We took the ice cream back to his apartment. Coming up the steps, we met Gloria on her way to the incinerator. The look she gave me would have wilted a nun, but nothing short of an earthquake could have altered my course.

He spooned my ice cream into a dish and ate his from the container. Gospel music was playing on his transistor radio, and the flame of the candle seemed to flicker with the voices. The barrenness of the room, which I had found unpleasant earlier, now seemed comforting.

“How did you happen to go into Asian-African Studies?”

He shrugged. “I guess because so much of their history has yet to be made. Right now they’re the world’s underdogs, and underdogs are always interesting to watch, if just to see which way they’ll go— Look, I don’t want to bore you.”

“You’re safe until I yawn.”

He laughed. Out loud. Very good, I thought. You’re making some progress. What he didn’t know was that he could have read me the Betty Crocker cookbook, for all I cared. At least he was talking.

There was a storytelling lilt to his voice as he enumerated historical examples of underdogs turned top dogs. He talked about turnabouts in national identities, the role of chance in determining world powers. What really impressed me was that he did not sound academic or pedantic. History, it seemed, was a very personal matter to him.

“History,” he said, “has always proven one cliché: After you get what you want, you don’t want it. It’ll be interesting to see what Asia and Africa give up as they try to catch up—what they give up willingly and what they give up unknowingly. Look at Japan. Someday they’ll put all their chopsticks in museums and pick up the plastic fork.” He pressed his palms together and bowed. “Ah so. End of honorable and pompous lecture.”

“What inspired this interest in the underdog?”

He hesitated, scraping the bottom of the ice cream container. “I guess most of my life I was pretty much the underdog.”

“In what way?”

“I was raised in a small town, where your name sums you up. There were two rock-bottom families, us and the Hooples. Old Man Hoople was a drunk and eventually went to prison. None of the Hoople kids except one made it beyond the tenth grade. But we were considered respectably poor because my father always worked. Most people pitied us, but they had contempt for the Hooples. Even my mother. If any of us complained about something we didn’t have, she’d say, ‘Just be glad you ain’t a Hoople.’ She spent half the day reading the Bible, but she pulled rank on the Hooples every chance she got. She was too ignorant to see that what she was doing to them, everyone else was doing to us: clustering us under one name as if we’d all been stamped out of some inferior mold. She didn’t know there was one Hoople she could never pull rank on.” He stared wistfully into the flame of the candle between us. “Wanda Hoople,” he said softly, as though caressing the name. “I haven’t thought about her in years. Not until yesterday. It hit me when I was holding that stick out for Larry to grab. Suddenly I wished I’d done the same for Wanda.”