His father was tall and lanky, and tanned from racing his sloop. He had returned from the South Pacific eight years before, drier and harder than Mitch remembered him. They had lost their rapport while his father picked up the shambles of his interrupted practice. But one night in Mitch’s fraternity room they had several quarts of Psi U home-brew, and gradually reached a humming, resonant level of communication they had known long ago, sailing a dinghy on the Bay. The tumor that would kill his dad must already have been sleeping under the thick white shock of hair.

Mitch mentioned Lindy, casually. He almost never spoke of girls to his father.

“Just don’t get married, that’s all.”

“Married? Jesus, she’s only eighteen.”

He knew that his dad saw him as a partner some day. He had no intention of joining him, to become another society doctor in a city full of them, but, thank God, he’d never had to argue that out; his father had died six months later, disappointed that Mitch had married but still thinking he could make medical school.

Just after his drinking session with his dad, Lindy had delivered her hammer blow, smack in the middle of midterms. He had been studying for a biology exam for a week and one evening found himself too stale to go on. He had pried his roommate out of the room and gone to get Lindy. For a quarter of an hour they lay on a straw mat he had got in Japan, watching the Sid Caesar show. As always, they had been unable to keep their hands off each other. Halfway through, he had got up and moved for the set to turn it off. She smiled and her eyes went moist and then she was on her feet and looking up at him strangely out of the gold-flecked eyes.

“Lindy? What’s wrong?”

She had shaken her head silently. He flicked off the TV.

“What is it?” he demanded, pressing her close. “Come on."

She was two months pregnant. She wanted to have the child, was sure it was a girl, hoped it was a girl. But she was scared to tell her father and wanted to finish college. “What’ll I do?”

Not we, I, as if Tony had been immaculately conceived. He knew half a dozen girls her age who would have broken the news in a fit of pseudo-hysteria.

“Kill yourself?” he grinned. His knees went wobbly.

“There’d be an autopsy. He’d find out.”

“You could get married.” His stupid smile felt frozen. In later years, he could only blame the crummy script on Sid Caesar.

“To who ... Whom?”

“We might stick Clem.” Clem was the senior he’d snagged her away from in the first place. “You’re pretty ugly, but your daddy’s rich.”

“Clem’s unfriendly: I’d prefer a friend.”