The Moviegoer

would for him. I introduce Kate as my fiancée and she pulls down her mouth. I can’t tell whether it is me she is disgusted with or my business colleagues. But these fellows: so friendly and—? What, dejected? I can’t be sure.
    Kinchen asks me if I am going to be in the Cracker Barrel. He is very nervous: it seems he is program chairman and somebody defected on him. He takes me aside.
    â€œWould you do me a favor? Would you kick off with a ten minute talk on Selling Aids?”
    â€œSure.”
    We shake hands and part good comrades.
    But I have to get out of here, good fellows or no good fellows. Too much fellow feeling makes me nervous, to tell the truth. Another minute and the ballroom will itself grow uneasy. Already the cellophane stove has begun to glow ominously.
    â€œI have to find Harold Graebner,” I tell Kate.
    I grab her hand and slip out and away into the perilous out-of-doors, find the tiniest bar in the busiest block of the Loop. There I see her plain, see plain for the first time since I lay wounded in a ditch and watched an Oriental finch scratching around in the leaves—a quiet little body she is, a tough little city Celt; no, more of a Rachel really, a dark little Rachel bound home to Brooklyn on the IRT. I give her a pat on the leg.
    â€œWhat?” she says, hardly paying attention—she is busy finding Harold’s address on the map and adding up the bar bill. I never noticed how shrewd and parsimonious she is—a true Creole.
    â€œSweet Kate,” say I patting her.
    â€œAll right, let’s go.” But she does not leave immediately. We have six drinks in two bars, catch buses, cross a hundred miles of city blocks, pass in the neighborhood of millions of souls, and come at last to a place called Wilmette which turns out not to be a place at all since it has no genie, where lives Harold Graebner the only soul known to me in the entire Midwest. Him, one soul in five million, we must meet and greet, wish good luck and bid farewell—else we cannot be sure we are here at all—before hopping off again into the maze of a city set down so unaccountably under the great thundering-lonesome Midwestern sky.
    Off the bus and hopping along Wilmette happy as jaybirds, pass within a few feet of noble Midwestern girls with their clear eyes and their splendid butts and never a thought for them. What an experience, Rory, to be free of it for once. Rassled out. What a sickness it is, Rory, this latter-day post-Christian sex. To be pagan it would be one thing, an easement taken easily in a rosy old pagan world; to be Christian it would be another thing, fornication forbidden and not even to be thought of in the new life, and I can see that it need not be thought of if there were such a life. But to be neither pagan nor Christian but this: oh this is a sickness, Rory. For it to be longed after and dreamed of the first twenty years of one’s life, not practiced but not quite prohibited; simply longed after, longed after as a fruit not really forbidden but mock-forbidden and therefore secretly prized, prized first last and always by the cult of the naughty nice wherein everyone is nicer than Christians and naughtier than pagans, wherein there are dreamed not one but two American dreams: of Ozzie and Harriet, nicer-than-Christian folks, and of Tillie and Mac and belly to back.
    We skip on by like jaybirds in July.
    Harold lives in a handsome house in a new suburb back of Wilmette. His father left him a glass business in South Chicago and Harold has actually gotten rich. Every Christmas he sends a card with a picture of his wife and children and a note something like: “Netted better than thirty five thou this year—now ain’t that something?” You would have to know Harold to understand that this is not exactly a boast. It is a piece of cheerful news from a cheerful and simple sort of a fellow who can’t get over his good fortune and who therefore has to tell you about it. “Now ain’t that something, Rollo?” he would say and put up his hands in his baby-claw gesture. I know what he means. Every time American Motors jumps two dollars, I feel the same cheerful and expanding benevolence.
    Since Kate and I can hardly wait to be back on our rambles, we visit with Harold about twenty minutes. As I said before, Harold loves me because he saved my life. I love him because he is a hero. I have a boundless admiration for heroes and