Friend of My Youth

to the mill.’ I always thought,” he says, interrupting himself, “that that song came from that movie.”
    Barbara continues singing. “ ‘To make a coffin of pine, for that sweetheart of mine.’ ” Then she says, “Don’t be squeamish.”
    “I wasn’t,” says Murray. “I forgot what came next.”
    “Don’t come and sit in the waiting room. It’s awful. Go down to the beach and wait for me. I’ll come down the Sunset Steps.”
    They have to drive past the farm where Beatrice Sawicky used to keep horses. At one time she had a riding school. That didn’t last very long. She boarded horses then, and she must have made a living out of that, because she kept at it, she stayed there, until four or five years ago, when she sold out and, presumably, moved away. They didn’t know where she would go;they had seen her a few times in town but never talked to her. When they used to drive past, and saw the horses in the fields, one or the other of them would say, “I wonder what happened to Victor.” Not every time they passed, but about once a year, one of them would say that, and the other would answer, “God knows,” or something of the sort. But they haven’t bothered saying it since Beatrice and the horses left.
    The first time that Victor Sawicky came into the store, he scattered the clerks—so Murray said to Barbara—like a cat among the pigeons. And, in fact, many of the clerks whom Murray had inherited with the store did look like pigeons—they were gray-haired maiden ladies whom maidenhood had not kept from growing stout and bosomy. It was easy to imagine a clammy dew of alarm between those bosoms at the sight of Victor. One of the women came pattering up the ramp to Murray’s little office to tell him that there was a foreigner and that none of them could make out what it was he wanted.
    He wanted work clothes. It wasn’t so difficult to tell what he was saying. (After all, he had lived for several years in England.) It was not the Polish accent that dismayed the clerks in Zeigler’s store, it was Victor’s looks. Murray put Victor immediately into the same class of human beings as Barbara, but of the two he found Victor far the more splendid and disturbing. He had been able to look at Barbara and think, That is a rare girl. But she was still a girl, and he wanted to sleep with her. (He had been married to her now for seven years.) Victor drew his attention as a sleek and princely animal might—say, a golden palomino, bold but high-strung, shy about the stir he created. You’d try to say something soothing but deferential and stroke his shining neck, if he’d let you.
    Murray said, “Work clothes.”
    Victor was tall and light-boned and looked polished. In the coffee shop of the British Exchange Hotel, where he and Murraygot in the habit of going, a waitress said to him one day, “You mind telling me? Because we kind of have a bet going on? How tall are you?”
    “I am six feet and five inches,” said Victor.
    “Is that all? We had you going up as high as seven feet.”
    His skin was a pale-olive color, his hair a dark blond, his eyes a light, bright blue. The eyes protruded a little, and the eyelids never lifted quite all the way. His teeth were large and stained, like his fingers, from nicotine. He smoked all the time. He was smoking while he gave his puzzled consideration to the overalls in Zeigler’s store. They were all too short in the legs.
    He said that he and his wife, who was English, had bought a farm just on the edge of town. Murray wanted to talk to him without the clerks hanging around in amazement, so he took him along the street, for the first time, to the British Exchange. He knew the farm Victor was talking about, and he didn’t think much of it. But Victor said that they were not intending to farm it. They were going to keep horses and run a riding school. Victor asked Murray’s opinion about whether or not this would be a success. Were there enough little rich girls around? “I think if you have a riding school you must have the little rich girls. They are the ones for the horse riding.”
    “You could advertise in the city papers, and they could come in the summers,” Murray said.
    “Of course. To the camp. To the horse camp. Here and in the United States they always go in summer to the camp, isn’t that so?”
    Victor seemed delighted with this idea. Everything was absurd to him, everything acceptable. The winters—is it true that there is frost