“Oh,” she says, “the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It’s a woman who changed her mind afterward.”

“Watch how you talk in front of the kid.”

“He knows more now than you ever will. That’s nothing personal, Harry, it’s just a fact. People are more sophisticated now than when you were a boy.”

“How about when you were a girl?”

“I was very dumb and innocent, I admit it.”

“But?”

“But nothing.”

“I thought you were going to tell us how wise you are now.”

“I’m not wise, but at least I’ve tried to keep my mind open.”

Nelson, walking a little ahead of them but hearing too much anyway, points to the great Sunflower Beer clock on Weiser Square, which they can see across slate rooftops and a block of rubble on its way to being yet another parking lot. “It’s twenty after six,” he says. He adds, not certain his point was made, “At Burger Bliss they serve you right away, it’s neat, they keep them warm in a big oven that glows purple.”

“No Burger Bliss for you, baby,” Harry says. “Try Pizza Paradise.”

“Don’t be ignorant,” Janice says, “pizza is purely Italian.” To Nelson she says, “We have plenty of time, there won’t be anybody there this early.”

“Where is it?” he asks.

“Right here,” she says; she has led them without error.

The place is a brick row house, its red bricks painted oxblood red in the Brewer manner. A small un-neon sign advertises it, The Taverna. They walk up sandstone steps to the doorway, and a motherly mustached woman greets them, shows them into what once was a front parlor, now broken through to the room beyond, the kitchen behind swinging doors beyond that. A few center tables. Booths along the two walls. White walls bare but for some picture of an oval-faced yellow woman and baby with a candle flickering in front of it. Janice slides into one side of a booth and Nelson into the other and Harry, forced to choose, slides in beside Nelson, to help him with the menu, to find something on it enough like a hamburger. The tablecloth is a red checked cloth and the daisies in a blue glass vase are real flowers, soft, Harry notices, touching them. Janice was right. The place is nice. The only music is a radio playing in the kitchen; the only other customers are a couple talking so earnestly they now and then touch hands, immersed in some element where they cannot trust their eyes, the man red in the face as if choking, the woman stricken pale. They are Penn Park types, cool in their clothes, beige and pencil-gray, the right clothes insofar as any clothes can be right in this muggy river-bottom in the middle of July. Their faces have an edgy money look: their brows have that frontal clarity the shambling blurred poor can never duplicate. Though he can never now be one of them Harry likes their being here, in this restaurant so chaste it is chic. Maybe Brewer isn’t as dead on its feet as it seems.