“If you don’t act now, you’ll be thinking about it the rest of your life. You’ve got to help, if you ever want another good night’s sleep. Suppose a year from now, five years, you realize you should have helped and you didn’t—wouldn’t that be unbearable?”

“God,” he says, “you’re pushy. You’re holding a gun to my head.”

Precisely what I intended—either that or slipping off the bottom of the page. Honor, dignity, pride, and all the other trappings of grace and heroism were no longer luxuries I could afford. I’d have to live with ignobility, at least for the moment, if I were to live at all.

“It’s a matter of preservation,” I plunge on, citing, as most men do, both truth and falsehood. “Yours as well as mine. If you don’t send those wires…”

“I told you I’ll think about it,” he mumbles. His chin hangs. His eyes droop. He has dried up. So far as I can see, the subject is dead.

Gorelik carefully grinds out his cigarette under a heel and says, “Excuse him. But there is nothing to be done.”

NINETEEN
A DAUGHTER OF THE WILLIWAW

Chatterton wanted to see me before I left the jute mill forever. I knocked on his door; he ushered me in for our last (and first and only) supper together. On his desk were two stoups of Campbell’s borscht, half a loaf of sliced white bread, and, befitting the festive occasion, a fresh tin of peanuts.

“You’ve been like a son to me,” he said, unclearly, because his mouth was clogged with goobers, “so what I’m going to tell you will, I hope, be interpreted as it is intended—for your own good.”

“Of course.”

“Of course. You know by now how reluctant I am to dispraise anyone, but I must try to be helpful.”

“Please tell me.” And get it over with, I was tempted to add, there being no convenient escape hatch available.

Popping peanuts, he settled back in his chair, like some great old dugong munching on lily pods. “The best advice is always the least heeded,” he reflected, “especially by the young.”

I said nothing.

“You’re just a chicken…” he plowed on.

“I’m not all that young.”

“…with its head cut off. Clucking aimlessly from one barnyard to another. You must find your métier and stick to it like grim death.”

Good point.

“If you were to return to university, you’d never be more than a… a limp-wristed scholiast.”

“I have no intention of returning.” Damned if I’d become an academic tramp like my father.

“What then?”

What then, indeed? “What are you going to do?” I said, switching the spotlight. “How long can your project last without funds?”