She smiled as the boy came into the room. “Good evening, Arnold,” she said. “Looking for something?”

“Naw. Just wanderin’. Couldn’t get to sleep, somehow. Then I saw the light in here and I say to myself, ‘I’ll go in and visit with that pretty li’l Miss Jordache, pass the time of day.’” He smiled at her, his teeth white and perfect. Unlike the other men, who called her Gretchen, he always used her last name. His speech was somehow countrified, as though his family had carried the burden of their Alabama farm with them when they had migrated north. He was quite black, gaunt in the loose bathrobe. It had taken two or three operations to save his leg, Gretchen knew, and she was sure she could see the lines of suffering around his mouth.

“I was just going to put the light out,” Gretchen said. The next bus passed the hospital in about fifteen minutes and she didn’t want to miss it.

Pushing off his good leg, Arnold bounced up onto the table. He sat there swinging his legs. “You don’t know the pleasure a man can get,” Arnold said, “just looking down and seeing his own two feet. You just go on home, Miss Jordache, I imagine you got some fine young man Waiting outside for you and I wouldn’t like him to be upset your not coming on time.”

“Nobody’s waiting for me,” Gretchen said. Now she felt guilty that she had wanted to hustle the boy out of the room just to catch a bus. There’d be another bus along. “I’m in no hurry.”

He took a package of cigarettes out of his pocket and offered her one. She shook her head. “No, thank you. I don’t smoke.”

He lit his cigarette, his hand very steady, his eyes narrowed against the smoke. His movements were all deliberate and slow. He had been a football player in high school in St. Louis before he was drafted, he had told her, and the athlete remained in the wounded soldier. He patted the table next to him. “Why don’t you set awhile, Miss Jordache?” he said. “You must be weary, on your feet all night, running around the way you do for us.”

“I don’t mind,” Gretchen said. “I sit most of the day in the office.” But she hoisted herself up to the table beside him, to show that she was not anxious to leave. They sat side by side, their legs hanging over the side of the table.

“You got pretty feet,” Arnold said.

Gretchen looked down at her sensible, low-heeled, brown shoes. “I suppose they’re all right,” she said. She thought she had pretty feet, too, narrow and not too long, and slender ankles.

“I became an expert on feet in this man’s army,” Arnold said. He said it without self-pity, as another man might have said, “I learned how to fix radios in the Army,” or, “The Army taught me how to read maps.” His absence of compassion for himself made her feel a rush of pity for the soft-spoken, slow-moving boy. “You’ll be all right,” she said. “The nurses tell me the doctors’ve done wonders for your leg.”

“Yeah.” Arnold chuckled. “Just don’t bet on old Arnold gaining a lot of ground from here on in.”

“How old are you, Arnold?”

“Twenty-two. You?”

“Nineteen.”

He grinned. “Good ages, huh?”

“I suppose so. If we didn’t have a war.”

“Oh, I’m not complaining,” Arnold said, pulling at his cigarette. “It got me out of St. Louis. Made a man of me.” There was the tone of mockery in his voice. “Ain’t a dumb kid no more. I know what the score is now and who adds up the numbers. Saw some interesting places, met some interesting folk. You ever been in Cornwall, Miss Jordache? That’s in England.”

“No.”

“Jordache,” Arnold said. “That a name from around these parts?”

“No,” Gretchen said. “It’s German. My father came over from Germany. He was wounded in the leg too. In the First War. He was in the German army.”

Arnold chuckled. “They get a man coming and going, don’t they?” he said. “He do much running, your pa?”

“He limps a little,” Gretchen spoke carefully. “It doesn’t seem to interfere too much.”

“Yeah, Cornwall.” Arnold rocked back and forth a little on the table. He seemed to have had enough of talk about wars and wounds. “They got palm trees, little old towns, make St. Louis look like it was built the day before yesterday. Big, wide beaches. Yeah. Yeah, England. Folk’re real nice. Hospitable. Invite you to their homes for Sunday dinner. They surprised me. Always felt the English were uppity. Anyway, that was the general impression about ’em in the circles in which I moved in St. Louis as a young man.”

Gretchen felt he was making fun of her, gently, with the ironic formal pronouncement. “People have to learn about each other,” she said stiffly, unhappy about how pompous she was sounding, but somehow put off, disturbed, forced on the defensive by the soft, lazy, country voice.

“They sure do,” he agreed. “They sure enough do.” He leaned on his hands and turned his face toward her. “What have I got to learn about you, Miss Jordache?”

“Me?” A forced little laugh was surprised out of her. “Nothing. I’m a small-town secretary who’s never been anyplace and who’ll never go anyplace.”

“I wouldn’t agree to that, Miss Jordache,” Arnold said seriously. “I wouldn’t agree to that at all. If ever I saw a girl that was due to rise, it’s you. You got a neat, promising style of handling yourself. Why, I bet half the boys in this building’d ask you to marry them on the spot, you gave them any encouragement.”

“I’m not marrying anyone yet,” Gretchen said.

“Of course not.” Arnold nodded soberly. “No sense in rushing, lock yourself in, a girl like you. With a wide choice.” He stubbed his cigarette out in an ash tray on the table, then reached automatically into the package in the pocket of the bathrobe for a fresh one, which he neglected to light. “I had a girl in Cornwall for three months,” he said. “The prettiest, most joyous, loving little girl a man could ever hope to see. She was married, but that made never no mind. Her husband was out in Africa somewhere since 1939 and I do believe she forgot what he looked like. We went to pubs together and she made me Sunday dinner when I got a pass and we made love like we was Adam and Eve in the Garden.”

He looked thoughtfully up at the white ceiling of the big empty room. “I became a human being in Cornwall,” he said. “Oh, yeah, the Army made a man out of little Arnold Simms from St. Louis. It was a sorrowful day in that town when the orders came to move to fight the foe.” He was silent, remembering the old town near the sea, the palm trees, the joyous, loving little girl with the forgotten husband in Africa.

Gretchen sat very still. She was embarrassed when anybody talked of making love. She wasn’t embarrassed by being a virgin, because that was a conscious choice on her part, but she was embarrassed by her shyness, her inability to take sex lightly and matter-of-factly, at least in conversation, like so many of the girls she had gone to high school with. When she was honest with herself, she recognized that a good deal of her feeling was because of her mother and father, their bedroom separated from hers by only a narrow hallway. Her father came clumping up at five in the morning, his slow footsteps heavy on the stairs, and then there would be the low sound of his voice, hoarsened by the whiskey of the long night, and her mother’s complaining twitterings and then the sounds of the assault and her mother’s tight, martyred expression in the morning.

And tonight, in the sleeping building, in the first really intimate conversation she had had alone with any of the men, she was being made a kind of witness, against her will, of an act, or the ghost and essence of an act, that she tried to reject from her consciousness. Adam and Eve in the Garden. The two bodies, one white, one black. She tried not to think about it in those terms, but she couldn’t help herself. And there was something meaningful and planned in the boy’s revelations—it was not the nostalgic, late-at-night reminiscences of a soldier home from the wars—there was a direction in the musical, flowing whispers, a target. Somehow, she knew the target was herself and she wanted to hide.