The Downtown Foundlings’ Crèche, in aid of slum children, was Winifred’s best thing, or at least the charity ball was. It was a costume ball—such functions mostly were, because people at that time liked costumes. They liked them almost as much as they liked uniforms. Both served the same end: to avoid being who you were, you could pretend to be someone else. You could become bigger and more powerful, or more alluring and mysterious, just by putting on exotic clothes. Well, there was something to it.

Winifred had a committee for the ball, but everyone knew she made all the big decisions herself. She held the hoops, others jumped through them. It was she who’d picked the theme for 1936—“Xanadu.” The rival Beaux Arts Ball had recently done “Tamurlane in Samarkand,” and it had been a great success. Eastern themes couldn’t miss, and surely everyone had been made to memorize “Kubla Khan” at school, so even lawyers—even doctors—even bankers would know what Xanadu was. Their wives would know as a matter of course.

Winifred had the entire poem typed out and mimeographed and distributed to our committee—to get the ideas percolating, she said—and any suggestions from us were more than welcome, though we knew she had the entire thing mapped out in her head already. The poem would appear on the engraved invitation as well—gold lettering, with a gold-and-cerulean border of Arabic writing. Did anyone understand such writing? No, but it looked just lovely.

These functions were by invitation only. You were invited and then you paid through the nose, but the circle was very tight. Who was on the list became a matter of anxious anticipation, though only for those in doubt about their status. To expect an invitation and then not to receive one was a foretaste of Purgatory. I expect many tears were shed over such things, but in secret—in that world, you could never let it appear that you cared.

The beauty of Xanadu was (said Winifred, after she had read out the poem in her whisky voice—read it excellently, I’ll give her that)—the beauty of it was that with such a theme you could be as revealing or concealing as you might wish. The corpulent could swathe themselves in rich brocades, the svelte could come as slave girls or Persian dancers and show off everything but the kitchen sink. Gauzy skirts, bangles, tinkling ankle chains—the scope was practically infinite, and of course men loved to dress up as pashas and pretend they had harems. Though she doubted that she could talk anyone into playing the eunuchs, she added, to appreciative tittering.

Laura was too young for this ball. Winifred was planning a début for her, a rite of passage that had not yet taken place, and until it did she was not considered eligible. However, she took quite an interest in the proceedings. I was very relieved to have her once more taking an interest in something. Certainly she was not taking an interest in her schoolwork: her marks had been abysmal.

Correction: it wasn’t the proceedings she took an interest in, it was the poem. I knew it already, from Miss Violence, from Avilion, but Laura hadn’t bothered much about it then. Now she read it over and over.

What was a demon-lover, she wanted to know? Why was the sea sunless, why was the ocean lifeless? Why did the sunny pleasure-dome have caves of ice? What was Mount Abora, and why was the Abyssinian maid singing about it? Why were the ancestral voices prophesying war?

I didn’t know the answers to any of these questions. I know all of them now. Not the answers of Samuel Taylor Coleridge—I’m not sure he had any answers, since he was hopped up on drugs at the time—but my own answers. Here they are, for what they’re worth.

The sacred river is alive. It flows to the lifeless ocean, because that’s where all things that are alive end up. The lover is a demon-lover because he isn’t there. The sunny pleasure-dome has caves of ice because that’s what pleasure-domes have—after a while they become very cold, and after that they melt, and then where are you? All wet. Mount Abora was the Abyssinian maid’s home, and she was singing about it because she couldn’t get back to it. The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later.

Correct me if I’m wrong.

The snow fell, softly at first, then in hard pellets that stung the skin like needles. The sun set in the afternoon, the sky changed from washed blood to skim milk. Smoke poured from the chimneys, from the furnaces stoked with coal. The bread-wagon horses left piles of steaming brown buns on the street which then froze solid. Children threw them at one another. The clocks struck midnight, over and over, every midnight a deep blue-black riddled with icy stars, the moon white bone. I looked out the bedroom window, down to the sidewalk, through the branches of the chestnut tree. Then I turned out the light.

The Xanadu ball was the second Saturday in January. My costume had come that morning, in a box with armfuls of tissue paper. The smart thing to do was to rent your costume from Malabar’s, because to have one specially made would be displaying too much of an effort. Now it was almost six o’clock and I was trying it on. Laura was in my room: she would often do her homework there, or make a show of doing it. “What are you supposed to be?” she said.

“The Abyssinian Maid,” I said. What I would do for a dulcimer I wasn’t yet sure. Perhaps a banjo, with ribbons added. Then I remembered that the only banjo I knew about was back at Avilion, in the attic, left over from my dead uncles. I would have to skip the dulcimer.

I didn’t expect Laura to tell me I looked pretty, or nice even. She never did that: pretty and nice were not categories of thought for her. This time she said, “You aren’t very Abyssinian. Abyssinians aren’t supposed to be blonde.”

“I can’t help the colour of my hair,” I said. “It’s Winifred’s fault. She should have chosen Vikings or something.”

“Why are they all afraid of him?” said Laura.

“Afraid of who?” I said. (I hadn’t considered the fear in this poem, only the pleasure. The pleasure-dome. The pleasure-dome was where I really lived now—where I had my true being, unknown to those around me. With walls and towers girdled round, so nobody else could get in.)

“Listen,” she said. She recited, with her eyes closed:

“See, they’re afraid of him,” she said, “but why? Why Beware?”

“Really, Laura, I have no idea,” I said. “It’s just a poem. You can’t always tell what poems mean. Maybe they think he’s crazy.”

“It’s because he’s too happy,” said Laura. “He’s drunk the milk of Paradise. It frightens people when you’re too happy, in that way. Isn’t that why?”