The old man had two sons. One of them, the older, was called Berry-berry.

Berry-berry was known in the neighborhood to be a wild person, with narrow eyes and a cleft chin, who traveled around getting arrested in Covington, Kentucky; Biloxi, Mississippi, and other strange places. The Williamses’ arrival on Seminary Street took place just a month after Berry-berry’s twenty-first birthday, and it was at this age that he began his travels. A bedroom was prepared for him in the new house, but the young man had not even slept in it. His Western Stories were placed on his bookshelf, and his locked cedar chest full of childhood belongings, mostly weapons and tools, was placed at the foot of his bed. But the books were never again opened and the cedar chest was never unlocked. Since the move he had paid certain irregular and surprise visits to Cleveland, and it was on these occasions that the neighbors caught their brief glimpses of him: once, he was seen standing at a second-story window of the house, peeing on the porch roof; and he was known to be responsible for a good deal of door slamming at odd hours of the night. During one particular summer he was often observed arriving and departing in a blue Ford pickup truck; this vehicle might have aroused less speculation had it not been for the fact that, parked right behind it, was a 1929 Dodge touring car, painted a flawless shiny black, with a FOREIGN CONSUL sticker on the windshield. Berry-berry was often seen with the “ambassador” herself, a beautiful woman who wore a variety of large and expensive hats. Actual clues to the nature of his association with this woman were meager, but a number of full-blown tales grew up around them.

In plain fact, the owner of this car was not an ambassador or any other kind of important personage. Her name was Echo O’Brien, she was a receptionist for an insurance company in Toledo, Ohio, and the FOREIGN CONSUL sticker happened to be on the windshield when she first bought the Dodge in a used-car lot. Her part in the story of the Williamses will be told in its proper place. The point is simply this:

There was often a wide and ridiculous difference between what took place in the Williams house and what the people of Seminary Street believed.

Now, the younger son was Clinton.

Clinton Williams was not yet a full-fledged person. He was a small boy with big quick eyes. Angular in body and in manner, uncertain of himself and puzzled by others, he was as graceless as a new bird.

Although these qualities are not unusual in a young person, Clinton was nonetheless the recipient of many deferential smiles on the street; they said he was not quite right, and showed their sympathy by these extra kindnesses. He was of high-school age, but attended no high school or any other school: the boy simply stayed home. As he did not seem to lack intelligence, his truancy was generally held to be a sign of some more sinister defect, perhaps a serious nervous disorder. It was known, for instance, that he occupied himself with the keeping of little notebooks in which he wrote down every word that was said to him or spoken within his hearing. This “nervous habit” became known because such a notebook, marked Number 142 (indicating the existence of at least 141 others), was found at the Aloha Sweet Shop on Mound Road and read by the manager, both clerks, and several customers before Clinton came back the next morning to claim it. He maintained to the manager that it was all part of a “fictitious” book he was writing, but since the manager had found his own name in it, and many of the things he himself had said, the story did not seem to hold water. —From then on, when Clinton passed the Aloha Sweet Shop, he walked on the other side of the street.