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By Root 15402 0

moment is exactly right and the audience is utterly responsive, my encyclopedic ability to run on and on about a subject has served me in good stead; at a time when the situation demands the blessed release of witless diversion, nothing can be more soothing than useless facts and empty statistics. I employed all my knowledge about—of all things—peanuts to try to captivate Sophie that evening in Washington, as we ambled past the floodlight-drenched White House and then made our roundabout way toward Herzog’s restaurant and “the best crab cakes in town.” After what she had told me, peanuts seemed the appropriate commonplace out of which to refashion new conduits of communication. For during the two hours or so following her story I don’t think I had been able to say more than three or four words to her. Nor had she been able to say much to me. But peanuts allowed me at last to breach our silence, to try to break out of the cloud of depression hovering over us.

“The peanut’s not a nut,” I explained, “but a pea. It’s a cousin of the pea and the bean but different in an important way—it develops its pods under the ground. The peanut’s an annual, growing low over the soil. There are three major types of peanut grown in the United States—the large-seeded Virginia, the runner and the Spanish. Peanuts have to have a lot of sunshine and a long frost-free growing period. That’s why they grow in the South. The major peanut-growing states are, in order, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and Texas. There was an incredibly gifted Negro scientist named George Washington Carver who developed dozens of uses for peanuts. Aside from just food, they’re used in cosmetics, plastics, insulation, explosives, certain medicines, lots of other things. Peanuts are a booming crop, Sophie, and I think that this little farm of ours will grow and grow, and pretty soon we’ll not only be self-sufficient but maybe even rich—at least, very well-off. We won’t have to depend on Alfred Knopf or Harper and Brothers for our daily bread. The reason I want you to know something about peanuts as a crop is simply because if you’re going to be the chatelaine of the manor, there are times when you’ll have to have a hand in the running of the operations. Now, as for the actual growing, peanuts are planted after the last frost by seeding three to ten inches apart in rows about two feet apart. The pods usually mature about a hundred and twenty to a hundred and forty days after planting...”

“You know, Stingo, I just thought of something,” Sophie said, breaking in at some point on my soliloquy. “It’s something very important.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“I don’t know how to drive. I don’t know how to drive a car.”

“So?”

“But we’ll be living on this farm. From what you say, so far away from things. I’ll have to be able to drive a car, won’t I? I never learned in Poland—so few people had cars. At least, you never learned to drive until you were so much older. And here—Nathan said he was going to teach me but he never did. Surely I’ll have to learn how to drive.”

“Easy,” I replied. “I’ll teach you. There’s a pickup truck already there. Anyway, in Virginia they’re very lax about driver’s licenses. Jesus”—I had a sudden fit of recollection—“I remember I got my license on my fourteenth birthday. I mean, it was legal!”

“Fourteen?” said Sophie.

“Christ, I weighed about ninety pounds and could barely see over the steering wheel. I remember the state trooper who was giving the test looked at my father and said, ‘Is he your son or a midget?’ But I got the license. That’s the South... There’s something that’s so different about the South even in trivial ways. Take the matter of youth, for instance. In the North you’d never be allowed to get a driver’s license so young. It’s as if you got older much younger in the South. Something about the lushness, the ripeness maybe. Like that joke about what’s the Mississippi definition of a virgin. The answer is: a twelve-year-old girl who can run faster than her daddy.” I heard myself giggle self-indulgently, in the first spell of what