It is the struggle hanging over my life that made him go away.

Postcard #3. Aboard the freighter SS Marion Lykes bound for Le Havre. The oddball loner has little to say to the three other passengers on the sixteen-day crossing. Gray seas, high swells, missed meals. He tells them he is going to school in Switzerland but doesn't mention the name of the institution or the course of study he plans to follow. He avoids a passenger's friendly attempts to take his picture. She is a nice enough lady whose husband is a lieutenant colonel, U.S. Army, retired. You'd think in the middle of the ocean he'd be able to sit on deck without answering questions from some clear-eyed military type. He talks least of all to the fourth passenger, his cabin mate, a boy just out of high school and on his way to France to study French. He is a Texas boy and just close enough to Lee outwardly to be the world's preferred version of the type.

It is like the shadow of his own life keeps falling across his path.

He watches them at dinner in the officers' mess and he thinks he knows why they look so satisfied with themselves. They have begun to feel the bond of being American. They almost glow with self-awareness, headed for foreign shores, surrounded and attended by a partly foreign and mainly dark-skinned crew, delighting in their own straightforward and affirmative ways, their democratic values, their moral strength, the way they hold their knife and fork, smiling over the glitter, and this is why he will not eat with them or share their conversation.

The spiral rind of a tangerine sits in a white saucer in front of him. He thinks of the nine months he spent at the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro in California, after Japan. He continued his Russian studies, learned some Spanish (it was the time of Fidel Castro) and developed a neat little deception for the venture he was now engaged in.

At the base library he found a catalogue listing the names of colleges abroad. He scanned the list for obscure schools in certain locations, then wrote away for an application. Albert Schweitzer College. Churwalden, Switzerland. He needed to invent a reason to travel abroad because a Marine has two years in the reserve after active duty.

On the application form he listed under special interests: Philosophy, Psychology, Ideology, Football, baseball, tennis, Stamp collecting.

Vocational interest (if decided upon): To be a short story writer on contemporary American life.

In certain light the sea goes green, a slow dullish tumble he watches from the deck. When he goes below again he lies on his bunk, aware of the great slow creaking of the ship, like a mind stirring around him. Hawsers are ropes for mooring.

On the Albert Schweitzer application he made it a point to mention that after the term was completed he planned to attend the summer session of the University of Turku-Turku, Finland.

Hidell creeps closer to the East.

19 June

Mary Frances parked under an oak tree on the circular drive outside the College of Education Building, or Old Main. It pleased her that Win's office was in the oldest building on campus. The building pleased her with its arched entranceways and two-story columns. Den ton had its hidden streets, its sense of languorous history, an old American stillness, wistful and unchanged, and these older traces too, older ideas and values scored in limestone and marble, in scroll ornaments atop a column or in the banknote details of a frieze. The Old Main, the county courthouse, the broad-fronted homes, the homes with deep shady porches, the trees, the streets named for trees-all this pleased her, made her think that happiness lived minute by minute in the things she saw and heard. Being happy was a small awareness, the sum of small awarenesses, day by day, minute by minute, and you knew it now, in the hair and skin as much as in the heart.

Suzanne sat next to her mother, arms at her sides, slim white legs pointed straight out, a show'of mock obedience. They were not talking to each other.

You could be happy now. It did not have to be experienced in retrospect, as Win believed, as he liked to explain in his mild way, with the face he called a failed professor's tipped slightly right. It was not a slow-working glow or meditation. You could feel it now, collect it in the names of things around you, in chinaberry, oak and slippery elm. It pleased her to live here, after Miami, Havana, Mexico City, Guatemala City, temporary housing in southeast Virginia (isolation), dusty tracts of identical homes near the Carolina coast (isolation tropic).

They would go to the Steak House on South Locust for jumbo shrimp with salad, french fries and hot rolls and then Win would suggest an ice cream at Lane's.

Bright hot skies.

Silence in the car, on the burning lawns.

Suzanne was holding her breath.

In his basement office in the Old Main, Win Everett was on the phone with Parmenter.

"How does Mackey know all this if he hasn't made contact?"

"Whatever T-Jay knows comes out of Banister's office. Oswald confides in one of Banister's people."

"Go ahead."

"In January he orders a snub-nose.38 from a firm in Los Angeles. In March he sends away to Chicago for an Italian carbine with a sniper's scope."

"Armed and dangerous," Win said softly.

"Plus. Are you ready? He's handing out pro-Castro leaflets on the street. He was on the docks two or three days ago pushing leaflets at sailors off an aircraft carrier."

Everett looked into space.

"How does this fit in with the fact that he has the use of an office in the same building as Banister's detective agency, right above

Banister's office, which is the damn pivot point of the anti-Castro crusade in Louisiana?"

"It doesn't fit in," Parmenter said.

"I'm glad you said that. I thought I might be missing something. "

"All I know is what T-Jay tells me. As follows. The subject walks into Banister's office looking for an undercover job. Banister installs him in a broom closet upstairs. This little-bitty room becomes the New Orleans headquarters of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. And the subject hits the streets in a white shirt and tie, handing out leaflets."

They talked about Oswald as the subject in the same way they referred to the President as Lancer, which was his Secret Service code name. Habit. One wants the least possible surface to which pain and regret might cling-anyone's, everyone's pain. A thought for late afternoon.

"Let me understand the sequence," Win said. "The subject leaves Dallas. He is gone, out of our lives, a promising part of our operation lost forever."

"Then he turns up in the one place we would never expect to find him."

"He turns up, out of nowhere, in New Orleans, in Guy Banister's office, looking for an undercover assignment. The same fellow who defected to the bloody Soviet Union, who used his mail-order rifle to take a shot at General Walker. Strolls right into the middle of the enemy camp."

"Mackey was supposed to ask Guy Banister to find a substitute for our boy. What happens? The original walks in off the street."

Everett searched his pockets for a cigarette.

"You've got to get close to the subject," he said.

"Oh no."

"Look, Larry."

"I don't want personal contact any more than you do, my friend. Give him to Mackey."

"Where is he?"

"Still at the Farm as far as I know."

"All right. Look. Get me a sample of the kid's handwriting."

"I'll talk to T-Jay right away."

The hallway was empty. Win climbed the stairs to the main floor. Nobody at the desk. He went outside. School year ended, slow-moving figures in the distance, summer students, maintenance men, and a lawn sprinkler sending out spray in overlapping arcs, all the lazy brightness of cobwebbed grass.