【正文】 said her husband. 39。Are you a friend of his?39。e to meet him in a hotel lobby, rather than at his empty, available apartment. The morality of the invitation was by no means out of character, but it interested me, mildly, noheless. 39。s always those kind of people that get hurt in the end.... Anyway, so she gets dressed and gets in a cab and sits in some horrible lobby talking with him till quarter to five in the morning.39。s poor father had to take his place, just because his crazy plane couldn39。t even met him. The first I39。You can39。 She spoke with increasing aplomb, as though perceiving that, cued by her husband, the rest of us within earshot were finding something attractively forthright spunky about her sense of justice, however youthful or impractical it might be. 39。d39。No. They39。All right, now, take it easy, take it easy,39。 he said, addressing Mrs Silsburn and giving another soft, public chuckle. In automatic deference to his rank, I very nearly chuckled right along with him a short, inane, stranger39。 said a chuckling male voice. And Mrs Silsburn and I turned around again. It was the Matron of Honor39。d better not say you39。Are you a friend of the bride39。s boy. Around the mouth. I tried to show by my expression that it was a mistake anybody could make. Then I went on staring at the back of the driver39。s notion that I was getting a strep throat. I sat surreptitiously curling back my tongue and exploring the suspected ailing part. I was staring, as I remember, directly in front of me, at the back of the driver39。 and 39。s parting but markedly crisp suggestion, I found myself stationed at the curb, directly at the mouth of the canvas canopy, attending to helping people into cars. How I had been singled out to fill this post deserves some small speculation. So far as I know, the unidentified, middleaged man of action who had picked me for the job hadn39。t quite go without saying, however, that the cars were to be 39。. I remember a little dispersed band of unfamiliar faces that surreptitiously turned around, now and then, to sec who was coughing. And I remember that the woman at my right addressed me once again, in the same rather festive whisper. 39。m Helen Silsburn!39。s39。m going to wire Walt, but I think he39。t. I mean it. Mother and Daddy can39。t actually know that she39。t think I39。re the children of vaudevillians, a sect not usually antipathetic to publicity, but my mother had once read a magazine article on the little crosses professional children are obliged to bear their estrangement from normal, presumably desirable society and she took an iron stand on the issue, and never, never wavered. (This is not the time at all to go into the question of whether most, or all, 39。. At one time or another, I night well bring in here or, rather, in one year or another all the children in our family have been weekly hired39。t been able to think of anybody whom I39。 he cried. 39。Oh, it is a duncolored mare,39。A good horse can be picked out by its general build and appearance. But the superlative horse one that raises no dust and leaves no tracks is something evanescent and fleeting, elusive as thin air. The talents of my sons lie on a lower plane altogether。s sake,39。 He went over in the dark to a bookcase and beamed the flashlight slowly back and forth along the stacks. I sat up in bed. 39。s crying wakened me. I lay in a still, neutral position for a few minutes, listening to the racket, till I heard, or felt, Seymour stir in the bed next to mine. In those days, we kept a flashlight on the night table between us, for emergencies that, as far as I remember, never arose. Seymour turned it on and got out of bed. 39。 Seymour said. 39。 Seymour said, and took down a book. 39。 The story Seymour read to Franny that night, by flashlight, was a favorite of his, a Taoist tale. To this day, Franny swears that she remembers Seymour reading it to her: Duke Mu of Chin said to Po Lo: 39。 he added.39。s color or sex! What oil earth can he know about horses?39。m in possession of the fact, I feel I must mention that the bridegroom is now, in 1955, no longer living. He mitted suicide in 1948, while he was on vacation in Florida with his wife.... Undoubtedly, though, what I39。s radio quiz program called, with perhaps typically pungent CoasttoCoast irony, 39。. Seymour and I were the first to appear on the show, back in 1927, at the respective ages often and eight, in the days when the program 39。s a Wise Child39。t be there. I may be gone for anywhere from six weeks to two months on this trip. I39。s all I know except that you39。s house on 63rd. Some judge is marrying them. I don39。s campaign to get permission to attend the wedding. I was finally able to do it by laboriously ingratiating myself with my pany mander, a bookish man by his own confession, whose favorite author, as luck had it, happened to be my favorite author L. Manning Vines. Or Hinds. Despite this spiritual bond between us, the most I could wangle out of him was a threeday pass, which would, at best, give me just enough time to travel by train to New York, sec the wedding, bolt a dinner somewhere, and then return damply to Geia. All situp coaches on trains in 1942 were only nominally ventilated, as I remember, abounded 3 with , and smelled of orange juice, milk, and rye whiskey. I spent the night coughing and reading a copy of Ace Comics that someone was kind enough to lend me. When the train pulled into New York at ten after two on the afternoon of the wedding I was coughed out, generally exhausted, perspiring, unpressed, and my adhesive tape was itching hellishly. New York itself was indescribably hot. I had no time to go to my apartment first, so I left my luggage, which consisted of a rather oppressivelooking little canvas zipper bag, in one of those steel boxes at Penn Station. To make things still more provocative, as I was wandering around in the garment district trying to f