first day I worked for
Park & Tilford. I had a
steamer basket to deliv-
er — a real expensive one
— and I went to the
wrong door. Upstairs in-
stead of downstairs. I'm
always pulling boners
like that. Talk about high
class." Ira grinned,
scratched. "It wasn't the
champagne I could see
the butler serving, and
the maids — you know,
the dough. I came away
thinking what they were
was more than money.
Class."
Larry regarded him
with his soft gaze, his
brown eyes appreciative;
then he shook his head.
"You've got some won-
derful stories."
"Yeah?"
"You make everything
so graphic, it's really fas-
cinating."
that. Was that what he himself disliked
about them, without knowing why? Them,
his relatives, Pop too. His Jewish interim
friends on the street, who shot pool, pa-
tronized the delicatessen after the movies,
ate pastrami sandwiches and drank celery
tonic. Middle class. That was their ambi-
tion: success. Boy. And Billy's father, the
engineer? Wasn't he middle class? So what
about Farley's father, the undertaker? Ira
uttered a short helpless laugh as the train
moved on again. "Jesus, there's so much I
don't know."
Larry looked at him inquiringly.
"I mean, you said middle class. Every-
one wants to be in the middle class. Every-
body I know wants to be in the middle class.
My mother wants to be in the middle class."
"That's the.trouble."
"Why?"
"That's exactly what I'm trying to escape.
Middle-class standards. Middle-class val-
ues. That's why I write, I think, why I've
been writing, trying to write poems, ever
since I attended Ethical Culture. Even be-
fore I began going to high school."
"But you're going to be a dentist."
"There's nothing wrong with assuring
myself of leisure, you know what I mean?
Of decent surroundings. But I don't have
to think the way the middle class does. And
I don't think the way they do. I know it. I
don't value the things they value. I have
other values, to me much more important,
values most of them don't have the vaguest
ideas about. Poetry. Art. Theater."
"You're way over my head." Ira grinned,
sighed without knowing why. "Yeah."
"Wait till you meet my family, you'll
understand."
"But you love them? Don't they know
you're writing poems that are sort of
against what they — they believe in?"
"Not against that exactly. Just free of it.
Of course, I don't think they always under-
stand. And when they do, well, that's just
a youthful phase, as far as they're con-
cerned. They can't think of lyrics beyond
the kind they would hear in Rose Marie or
Indian Love Call or some other musical
comedy hit on Broadway. Maybe not my
sisters so much. My brother and my par-
ents are terribly conventional."
Conventional. There was another inert
term suddenly come to life, emerging from
the abstract, and becoming troublesome.
He wasn't used to that kind of thinking:
categories, that was it. The classes that
people belonged to. And people who were
conventional. In Billy's America nobody
worried about that. He never once heard
Billy mention anything like that around a
campfire, or while they toted guns to a ri-
fle match. Too intangible. Billy never said
anything about society. "Hell, I know!" Ira
burst out. "I know what you mean. 'Class,'
you were saying. I don't mean middle class.
Not classy. Class. I get the idea."
"Now you know what I mean by social
climbers."
"Yeah. When you talked about society,
I just thought of a party I barged into the
That was enough. Ira
scrolled the pages down.
No, the El ride, the jour-
ney, couldn't contain any
more, anyway ought not
to. Maybe interesting
stuff, but a plethora. Then
what? Delete? All that fol-
lowed? What a shame. He
sat, quietly, soberly, with
hands cradled in lap,
pondering. How to rescue
it, where to interlard or
append it? The monitor
indicated the RAM was
already 60 percent of ca-
pacity, and he was jittery
about going any higher. Exceeding 60 per-
cent by too much, he had difficulties once
or twice in retrieving the document, at least
from a floppy disk, though it was true he
had a hard disk to fall back on. But actu-
ally his worries were groundless. Fiona, his
secretary, expert in these matters, could be
depended on to rescue him. Ah, yes.
Had he taken his second diuretic tablet,
his furosimide, as its generic name went?
Had he? When he took his luncheon cup
of tea? No, he hadn't. He had forgotten to.
Still, he had been sitting here a long time,
and he had to urinate. Well, there was the
urinal hanging in this three-wheel walker.
He could use that. Not take any chances
of mishap during the trek to the bathroom
in his bedroom. Better save right now, and
get up and answer the call of nature forth-
with. No chance of embarrassment either,
right now, using the urinal. Diane, his
housekeeper, was away; she had gone to