Slowly, assiduously since the age of eighteen I have been accumulating credits in the state university system. I have had many interruptions in my education. Entire epochs of my life seem to have disappeared. I have never been able to attend college full-time and now the State University of New York at Mohawk has accepted me as a transfer student in the School of Social Work with just five more courses before graduation.

In Mohawk, a town of less than twenty thousand inhabitants, I will look for a new way of supporting myself. I will change my hair color to its more natural shade of brown. I will walk the lively little French bulldog along the river at least twice a day and see who it is I will encounter in this territory entirely new to me.

What an adorable little dog! What is his breed? What is his name?

A dog is a disguise I’d never anticipated.

Uncanny

HIM. BUT—WHO?

He was approaching me on the campus walkway. First morning of the fall term.

Facing me, not exactly seeing me. Making his way deftly through loose surges of students moving more slowly along the walkway oblivious of him, his very presence.

A dark-skinned man, young, yet middle-aged. Dignified, self-absorbed, intent upon his destination. His briefcase was a handsome matte beige leather, a relic of another era, clearly heavy. His manner was severe. Something about the sobriety of his bearing and his clothing, the “sport coat” in a muted color that might have been gray, beige, or blue, the fresh-laundered white shirt and dark, dull necktie, made me think he might be an older, foreign-born graduate student. The black plastic-framed eyeglasses and the boxy-shouldered coat suggested a culture other than American and a style very far from fashionable. And no American student, even an older graduate student, would wear a coat and tie, let alone carry a briefcase.

Briskly he passed me. Ascended a flight of steps, disappeared into a sandstone building.

At the foot of the steps I stood staring after him. A sensation of terrible yearning came over me, to follow him up the steps . . . The uncanny sensation that you know who someone is, unmistakably you recognize the face, that’s to say the essence of the face, the (unique) face you’d known in a previous lifetime except now in the confusion of the moment, in the excited leap of your blood, you are unable to recall who this person is, or was.

Yet, I was not sure that I wanted him to see me. I was not sure that I wanted to be forced to recall how this person and I knew each other.

It should not have been surprising to me that I might encounter people here in Mohawk whom I’d known years ago in Port Oriskany and in South Niagara. Often in Catamount Falls I’d encountered former classmates whose company I avoided, for I did not want to recall exactly how they knew me, and what they knew of me and my family—Kerrigans.