachusetts. It was an avoidable tragedy. The Wyatts never tried to justify it, and would not hire lawyers to justify it. It could not be justified.

It went like this: In the nineteen twenties the United States Navy awarded Wyatt Clock a contract to produce several thousand standardized ships' clocks that could be easily read in the dark. The dials were to be black. The hands and the numerals were to be hand-painted with white paint containing the radioactive element radium. About half a hundred Brockton women, most of them relatives of regular Wyatt Clock Company employees, were hired to paint the hands and numerals. It was a way to make pin money. Several of the women who had young children to look after were allowed to do the work at home.

Now all those women had died or were about to die most horribly with their bones crumbling, with their heads rotting off. The cause was radium poisoning. Every one of them had been told by a foreman, it had since come out in court, that she should keep a fine point on her brush by moistening it and shaping it with her lips from time to time.

And, as luck would have it, the daughter of one of those unfortunate women would become one of the four women I have ever loved in this Vale of Tears — a long with my mother, my wife, and Sarah Wyatt, Mary Kathleen O'Looney was her name.

10

I speak only of Ruth as "my wife." It would not surprise me, though, if on Judgment Day Sarah Wyatt and Mary Kathleen O'Looney were also certified as having been wives of mine. I surely paired off with both of them — with Mary Kathleen for about eleven months, and with Sarah, off and on, to be sure, for about seven years.

I can hear Saint Peter saying to me: "It would appear, Mr. Starbuck, that you were something of a Don Juan."

So there I was in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one, sashaying into the wedding-cake lobby of the Hotel Arapahoe with beautiful Sarah Wyatt, the Yankee clock heiress, on my arm. Her family was nearly as broke as mine by then. What little they had salvaged from the crashing stock market and the failing banks would soon be dispersed among the survivors of the women who painted all those clocks for the Navy. This dispersal would be compelled in about a year by a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court as to the personal responsibility of employers for deaths in their places of work caused by criminal negligence.

Eighteen-year-old Sarah now said of the Arapahoe lobby, "It's so dirty — and there's nobody here." She laughed. "I love it," she said.

At that point in time, in the filthy lobby of the Arapahoe, Sarah Wyatt did not know that I was acting with all possible humorlessness on orders from Alexander Hamilton McCone. She would tell me later that she thought I was being witty when I said we should get all dressed up. She thought we were costumed like millionaires in the spirit of Halloween. We would laugh and laugh, she hoped. We would be people in a movie.

Not at all: I was a robot programmed to behave like a genuine aristocrat.

Oh, to be young again!

The dirt in the Arapahoe lobby might not have been so obvious, if somebody had not started to do something about it and then stopped. There was a tall stepladder set against one wall. There was a bucket at the base of it, filled with dirty water and with a brush floating on top. Someone had clearly scaled the ladder with the bucket. He had scrubbed as much of the wall as he could reach from the top. He had created a circle of cleanliness, dribbling filth at its bottom, to be sure, but as bright as a harvest moon.

I do not know who made the harvest moon. There was no one to ask. There had been no doorman to invite us in. There were no bellboys and no guests inside. There wasn't a soul behind the reception desk in the distance. The newsstand and the theater-ticket kiosk were shuttered. The doors of the unmanned elevators were propped open by chairs.

"I don't think they're in business anymore," said Sarah.

"Somebody accepted my reservation on the telephone," I said. "He called me 'monsieur.' "

"Anybody can call anybody 'monsieur' on the telephone," said Sarah.

But then we heard a Gypsy violin crying somewhere — sobbing as though its heart would break. And when I hear that violin's lamenting in my memory now, I am able to add this information: Hitler, not yet in power, would soon cause to be killed every Gypsy his soldiers and policemen could catch.

The music was coming from behind a folding screen in the lobby. Sarah and I dared to move the screen from the wall. We were confronted by a pair of French doors, which were held shut with a padlock and hasp. The panes in the doors were mirrors, showing us yet again how childish and rich we were. But Sarah discovered one pane that had a flaw in its silvering. She peeped through the flaw, then invited me to take a turn. I was flabbergasted. I might have been peering into the twinkling prisms of a time machine. On the other side of the French doors was the famous dining room of the Hotel Arapahoe in pristine condition, complete with a Gypsy fiddler — almost atom for atom as it must have been in the time of Diamond Jim Brady. A thousand candles in the chandeliers and on the tables became billions of tiny stars because of all the silver and crystal and china and mirrors in there.

The story was this: The hotel and the restaurant, while sharing the same building, one minute from Times Square, were under separate ownerships. The hotel had given up — was no longer taking guests. The restaurant, on the other hand, had just been completely refurbished, its owner believing that the collapse of the economy would be brief, and was caused by nothing more substantial than a temporary loss of nerve by businessmen.