"Unless there's something that I don't know about. I still don't understand why you took the picture from the Biemeyer house."

"I wanted to test it. I told you about that. Doris even suggested that I should take it. She was just as interested as I was."

"Interested in what, exactly?"

"In whether it was a Chantry. I thought I could put my expertise to work on it." He added in a muffled voice, "I wanted to show them that I was good for something."

He sat up on the edge of the bed and put his feet on the floor. He was young for his age, in his thirties and still a boy, and foolish for a person of his intelligence. It seemed that the sad house on Olive Street hadn't taught him much about the ways of the world.

Then I reminded myself that I mustn't buy too much of Fred's queer little story. After all, he was a self-admitted liar.

I said, "I'd like your expert opinion on that picture."

"I'm not really an expert."

"But you're entitled to an informed opinion. As a close student of Chantry, do you think he painted the Biemeyer picture?"

"Yes, sir. I do. But my statement has to be qualified."

"Go ahead and qualify it."

"Well. It certainly doesn't go back any twenty-five years. The paint is much too new, applied maybe as recently as this year. And the style has changed, of course. It naturally would. I think it's Chantry's style, his _developed_ style, but I couldn't swear to it unless I saw other late examples. You can't base a theory or an opinion on a single work."

Fred seemed to be talking as an expert, or at least an informed student. He sounded honest and for once forgetful of himself. I decided to ask him a harder question.

"Why did you say in the first place that the painting had been stolen from your house?"

"I don't know. I must have been crazy." He sat looking down at his dusty shoes. "I guess I was afraid to involve the museum."

"In what way?"

"In any way. They'd fire me if they knew I'd taken the picture myself the way I did. Now they'll fire me for sure. I have no future."

"Everybody has a future, Fred."

The words didn't sound too encouraging, even to me. A lot of futures were disastrous, and Fred's was beginning to look like one of those. He hung his head under the threat of it.

"The most foolish thing you did was to bring Doris with you."

"I know. But she wanted to come along."

"Why?"

"To see Mildred Mead if I found her. She was the main source of the trouble in Doris's family, you know. I thought it might be a good idea if Doris could talk to her. You know?"

I knew. Like other lost and foolish souls, Fred had an urge to help people, to give them psychotherapy even if it wrecked them. When he was probably the one who needed it most. Watch it, I said to myself, or you'll be trying to help Fred in that way. Take a look at your own life, Archer.

But I preferred not to. My chosen study was other men, hunted men in rented rooms, aging boys clutching at manhood before night fell and they grew suddenly old. If you were the therapist, how could you need therapy? If you were the hunter, you couldn't be hunted. Or could you?

"Doris is having a hard time maintaining," Fred said. "I've been trying to help her out of it."

"By taking her on a long drive to nowhere?"

"She wanted to come. She insisted. I thought it was better than leaving her where she was, sitting in an apartment by herself and gobbling drugs."

"You have a point."

He managed to give me a quick shy smile that twitched and cowered in the shadow of his mustache. "Besides, you have to remember that this isn't nowhere for Doris. She was born in Copper City and spent at least half of her life here in Arizona. This is home for her."

"It hasn't been a very happy homecoming."

"No. She was terribly disappointed. I guess you can't go home again, as Thomas Wolfe says."

Remembering the gabled house where Fred lived with his father and mother, I wondered who would want to.

"Have you always lived in Santa Teresa?"

He was thoughtful for a moment. Then he said, "Since I was a little boy, we've lived in the same house on Olive Street. It wasn't always the wreck that it is now. Mother kept it up much better-I used to help her-and we had roomers, nurses from the hospital and such." He spoke as if having roomers was a privilege. "The best times were before my father came home from Canada." Fred looked past me at my hunched shadow on the wall.

"What was your father doing in Canada?"

"Working at various jobs, mostly in British Columbia. He liked it then. I don't think he and Mother got along too well, even in those days. I've realized since that he probably stayed away from her for that reason. But it was a bit rough on me. I don't remember ever seeing my father until I was six or seven."

"How old are you now, Fred?"

"Thirty-two," he said reluctantly.

"You've had long enough to get over your father's absence."

"That isn't what I meant at all." He was flustered and angry, and disappointed in me. "I wasn't offering him as an excuse."

"I didn't say you were."

"As a matter of fact, he's been a good father to me." He thought this statement over, and amended it. "At least he was in those early days when he came back from Canada. Before he started drinking so hard. I really loved him in those days. Sometimes I think I still do, in spite of all the awful things he does."

"What awful things?"

"He rants and roars and threatens Mother and smashes things and cries. He never does a stroke of work. He sits up there with his crazy hobbies and drinks cheap wine, and it's all he's good for." His voice had coarsened, and rose and fell like an angry wife's ululation. I wondered if Fred was unconsciously imitating his mother.

"Who brings him the wine?"

"Mother does. I don't know why she does it, but she keeps on doing it. Sometimes," he added in a voice that was almost too low to hear, "sometimes I think she does it in revenge."

"Revenge for what?"

"For ruining himself and his life, and ruining _her_ life. I've seen her stand and watch him staggering from wall to wall as if she took pleasure in seeing him degraded. At the same time, she's his willing slave and buys him liquor. That's another form of revenge-a subtle form. She's a woman who refuses to be a full woman."

Fred had surprised me. As he reached deeper into the life behind his present trouble, he lost his air of self-deprecating foolishness. His voice deepened. His thin and long-nosed boyish face almost supported his mustache. I began to feel faint stirrings of respect for him, and even hope.

"She's a troubled woman," I said.

"I know. They're both troubled people. It's really too bad they ever got together. Too bad for both of them. I believe my father once had the makings of a brilliant man, before he turned into a lush. Mother isn't up to him mentally, of course, and I suppose she resents it, but she isn't a negligible person. She's a registered nurse and she's kept up her profession and looked after my father, both at the same time. That took some doing."

"Most people do what they have to."

"She's done a bit more than that. She's been helping me through college. I don't know how she makes the money stretch."

"Does she have any extracurricular income?"

"Not since the last roomer left. That was some time ago."

"And I heard last night that she lost her job at the hospital."

"Not exactly. She gave it up." Fred's voice had risen, and lost its masculine timbre. "They made her a much better offer at the La Paloma nursing home."

"That doesn't sound very likely, Fred."

"It's true." His voice rose higher, his eyes were too bright, his mustache was ragged. "Are you calling my mother a liar?"

"People make mistakes."

"You're making one now, running down my mother like that. I want you to take it back."