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By Root 12403 0

retired to my room’s nursery-pink and the disquietude that it had begun to cause me. I sat down at my table. The first page of the legal pad, its blankness still intimidating, yawned in front of me like a yellowish glimpse of eternity. How in God’s name would I ever be able to write a novel? I mused, chewing on a Venus Velvet. I opened the letter from my father. I always looked forward to these letters, feeling fortunate to have this Southern Lord Chesterfield as an advisor, who so delighted me with his old-fashioned disquisitions upon pride and avarice and ambition, bigotry, political skulduggery, venereal excess and other mortal sins and dangers. Sententious he might occasionally be, but never pompous, never preacherish in tone, and I relished both the letters’ complexity of thought and feeling and their simple eloquence; whenever I finished one I was usually close to tears, or doubled over with laughter, and they almost always set me immediately to rereading passages in the Bible, from which my father had derived many of his prose cadences and much of his wisdom. Today, though, my attention was first caught by a newspaper clipping which fluttered out from the folds of the letter. The headline of the clipping, which was from the local gazette in Virginia, so stunned and horrified me that I momentarily lost my breath and saw tiny pinpoints of light before my eyes.

It announced the death by suicide, at the age of twenty-two, of a beautiful girl with whom I had been hopelessly in love during several of the rocky years of my early adolescence. Her name was Maria (rhyming in the Southern fashion with “pariah”) Hunt, and at fifteen I had been so feverish in my infatuation for her that it seems in retrospect a small-scale madness. Talk about your lovesick fool, how I exemplified such a wretch! Maria Hunt! For if in the 1940s, long before the dawn of our liberation, the ancient chivalry still prevailed and the plastic June Allysons of a boy’s dreams were demigoddesses with whom one might at most, to use the sociologists’ odious idiom, “pet to climax,” I carried self-abnegation to its mad limit and with my beloved Maria did not even try to cop a feel, as they used to say in those days. Indeed, I did not do so much as place a kiss upon her heartlessly appetizing lips. This is not on the other hand to define our relationship as Platonic, for in my understanding of that word there is an element of the cerebral, and Maria was not at all bright. To which it must be added that in those days of the forty-eight states, when in terms of the quality of public education Harry Byrd’s Virginia was generally listed forty-ninth—after Arkansas, Mississippi and even Puerto Rico—the intellectual tang of the colloquy of two fifteen-year-olds is perhaps best left to the imagination. Never was ordinary conversation cleft by such hiatuses, such prolonged and unembarrassed moments of ruminant non-speech. Nonetheless, I had passionately but chastely adored her, adored her for such a simple-minded reason as that she was beautiful enough to wreck the heart, and now I discovered that she was dead. Maria Hunt was dead!

The advent of the Second World War and my involvement in it had caused Maria to fade out of my life, but she had been many times since in my wistful thoughts. She had killed herself by leaping from the window of a building, and I found to my astonishment that this had occurred only a few weeks before, in Manhattan. I later learned that she had lived around the corner from me, on Sixth Avenue. It was a sign of the city’s inhuman vastness that we had both dwelt for months in an area as compact as Greenwich Village without ever having encountered each other. With a wrench of pain so intense that it was almost like remorse, I pondered whether I might not have been able to save her, to prevent her from taking such a terrible course, had I only known of her existence in the city, and her whereabouts. Reading the article over and over again, I verged very close to a state of real upheaval, and found myself moaning aloud at this senseless story of