Before Berry-berry went away, Clinton gave him a piece of paper with a certain address on it where he could always be reached without the letter becoming a matter of general knowledge to the family. It was the address of a girl named Mildred Murphy, who lived in the Old Neighborhood. She had agreed to act as a secret post office for any messages between the brothers. But after Berry-berry left the house, Clinton had found the piece of paper with the address on it in a pair of trousers that were left behind. This made it fairly certain that Berry-berry had no intention of sending for him.

Besides, he had to admit that his brother had never truly let him in on any important secrets. Even in the Amelia Street days, Berry-berry had kept the meanings of his comings and goings strictly to himself. The old man was careful never to question him on the nature of his absences, whether for an hour or a day or a group of days, and Berry-berry never volunteered anything. Annabel, on the other hand, made it a point to question him closely, and as a result gleaned even less information than anyone else.

Therefore, since Clinton did not have hold of any facts, he was careful not to commit himself to any hard and fast conclusions; but appearances were that Berry-berry Williams had engaged in every kind of debauch ever heard of or imagined. For instance, one night in the old house, the young man, returning from some escapade, had climbed in Clinton’s window at 4:00 A.M. (Because the front door of the place was kept locked, and Berry-berry had never been furnished with a key, he often used Clinton’s window as a means of entrance.) Clinton would wake up and sometimes they would have a conversation. On this particular night that Clinton was remembering, Berry-berry came in giggling from the wine he had drunk, and between his teeth he carried an inflated balloon of great size. He tossed an empty box on the bed, and Clinton saw that the balloon was in fact a blown-up contraceptive. Clinton was twelve then, and naturally had never made use of one of these devices himself; but he knew they came three in a box, and he was eager to know what had become of the other two. But on close questioning of this sort, Berry-berry would only laugh. He dropped his trousers, peed out the window, and sang some crazy song.

Clinton did not know what to believe; he knew there were two schools of thought on the subject of fornication: either it was a widespread custom that took place almost constantly in every parked car and hotel room in the world, or a rare event that almost never occurred—and if it did you were likely to end up in jail or with your name in the paper. In the Old Neighborhood, he had for some time hung around in the back room of a chain grocery store where a friend of his was employed putting potatoes in paper sacks. Conversations among the older male clerks seemed to indicate that the main purpose of life was fornication; whereas, the manager himself, a grown-up married man, had got into the discussion one day and maintained hotly that it was all talk, the only single people who ever engaged in such activities were underprivileged nincompoops and basically non compos mentis, and furthermore, people who handled groceries to be eaten by the general public had no business even thinking about such subjects. Clinton suspected even then that the truth might lie somewhere between these extremes, but he would have liked to get hold of some authoritative information that would settle the matter.