She had been annoyed because he was sending Tony back to school against his will. Her pique was silly. Mitch was right, Tony had to finish, and Tony should know it too. She found him packing in his room, miraculously without Nancy. It was the first time all month she had found him alone. He was stuffing socks, shirts, and Levi’s indiscriminately into an orange backpack. He could have got twice the gear into any one of three suitcases in his closet, and he never hiked where he could take a bus or drive, but she supposed that the backpack was as important to him as Mitch’s old Navy duffel bag was to Mitch.

He was red-cheeked and hot-eyed, but only shook his head when she asked what was wrong. She wandered to the window and looked across at Nancy’s bedroom. No wonder the poor kid was so horny: the strip-tease acts that must have gone on here all through his puberty must have been enough to strain the soul of a saint.

“You’d think,” he growled suddenly, “he went through college as a Trappist monk!”

“Mitch?” she chortled. “More like Cyrano de Bergerac.”

“I’ve gathered. But he’s forgotten all that. Didn’t he ever flunk a course, or anything?”

“No.” He looked so disappointed she handed him some ammunition. “He did quit premed for law. And I quit as a sophomore, you knew that?”

“Well, but that was me. Right?”

Her face flamed. “What do you mean?”

He poked a finger through a hole in a ski sock. He tossed it into a wastebasket, with its mate. She retrieved them both, silently, and looked up at him.

He muttered: “Well, you quit because you were pregnant, OK?”

Startled, she started to protest, but changed her mind. He was twenty, it was time he knew. “Yes,” she admitted. She had a happy thought. “Hey, did Mitch tell you?” She would have liked that.

“You’re kidding! No, your wedding picture, in an old Call Bulletin, or Examiner, or whatever. In a scrapbook at Grandad’s apartment, before he moved to the Club. The date was wrong.”

Her father had moved to the Bohemian Club ten years ago, so for at least that long Tony had sat on this one. She wondered if there were other secrets from him that were not secrets at all. “That was pretty sharp, for a ten-year-old,” she suggested.

“To know my own birthday?” he smiled. “Thanks.” He wanted to know if they’d lived together before, and she told him no, hardly anybody did. “He was back from Korea, he still had this kind of drink and be merry aura, tomorrow we die, and, well, I was only eighteen.” Now she was apologizing to her own son.

“So you got married to be polite,” he reflected. “And lived happily ever after.”