And yes, it's true, Charlie has practiced this kind of erotic disport himself, off and on, with one or another single young woman working in the production department or somesuch level of the mothership, belowdecks and lonesome and not always, actually, very young. But did he enjoy these interludes or were they sad entertainments he inflicted on himself in the stark space of a convertible sofa turned open to span the room so that he had to walk upon the bedding to go and pee? He had lovely sex with his wife in an antique bed with carved oak posts, so what are you doing here, Charlie, balling this morose media clerk. It was an odd form of mortification for some pattern of behavior, or grain of being, too transparent for this adman to fathom.

"This is the challenge, Dwayne. You have to read the mysterious current that passes in the night and connects millions of people across a continental landmass, compelling them to buy a certain product first thing in the morning. They gotta have it and you gotta be ready for them when they show up."

He said, "Package goods and painkillers. These are the things that keep the country running."

A swarthy male stood in the doorway.

"Jou order oranjuice?"

Charlie fished some money out of his pocket and paid the guy. He took an extra-strength antacid tablet out of the bottle in his desk and washed it down with the watery pulpless half-rancid juice, for whatever calmative effect it might have on his acidic backwash.

He told a dirty joke to Dwayne and sensed the fellow going pink out there on the prairie. There was nothing left to do but leave. Charlie walked through the semiswank lobby, done in Babylonian art deco, and nipped around the corner to his Swedish masseuse, who karate'd his aching lumbar for ten minutes. Then he wheeled into Brooks Brothers and picked up a couple of tennis shirts because what's more fun than an impulse buy? He double-timed it across Madison to the Men's Bar at the Biltmore, where he massively inhaled a Cutty on the rocks and was out the door in half a shake and skating across the vast main level of Grand Central, the Bobby Thomson baseball jammed into the pocket of his topcoat-a Burberry all-weather that he loved like a brother and that went especially well with the suit he was wearing, a slate gray whipcord made for Charlie by a guy who did lapels for organized crime-because he'd decided the ball was no longer safe in his office and he wanted his son to have it, for better or worse, love or money, real or fake, but please Chuckie do not abuse my trust, I could fall down dead passing the stuffed mushrooms at dinner and this is the one thing I want you to take and keep and care for, and he went striding through the gate just in time to make his train, which was the evolutionary climax of the whole human endeavor, and he bucketed up to the bar car, filled with people who more or less resembled Charlie, give or take a few years and a few gray hairs and the details of their evilest dreams.

The last express to Westport.

3

There were stories about the Pope. There were reports, a certain kind of underground rumor that can make its way across a country, parish to parish. Pope Pius was having mystical visions. That was the rumor going round. He was witness to a series of supernatural events, seeing things in the dead of night. That was the story people told, I don't know, nuns, old ladies on novena nights, maybe well-heeled parishioners too, pink and fit, officers of the Knights of Columbus. People hear such a story and feel something turn in their souls, a leap out of dear old singsong life into some other reading altogether.

In class a student mentioned the rumors to Father Paulus in the course of a discussion that touched on the subject of thaumatology, or the study of wonders.

The old priest looked out the window.

"If you'd been drinking dago red until three in the morning, you'd have visions too."

I went to see Father in his office later in the day. It was a three-hundred-yard walk through a billowing white storm. I had the edges of my watch cap unfurled over my ears and kept my forearm raised against the cutting sleet, against the whole hard physical thing, the snowstorms and open spaces, the reality of a mass of land called North America, new to my experience.

Father started talking before I had my jacket off.

"It's when the hair in my nostrils begins going stiff. That's when I want to retire to the south of France."

"The snow on the parade."

"Yes, I know."

"The benches are buried."

"Yes," he said.

"I realized, just out the window there, I was walking over a bench."

"Yes. Sit down, Shay, and tell me how you're doing. A young man's progress. That's the title of this session."

"I borrowed a pair of boots."

He liked that response.

"Do they fit?"

"No."

Even better. When he asked about the state of my mind and soul, which he did only rarely, and when I answered on a practical plane, as I always did, he seemed to think I was devising a down-to-earth reply out of some manly instinct when in fact I was only confused, forever trying to put together a suitable set of words.

"What are you reading?"

I recited a list.

"Itbu understand what's in those books?"

"No," I said.

Again he smiled. I think he was tired of gifted kids. He'd done work with boys of advanced standing and now he wanted to talk to misfits of the other kind, the ones who'd made trouble for themselves and others.

"Some of it maybe. What I don't understand, I memorize."

His arm was propped on the desk and he leaned his head into the canted hand. No smile this time,

"That's not why we started this place, is it?"

"I study like a madman, Father."

"But you can't memorize ideas the way you do the endings of Latin verbs."

His hands were unspotted and small. Some of the other jebbies wore flannel shirts and heavy sweaters but Father Paulus was not influenced by climate or geography or the sense of special freedoms at Voyageur. He went black-suited and roman-collared and I respected this and found it reassuring.

"One of the things we want to do here is to produce serious men. What sort of phenomenon is this? Not so easy to say. Someone, in the end, who develops a certain depth, a spacious quality, say, that's a form of respect for other ways of thinking and believing. Let us unnar-row the basic human tubing. And let us help a young man toward an ethical strength that makes him decisive, that shows him precisely who he is, Shay, and how he is meant to address the world."

You were always afraid of disappointing Father, being unequal to the level of discourse. Being bland when he wanted a more spirited sort of traffic, even a bullshit act, wiseass and slouchy. Bland and plodding when he wanted independence and open argument.

"My own life, I confess-yes, why not, you'll hear my confession, Shay. Who better than you? Took me all these years to understand that I'm not a serious man. Too much irony, too much vanity, too little what-I don't know, a lot of things. And no rage, you see. Or a small ingrown toenail rage, a puny frustration. Eventually you get to know these things. Do you act out of principle? Or do you devise self-justifying reasons for your bad behavior? This is my confession, not yours, so you're not required to come up with answers. Not yet anyway. Eventually, yes. You'll know in your heart how well you've met the calling to be a man."

"No rage," I said. "What do you mean?"

"No rage. Rage and violence can be elements of productive tension in a soul. They can serve the fullness of one's identity. One way a man untrivializes himself is to punch another man in the mouth."