The Last Gentleman

along a path, stooped and holding the girl’s head down, turned into a thicket of privet whose bitter bark smelled like the dry rain gutters of his own house. Dark as it was, with no more light than a sinking gibbous moon, it didn’t matter. He knew the southwest quadrant of the park as he knew his own back yard. (Though he could not see them, he knew when he passed the Disney statuettes, could have put out a hand and touched Dopey.)
    The place was down a ravine choked with dogbane and whortleberry and over a tumble of rocks into a tiny amphitheater, a covert so densely shaded that its floor was as bare as cave’s dirt. By day it looked very like the sniper’s den on Little Round Top which Brady photographed six weeks after the battle: the sniper was still there! A skeleton in butternut, his rifle propped peaceably against the rocks.
    He set the police special in the dust beside him and drew Kitty down on the other side. They leaned into the curve of a shallow overhang of smooth rock facing the cleft where they entered. There was no sound of traffic or sight of the lighted windows of the apartment houses along Central Park West, or any sign of the city at all except, when he moved his head slightly, a chink of red sky over 110th Street.
    â€œMy Lord,” said Kitty. “How could anybody find us here? I can’t even see you.” Her fingers brushed clumsily across his face.
    He kissed her with an amiable passion, mainly concerned now to bear with her, serve her anticness as gracefully as he could. He aimed to guard her against her own embarrassment. His nose was no better.
    â€œTo answer your question,” she said softly, “Yes.”
    â€œFine,” he said, nodding in the dark. What question?
    â€œDearest,” she breathed, holding her hand to his cheek with a tenderness that struck dismay to his heart.
    The puzzle is: where does love pitch its tent? in the fine fervor of a summer night, in a jolly dark wood wherein one has a bit o’ fun as the English say? or in this dread tenderness of hers?
    â€œDon’t go away, darling,” she whispered. “I’ll be right back.”
    â€œAll right.”
    She moved away. As he traced a finger in the dust, drawing the old Northern Pacific yin-yang symbol, he heard the rustling of clothes and the singing of zippers. She returned without a sound. He embraced her and was enveloped in turn by the warm epithelial smell of her nakedness. What a treasure, he thought, his heart beating as rapidly and shallowly as a child’s. What suppleness.
    â€œHold me,” whispered Kitty with her dismaying tenderness. “My precious.”
    â€œRight.” Now holding her charms in his arms at last, he wondered if he had ever really calculated the terrific immediacy of it.
    â€œWhy don’t you—” she said.
    â€œWhat? Oh. Pardon,” said the courtly but forgetful engineer and blushed for his own modesty, clad as he was from head to toe in Brooks Brothers’ finest. Making haste to sit up, he began unbutton his shirt.
    â€œNow. Oh, my darling, do you love me?”
    â€œOh yes,” said the engineer, swinging her forty-five degrees in the dust so that he could look past her toward the opening of the covert. The sky was redder. From the same direction there came a faint crepitant sound like crumpled newspaper. The cops and the Negros were shooting it out in Harlem.
    â€œWill you cherish me?”
    â€œYes, certainly,” said the engineer.
    â€œI don’t mean just now. I want to be protected always. I want to be cherished.”
    â€œI will,” he assured her.
    â€œDo you know what matters most of all?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œLove.”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œLove is everything.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œRita asked me what I believed in. I said I believed in love.”
    â€œMe too.”
    â€œBesides which I want to prove something to myself,” said the girl, almost to herself.
    â€œProve what?”
    â€œA little experiment by Kitty for the benefit of Kitty.”
    â€œWhat experiment is that?”
    â€œLet me tell you, there is nothing wrong with Kitty,” she said.
    â€œI didn’t say there was.”
    Holding her, he couldn’t help thinking of Perlmutter, his young fresh-eyed colleague at Macy’s. Though he was from Brooklyn, Perlmutter looked like an Indiana farm boy. Perlmutter spoke of his wife with a lack of reserve,