The old man flopped into the chair and with an imperious gesture assigned the couch to me. He planted his elbows on the chess table, forearms slanting upward, making a steeple with his hands. He favored me with a meager smile.

“Armbruster,” he began, “has told me quite a bit about you. Recommended you highly.”

I tried not to register surprise.

“I can understand why—your being so removed from the usual run of doctoral candidates.”

True. But why would he consider my ineptitude an asset? What had Armbruster told him? I figured I’d find out soon enough, any minute now, if I just let him rave on.

“I refer of course to your maturity…”

Me? Mature? I rearranged my face into a saint’s mask of huckdummy humility, a violet by a mossy stone, in Wordsworth’s lapidary phrase, half-hidden from the eye. A conspiratorial hush descended on the fuggy, frostbitten room, profaned by the disintegrating smell of meals. Indeed, we were conspirators; of all the world’s burgeoning population of six billion souls, only we two shared an awareness of my maturity.

“…your zeal to face life’s rough and tumble, your ardor to accept the responsibilities of adulthood is hardly congruent with the aspirations of most graduate students…” He shook his head of disagreeable hair. “I need not tell you,” he deplored, sinking to paralipsis, “that there resides in almost every one of ’em the unconscious desire not to grow up. For once the academic goal is attained and the doctorate irradicably abbreviated after the name, the problem of facing the world is confronted. The subtlest, most unremitting drive of the student is his unconscious proclivity to postpone the acceptance of responsibility as long as possible.”

I said nothing; my lack of response seemed to bother him.

“I don’t seem to have your rapt attention,” he said crustily. “Aren’t you listening?”

I was listening intently, not to him but for some little manifestation of her presence. I strained to the trill of the fipple flute, no more than a memory, lost beyond the portal that confined me in this black hole with her father. Somewhere she was in that misshapen house, in a quiet room made luminous by her magic, her long, gracile fingers curved around the stem of the flute. I saw before me the mirage of happiness. Reverie soared on gossamer wings.

“Well,” Chatterton was saying, “that’s not my way.” He stared at me belligerently, like a big old bison staking out his claim to a patch of prairie. Perhaps he thought I was toying with the notion of refuting him—saying something nice about the fellowship of graduate students.

“What is your way? What do you do here?”

“You might say we practice good citizenship.”

“‘We’?”