The Rebel in Autumn

By Michael Shaara

“The rebel in spring is a sometime thing, but beware the rebel in autumn...” states the epigraph to Michael Shaara’s great unpublished novel, The Rebel in Autumn. Shaara wrote Rebel immediately before The Killer Angels (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize), in the late 1960s while teaching creative writing at Florida State University. Loosely based on his years as a professor on the then-small Southern college campus, Rebel is perhaps Shaara’s most fully realized novel.

The year is 1969. Unrest on college campuses is peaking, students tune in, drop out and protest everything from the Vietnam War to racism and police brutality while old guard conservatives push back. And at one small southern university, a story censored from the college literary magazine is the match that sets the tinder box ablaze. There’s a simple solution, argues history prof Max Rainer—just publish the damn story and move on. Rainer has more important things on his mind, like his weekend getaway planned with Rona Jackson, the cute sorority girl who sits in the first row. But university president Harry Locke feels that now is the time to draw his line in the sand. He’s read about what’s been going on up at Columbia, and he’ll be damned if anything like that will happen on his watch, no sir. Locke—an undistinguished administrator at the end of his career—has misread the mood of the students, where the seeds of unrest lie just below the surface of a genteel Southern campus.

Rainer leads the faculty’s vocal opposition to the story’s censorship, students begin to skip class to protest, and Locke’s closest advisor tells him now is no time to rebel against forces beyond his control. But the battle lines are drawn and neither side can give in. When the administration building is taken over and the students begin a sit-in, that’s when the fires start. And that’s when the police are called in. Rainer tries to keep the peace. But with the agitation of a Vietnam vet-turned-hippie and a recently politicized black music student with a rifle, the stage is set for a deadly showdown.

Written just before the fatal shootings of four students at Kent State in Ohio, and then forgotten in a drawer for nearly 45 years, The Rebel in Autumn is now published for the first time anywhere, ready to take its place as one of the great works of American fiction from a time when words mattered.

With an introduction by the author's son, New York Times bestselling novelist Jeff Shaara.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Antenna Books
• Release date: Dec 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781623060992

Michael Shaara

Michael Shaara (1928-88) was an American writer of science, sports and historical fiction. He served in the Korean War, was an amateur boxer and police officer. He later taught literature at Florida State University. The Killer Angels won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975.

Book preview

THE REBEL IN AUTUMN

Michael Shaara

Antenna Books

Brooklyn, New York

www.antennabooks.com

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE REBEL IN AUTUMN Copyright © 2013 by The Shaara Partnership All rights reserved. For information, address Antenna Books, 156 Prospect Park West, Brooklyn, NY 11215.

www.antennabooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shaara, Michael

eBook ISBN: 978-1-62306-029-9

1. Trade—Fiction.

First Edition: September 2013

The rebel in spring

Is a sometime thing,

But beware the rebel in autumn…

Anon.

Praise for the novels of Michael Shaara

The Killer Angels

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

A #1 New York Times bestseller

Made into the motion picture Gettysburg

The best Civil War novel ever written… The descriptions of combat are incomparable; they convey not jus the sight but the noise and smell of battle. And the characterizations are simply superb… Shaara has managed to capture the essence of war, the divided friendships, the madness, and the heroism of fratricidal conflict.

—Stephen B. Oates, author of With Malice Toward None

My favorite historical novel…a superb re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its insight into what the war was about, and what it meant.

—James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom

Remarkable, a book that changed my life…I had never visited Gettysburg, knew almost nothing about that battle before I read the book, but here it all came alive.

—Ken Burns, filmmaker, The Civil War

The Broken Place

…Shaara’s impressive creative talent manifests itself in The Broken Place, a novel that is at once tough and tender, that moves rapidly and still remains reflective, that is sexually realistic without being pornographic, that is funny in spots, yet serious about the human condition…Through all of this punishment McClain is searching for peace and belief in God. In taking him on this search, Shaara provides us with parallels with Hemingway, who furnishes the title for the novel in a passage from A Farewell to Arms. There is the Hemingway world of violence…There’s the Hemingway concreteness and feeling for nature…And one drunken party has the wild frenzy of those in The Sun Also Rises…Yet one feels more compassion for McClain than one feels for most of Hemingway’s heroes…in the best sense of the word, this is an intellectual novel, one that comments seriously upon man’s life: Shaara has a cure for the broken places that mar man’s soul…I think Florida has a new novelist of great promise.

—Tampa Tribune, Florida Accent Magazine

The author spars like Hemingway through much of this first novel about a soldier-prizefighter who kills a man in the ring. It’s probably inevitable. Writers are mostly violent people who act gentle. When a writer is a gentle person who acts violent, as Michael Shaara seems to be, Hemingway is one of the few guides available…When Mr. Shaara writes at ringside he writes as well as anyone around…McClain’s is a rare sickness, and more rarely still does someone write it truly. Mr. Shaara generates fits of murderous rage at least as well as Hubert Selby Jr., and somewhat better than Truman Capote…The Broken Place doesn’t pull its final punches. Michael Shaara, one novel in, comes on at least as a middleweight.

—Richard Rhodes, The New York Times Book Review

Author Shaara has the sensitivity to present the interior voyage of a man becoming. Often McClain’s world fractures, but at those moments beauty and freshness enter like sunlight. McClain, the reader feels, will make it around the bend. This is a novel at once soft and strong, tender and tough, like the journey of a man, in search of his soul.

—Miami Herald

The Herald

…a frighteningly credible version of nuclear apocalypse. Shaara’s forte is the subtle buildup of tension, a series of apparently ordinary evens leading to an unknown but dreadful finale. He has an unerring eye for those fascinating details that flesh out a finely paced thriller.

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

This is borderline fantasy, but Shaara brings it to a poetic reality.

—Publisher’s Weekly

Michael Shaara has broken new ground with his latest novel… After finishing The Herald readers will be glad that Shaara continues to write what he wants. …It’s a brilliant story told in a gripping style. Shaara uses short staccato sentences to show the urgency in the minds of people groping to deal with the power they are facing.

—Sentinel Star

For Love of the Game

Made into a motion picture starring Kevin Costner

A delightful and lyrical story about a great athlete’s momentous last game…   A fairy tale for adults about love and loneliness and finally growing up.

—USA Today

An endearing, timeless novel that can be enjoyed by both serious readers and baseball lovers for generations to come.

—Orlando Sentinel

Shaara’s work has often been compared to Hemingway, and this book has a Hemingway style to it, introspective, spare of dialogue. The short, simple sentences recall the voice of Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, a taciturn man who, like Billy Chapel, is facing his final showdown…the final pages of the book are as nail-bitingly tense as the ninth inning of a hotly-contested World Series game. Even if you don’t particularly like baseball, you care what happens in this game… For Shaara, baseball is more than a sport; it is a metaphor for youthful innocence.

—Creative Loafing

Contents

Foreword

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Foreword

My father, Michael Shaara, published his first novel, The Broken Place, in 1968. While the reviews were uniformly favorable, some comparing his writing skills to Hemingway, it found no audience at all, and very quickly went out of print. As discouraging as that was, he had already dug deeply into the writing of his second novel, The Rebel in Autumn. As the old adage goes, write what you know, and both his early novels were partially autobiographical. In The Broken Place, the primary character, Tom McClain is a military veteran and boxer who takes a trip to the Holy Land (as my father did in 1960). In Rebel, Max Rainer is, like my father, a university professor, who doesn’t fit well into the stolid world of academia. (My father was also a pilot and used that experience in his fourth novel, The Herald.)

It wasn’t until after my father’s second heart attack in 1988—the one that killed him—that I became aware The Rebel in Autumn even existed. My mother, my sister and I were going through his papers when we discovered the long forgotten manuscript, still in its gray cardboard box, with the literary agent’s label attached. Like all of my father’s books, it was written on an old Royal typewriter, and as I flipped through the pages I could see all the sloppy telltale signs so common to manuscripts in those days: the sudden darker lettering where the ribbon had been changed, page numbers out of sequence where new pages had been added, words crossed out, with words scribbled in between the double spaced lines, smears of Liquid Paper where minor corrections had been made. These days, with almost all manuscripts written on computer, we never get to see the physical connection to the writer, the anxieties and aggravations behind the editing process. Looking at the manuscript today is like discovering an antique—a fascinating historical document.

As I began to read the manuscript, I made the assumption that, since it had never been accepted by a publisher, it must be pretty bad. I could not have been more wrong. It’s not much of a stretch to say that The Rebel in Autumn is every bit the equal of my father’s classic novel, The Killer Angels. It may even be better. Written in the late 1960s, set in the spring of 1969, Rebel is my father at the top of his game.

While writing Rebel, he was also working on The Killer Angels, two very different projects. The Killer Angels, a story of the Battle of Gettysburg, required seven long years to complete, primarily because of the lack of available research materials (something easy to take for granted these days, since my father didn’t have the wonderful advantage I have using the Internet). He would often wait for weeks or months for a particular historical resource to arrive from some distant library, so while he was stalled out on one book, he would turn to the other. The result of that effort is The Rebel in Autumn.

It surprised me that Rebel was a terrific manuscript, and I was mystified why it had never seen the light of day. That question was answered by the file folder of rejection letters he’d received from various publishers. The book was simply unsuitable for the time it was written, a story based on events that, to many publishers in New York, seemed a little too similar to what were in those days bitterly uncomfortable newspaper headlines.

Rebel is about a campus protest that begins in a very small way—over the censorship of a short story in the campus literary magazine that the university president rejects as obscene because it contains profanity. Max Rainer, a history professor on the school’s publications board, is amazed at the stubborn, Puritanical tastes of the school administration, stating that students read far more profanity in their assigned English class readings. But the university president will not be moved, and the protest begins—about freedom of speech and freedom of expression and freedom of the press. But what seems like mundane grousing by restless students begins to escalate. It is 1969, a year after one of the most tumultuous in modern American history, and the myriad issues swirling around the country, and many college campuses, begin to attach themselves to this very small, very polite protest. Max Rainer, who my father certainly based on himself, is the one professor who sides vigorously with the students—who stands with them at their protest rallies, who challenges the school’s president to move beyond such old-fashioned ways of thinking.

But I realized that Rainer is not the rebel of the title. That title belongs to the college’s president, the aging Harry Locke, who feels a helplessness as his beloved Southern customs come under attack. He is a man of his times—and no more successful at appealing to the younger generation than Richard Nixon was when he appeared on the anarchic TV comedy show, Laugh-In. Locke thinks he knows what is right and he means well, but he is so out of step with the changes around him that his actions—and inability to admit his mistake and back off—will lead to death and to the destruction of the university. Not realistic? Perhaps the New York publishers of 1970 were too busy reading manuscripts to know what was going on at Columbia University, at Berkeley, at the University of Chicago, at Harvard and Yale, at Howard University, and all around the country—campus protests everywhere you turned, some of those destructive and violent, with tragic results for the students and those who tried to hold back the tide of change.

The simple argument over dirty words goes far deeper, to concerns about sweeping changes in our society that a genteel man like Locke simply cannot understand. At stake is an entire culture, respect for elders, respect for authority, deeply rooted passions that a man like Locke must try to preserve. But events escalate far beyond his own control, and the protests grow, fueled by opposition to the Vietnam War, issues of race relations in this southern city, and soon, violent confrontations with local police. The protesters and their adversaries move beyond arguing groups of campus hippies and radicals, drawing in the clean cut kids from the fraternities and sororities, and even the football team. The police presence merely adds fuel to the protests. The fuse is lit and a shot rings out, with disastrous results.

I began to understand why publishers dismissed this story. I do recall that my father had been enormously frustrated that many New York publishers couldn’t see beyond the sophisticated confines of their own city, and some of the rejection letters mention that it seemed vaguely ridiculous that any protest would erupt over something as silly as dirty words in a short story. Sit-ins? Fires? Riots? Really? But the rejections expressed another, more serious point. As my father’s story reached completion, and began to reach the eyes of the publishing community, history played out in a very nasty way, a horrifying event eerily similar to what my father had described. On May 4, 1970, National Guardsmen fired their rifles into a peaceful crowd of student protestors at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four of them. The shocking event briefly paralyzed this country, and many braced for what could have been an escalation of violence that would rival any horror in our past. That alone would be enough to make any publisher shy away from the book.

And so the manuscript sat, unopened, unread, unloved. Many years later, it was offered to Random House, my longtime publisher, and the publisher of the The Killer Angels. But Random House turned it down. It wasn’t until the ebook industry really took off that I even thought about it again. When Doug Grad, the President and Publisher of Antenna Books (and, coincidentally, the editor of my first two books, Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure) called me and asked me if the ebook rights were available for my father’s backlist, my sister Lila and I, who control my father’s estate, decided to bring out the four novels written by my father that didn’t reach the level of success enjoyed by The Killer Angels (which had won a Pulitzer Prize, and, as the basis for the enormously popular film Gettysburg, had become a #1 bestseller five years after my father’s death). The four other novels are The Broken Place, The Rebel in Autumn, The Herald and For Love of the Game. (You may have seen the movie of Game starring Kevin Costner as the aging baseball star pitching in the final game of his career—a second film made from my father’s work that he didn’t live to see.) My father’s work also includes over forty-five short stories, mainly his earliest works of science fiction, many published in the leading magazines of the 1950s and 60s, all to be made available electronically by Antenna Books as well.

We are very happy that The Rebel in Autumn will finally see publication. We agreed with Doug Grad that the manuscript should be left as is, a testament to my father’s work. Rebel is Michael Shaara’s vision, unadulterated, unaltered, unmodernized. The punctuation may be a little funky—my father liked using dashes rather than quotation marks for dialogue, but in the end we liked the writing so much that we felt that we would present what might today be called the director’s cut.

I was a student in the 1960s, and well recall the changes in our culture, the conflicts between town and gown, between students and faculty and college administration. One of my father’s great talents as a writer is capturing the essence, the spirit of the time period he chooses for his stories. I invite you to travel with him, to a time that threatened the fabric of this country as vividly as those periods of crisis a century and more before. If, like me, you lived through this era, then many of these events and issues will seem familiar. If you are younger, and so you know of this chaotic time only through a basic history lesson, you might be greatly surprised by the passions and the controversies, and most of all, by Michael Shaara’s magnificent gift for storytelling. To that, I can only add the simplest of greetings: Welcome to the 1960s.

Jeff Shaara, September 2013

CHAPTER ONE

It was a very short story: four pages long. Rainer read it once quickly, then read it again. He was aware of the boy watching him, sitting longhaired and solemn in the chair by Rainer’s desk, bony white fingers tinkering nervously with papers in his lap. Rainer finished the story and stared for a moment out the window at pale blue sky. It was a lonely story and Rainer was a lonely man and it had touched him. After a moment Rainer said: –Nothing dirty about this.– The boy grinned widely, fluttered his fingers.

–Great– the boy said.

–A few dirty words, but hell– Rainer shrugged.

–Then that’s the way you’ll vote?–

Rainer nodded.

–Great– the boy nodded violently, the long hair heavy on his shoulders. –But I bet you they never print it.– He stood up. –Just bet you they won’t.–

–Well. You’ve got my vote.–

–We’ll need it.–

Rainer shook his head. –Don’t know why they’ve got me on this damn Board anyway. I’m History. Listen, why don’t you show this thing to the English Department? If you have any trouble, you’ll need a professional opinion.–

–Oh, there’ll be trouble all right– the boy said darkly. He expected persecution: he stood with cocked head, eyes defiant. Rainer grinned. There was a tap on the door. The boy opened it and a thoroughly beautiful girl, dark eyed, immaculate, looked coolly in and apologized for disturbing him. Rainer arose. The girl said: –I just wanted to remind you about tonight.–

–Tonight?– The longhaired boy was staring at the girl with interest.

–The Apple-Polishing Dinner– the girl said musically.

–Oh– Rainer said. He blinked.

–You promised– the girl said.

–Oh sure– Rainer said. –Yes. Well fine.–

–Five thirty.–

–Great– Rainer said witlessly. The girl left. The door remained open and he saw across the hall in to a classroom; rows of pink knees, colors like a field of flowers, a girl cupping her chin.

–I just bet they don’t print it– the boy said.

Rainer refocused. –Well. I’ll do what I can.– He gestured vaguely. –I don’t know what the hell I’m doing on a Publications Board, God knows, but I’ll do what I can.–

–I’m damn glad you are, sir– the boy said. –They been running this place like it was a monastery. You know what? If they do print this story, which they won’t, but if they do, it will be the first time they ever printed a story with a profane word in it.– He said that with awe, as he might refer to the coming of a great comet. Rainer could not take it seriously. He smiled, waiting, and the boy thanked him again, and departed, leaving the door open. Rainer sat looking across at the knees, the thighs, at yellow light pouring through a wide window. Then he closed the door and was alone.

He rubbed his eyes. There was an emptiness in his brain. All day long he had been restless. He thought: Spring. No more today. He rose and stretched, remembering her, and looked at the calendar. Almost six months, to the day. Home now to an empty house. She would not come back. And he would not go after her.

He went out. The day was clear, the wind was gusty and warm. He moved out under the sky, smelling the salt air of the Gulf, the sharp hungry odor of pines, soft perfume, wet grass. This was the old part of campus: the buildings were ancient brick, faded a dusty red. The main building, Cawdor, was built in the style of a castle and Rainer looked up to see black battlements against the sky. He walked dreamily along toward the fountain. A girl came by in a very short skirt and Rainer looked and thought suddenly of the lonesome story, the obscene words. What words did she use, the girl in the very short skirt? She had fat legs: she turned to look back and he saw a fat face, a fat nose, a chubby grin.

He wandered up a path between tall camellia bushes, mindless in the southern afternoon. He came out in to the open and saw the fountain in front of Cawdor. It was a round bowl with another small bowl in the center and there was nothing particularly attractive about it except the flowing of the water. There was a wide circle of grass around the fountain and a lone couple was sitting on the grass: the boy reading from a large book, the girl leaning back on her hands, eyes closed, facing the sky. There were very few people walking the paths and then for a long while there was no one at all, only that one couple on the grass, and Rainer saw the boy stop reading suddenly to kiss the girl, who never opened her eyes, but who smiled, and then Rainer looked down the street and saw a crowd coming.

There were about a hundred of them, running and laughing and screaming, and dragging two struggling bodies. The crowd came straight for the fountain. One of the bodies was a girl. She was slung over the shoulder of a very large boy who was barefoot in a white T-shirt and she had one hand behind her desperately trying to keep her short skirt from riding up. The other body, a boy, was caught in the arms of five other boys, but he was still fighting and his face was very red. When they got him to the edge of the fountain they gathered around him and pulled off his shirt and his shoes and tie and tie pin, and then he screamed about his watch and they took that too. The large boy carrying the girl stood happily to one side while the girl took something metallic from around her neck and gave it to another girl. Then there was a ritual gathering around the feet and hands of the boy, and they swung him back and forth majestically three times, and on the third time threw him high in the air and in to the fountain and he was a good sized boy and came down with a tremendous splash. He sat in waist deep water clearing his eyes while the crowd did the same thing to the girl, throwing her higher, so that her clothes fluttered in the evening wind, and down she came close to the boy and the crowd cheered.

Rainer smelled the wet chlorine in the air, perfume and water; he felt a foolish envy. The crowd separated in to two groups, boys on one side of the fountain, girls on the other. The girl sat in the pool plucking hair out of her eyes and trying to pull the blouse away from her skin. She was wearing a thin white blouse which was molded wetly to her body and the outline of a white bra was clear against the darker color of her back: she was not wearing a slip. There was a great deal of noise from the crowd around her. Other students had stopped to watch; there were faces in the windows of the administration building. The girl stood up, plucking at her clothes; the boy helped her out of the fountain. She was wearing a very short skirt and she was a pretty girl; to Rainer she looked scrubbed and pink. He watched: the wet body, outline of hips, water rippling on smooth glistening legs. A sweetness rose in Rainer’s stomach. He thought silently, wistfully: ah.

The boy put his arm around the girl while she went on trying to wring herself out. Then the serenade began.

The girls sang first, arm in arm on the far side of the pool: a sorority song. The wet girl listened, her head on the boy’s shoulder. When all the girls were finished, the boys sang. Rainer, who had places to go and things to do, waited and listened. There was something about the ritual which repelled him, something staged, not quite real. Rainer was thirty-four years old and a long way from being thrown in the pool and he no longer believed in the innocent honesty of love, certainly not young love, and yet he was held, fascinated, by something possibly warm, something possibly important. If they loved each other they would remember this moment all their lives. He watched, privileged, but uncertain of the privilege. And he was looking at the hips of the girl, the round ball under the wet skirt, and that moved him, and he thought about it.

The singing was done. The girls got together to cheer the fraternity. The boys cheered the girls. The crowd began to fragment in to groups and couples and there was one more small scuffle: two boys and a girl were thrown into the pool for no particular reason, gratuitously, for the fun of it, so that some of the other onlookers began to move cautiously away. Off to one side, standing by themselves, the first wet couple was kissing professionally and with great concentration, the boy’s hands kneading the girl’s back and buttocks. Rainer thought: ownership. He sighed, and moved on.

It was darker now. The last class was ending. As he got in to his car the couples began to flow by around him. He drove back by the Cawdor fountain and he could see all the way down College Avenue into town. Couples were moving everywhere, in the warm dusk beneath the trees. A blue light shone down town: a star flickered in the sky. Rainer felt a sense of overwhelming hunger.

Harry Locke came out of the meeting smiling and went back to his office smiling all the way, a patient pleasant smile which deteriorated rapidly as he walked and was gone when he reached the door to his office. But he did not even slam the door. He went to the desk and took an Alka-Seltzer and let it fizz in a glass and then walked to the window and stared down, glass in hand. From the window he could see down College Avenue and he saw the crowd coming, dragging bodies, and for one numbed moment his mind had the absurd thought: riot, and his stomach froze before he focused and saw and shook his head at himself angrily. Absurd. But there were riots everywhere this year, everywhere, and although nothing could possibly happen here it was still another thing, just one more damned thing, to keep you from one night’s decent sleep. He put a hand to his stomach, searching for the pain. Pressure seemed to help. He drank the harsh water and watched the couple thrown into the pool and the sight of it soothed him. But he had an atomic reactor on his mind and twenty million dollars and the memory of a meeting with the Board of Regents and a long night ahead him…God, it’s long after supper time.

There was a feathery knock: he turned in anger. Miss Ferguson, his secretary, came silently watchfully worriedly into the room.

Locke said, –You really ought to have gone home.–

Miss Ferguson smiled.

–I’m supposed to wait for a phone call.– Locke said. –I have no idea how long that’ll be—you know how they are. Really, you ought to go. Look at the time.–

–Dr. Southall is here.–

–Woody?– Locke brightened. –Well good, send him in. But you go on home.– Miss Ferguson ghosted out. Round the edge of the door there was the gray skull head of Woody Southall, lean grinning corpse.

–Saw your car– Woody apologized. –Just want to know, when do we go fishing?–

–How’s the patient? Come on in.–

–Still ticking on all one– Woody said. He moved at a pace which differed from the rest of the world. He talked slowly and precisely and in no great hurry and was uninterruptable, once he got going. He moved glacially into the room. –How’re things with the reactor?–

–I wait. You know how it is. ‘Go back to your office and we call.’ So I wait.– Locke attempted a grin. He was on the edge of a complaint.

Southall looked past him out the window.

–It’ll go through– he said. He stared down and grinned, showing gray teeth.

–A little water sure does improve the clothing.–

Down there they were singing. Locke saw the wet boy, his arm around the glistening girl, short skirt high above gleaming knees, the blouse melted to the breasts. Locke felt another spasm of pain in his stomach. He put his hand to his mouth, did not quite catch the belch.

–Don’t be a dirty old man– he said.

Southall grinned. –I was a dirty young man. I plan on being a filthy ghost.–

–Do you know what?– Locke said suddenly. –There are actually people on our Board of Regents who think you can catch radiation poisoning. Like an infection.– Southall chuckled.

–I had to explain it four times– Lock said. –I really did. Listen– Again he paused. He considered it a weakness in a man to complain. It was not necessary. He could wait. He could wait. He pressed his hand to his stomach.

–Ah, now that’s lovely.– Woody said. The wet couple below was kissing. Locke watched. He saw the boy’s hand move and the Puritan in him stirred and grumbled.

The crowd was breaking up, going home. Lights were beginning to come on down College Avenue. He put his hands behind him and straightened, stiffening his chin. He would wait. He was being foolish. Mustn’t act like a child. He loved the building and the fountain and those kids and the floor of this office and old Woody and the view of College Avenue, and if there were things you had to do, then there were things you had to do. So he would wait. He looked down, and noticed a boy sitting alone on a stone bench, and almost at the same time saw a lone girl on the bench across from him, on the far side of the fountain. He pointed.

–Ah– Woody said. He smiled.

Something stirred in Locke’s mind, a fragment of times long past, a wisp of something tender and golden and irrecoverable. He could not remember. But he saw the boy looking across at the girl, and the girl looking away, and he knew that the boy should come across the fountain and speak. Woody knew it too. They waited. The boy got up, and put his hands in his pockets, and sat down again. They were alone in the circle now, the blue fountain between them.

–Five bucks he doesn’t talk to her– said Woody Southall, the cynic.

–Oh yes he will.–

But the boy waited. The girl sat swinging a leg. It was growing darker very fast.

–Go on, boy, dammit– Woody said– she’s waiting, she’s waiting.– The girl arose slowly. She walked around the fountain and down the path to the west,