Friend of My Youth

verandas. It is hard to find anybody who is not in favor of shade trees and general stores, pumps, barns, swings, nooks and crannies. But Murray himself can’t quite recall the pleasure he took in these things, or find much shelter.
    When he has walked beyond the end of the boardwalk to where the cedar trees crowd onto the beach, he sits on a boulder. First he noticed what a strange, beautiful boulder this was, witha line through it as if it had been split diagonally and the halves fitted together again not quite accurately—the pattern was jagged. He knew enough geology to understand that the line was a fault, and that the boulder must have come from the Precambrian shield that was a hundred miles away from here. It was rock formed before the last Ice Age; it was far older than the shore on which it sat. Look at the way it had been folded, as well as split—the layer on top hardened in waves like lapping cream.
    He stopped being interested in the boulder and sat down on it. Now he sits looking at the lake. A line of turquoise blue at the horizon, fine as if drawn with turquoise ink, then a clear blue to the breakwater, shading into waves of green and silver breaking on the sand. La Mer Douce the French had called this lake. But of course it could change color in an hour; it could turn ugly, according to the wind and what was stirred up from the bottom.
    People will sit and watch the lake as they’d never watch a field of waving grass or grain. Why is that, when the motion is the same? It must be the washing away, the wearing away, that compels them. The water all the time returning—eating, altering, the shore.
    A similar thing happens to a person dying that kind of death. He has seen his father, he has seen others. A washing away, a vanishing—one fine layer after another down to the lighted bone.
    He isn’t looking in that direction, but he knows when Barbara comes into sight. He turns and sees her at the top of the steps. Tall Barbara, in her fall wrap of handwoven wheat-colored wool, starting down with no particular hurry or hesitation, not holding on to the rail—her usual deliberate yet indifferent air. He can’t tell anything from the way she moves.
    When Barbara opened the back door, her hair was wet from the rain—stringy—and her satin blouse ruinously spotted.
    “What are you doing?” she said. “What are you drinking? Is that straight gin?”
    Then Murray said what neither of them ever mentioned or forgot. “Didn’t he want you?” he said.
    Barbara came over to the table and pushed his head against the wet satin and the cruel little buttons, pushed it mercilessly between her hard breasts. “We are never going to talk about it,” she said. “We never will. O.K.?” He could smell the cigarette smoke on her now, and the smell of the foreign skin. She held him till he echoed her.
    “O.K.”
    And she held to what she’d said, even when he told her that Victor had gone away on the morning bus and had left a note addressed to both of them. She didn’t ask to see or touch the note, she didn’t ask what was in it.
    (“I am full of gratitude and now I have enough money that I think it is time for me to follow my life elsewhere. I think of going to Montreal where I will enjoy speaking French.”)
    At the bottom of the steps Barbara bends down and picks up something white. She and Murray walk toward each other along the boardwalk, and in a minute Murray can see what it is: a white balloon, looking somewhat weakened and puckered.
    “Look at this,” Barbara says as she comes up to him. She reads from a card attached to the string of the balloon. “ ‘Anthony Burler. Twelve years old. Joliet Elementary School. Crompton, Illinois. October 15th.’ That’s three days ago. Could it have flown over here in just three days?
    “I’m O.K.,” she says then. “It wasn’t anything. It wasn’t anything bad. There isn’t anything to worry about.”
    “No,” says Murray. He holds her arms, he breathes the leafy, kitchen smell of her black-and-white hair.
    “Are you shaking?” she says.
    He doesn’t think that he is.
    Easily, without guilt, in the long-married way, he cancels out the message that flashed out when he saw her at the top of the steps:
Don’t disappoint me again
.
    He looks at the card in her hand and says, “There’s more. ‘Favorite book—
The Last of the Mohicans
.’ ”
    “Oh, that’s for the teacher,” Barbara says, with the familiar little snort of laughter in