That Mrs Hargraves! She was lonely, and so lost and still proud. One afternoon she took me to her apartment on the top floor. It was like walking into a welldusted tomb. Her husband was dead now, but thirty years ago he had owned a tool shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His picture was on the wall. A splendid man, who neither smoked nor drank, dead of a heart attack; a thin, severe face out of a heavy framed picture, still contemptuous of smoking and drinking. Here was the bed in which he died, a high mahogany four-poster; here were his clothes in the closet and his shoes on the floor, the toes turned upwards from age. Here on the mantel was his shaving mug, he always shaved himself, and his name was Bert. That Bert! Bert, she used to say, why don’t you go to the barber, and Bert would laugh, because he knew he was a better barber than the regular barbers.

Bert always got up at five in the morning. He came from a family of fifteen children. He was handy with tools. He had done all the repair work around the hotel for years. It had taken him three weeks to paint the outside of the building. He used to say he was a better painter than the regular painters. For two hours she talked of Bert, and Lord! how she loved that man, even in death, but he was not dead at all; he was in that apartment, watching over her, protecting her, daring me to hurt her. He frightened me, and made me want to i rush away. We had tea. The tea was old. The sugar was old and lumpish. The tea cups were dusty, and somehow the tea tasted old and the little dried up cookies tasted of death. When I got up to leave, Bert followed me through the door and down the hall, daring me to think cynically of him. For two nights he hounded me, threatened me, even cajoled me in the matter of cigarettes.

I am remembering that kid from Memphis. I never asked his name and he never asked mine. We said ‘Hi’ to one another. He was not there long, a few weeks. His pimpled face was always covered by his long hands when he sat on the front porch of the hotel: every night late he was there; twelve and one and two o’clock, and coming home I would find him rocking back and forth in the wicker chair, his nervous ringers picking at his face, searching his uncut black hair. ‘Hi,’ I would say, and ‘Hi’ he would answer.

The restless dust of Los Angeles fevered him. He was a greater wanderer than myself, and all day long he sought out perverse loves in the parks. But he was so ugly he never found his desire, and the warm nights with low stars and yellow moon tortured him away from his room until the dawn arrived. But one night he talked to me, left me nauseated and unhappy as he revelled in memories of Memphis, Tennessee, where the real people came from, where there were friends and friends. Some day he would leave this hated city, some day he would go back where friendship meant something, and sure enough, he went away and I got a postcard signed ‘Memphis Kid’ from Fort Worth, Texas.