After that, Avrum would often call me Whitman’s Child and he would say of himself, “But I am Whitman’s Old Man.”

And in his way of making logic fit his purpose, Avrum reasoned that only certain people were capable of being Whitman’s Child. “Too many want to take, but not to leave,” he would pontificate. “And what would they know if something good happened to them? Nothing. They would know nothing.”

It was the discovery of Whitman’s poem that encouraged Avrum to begin talking to me seriously about Amy. He insisted that it was not coincidental that I had traveled to the Catskills from a farm in Georgia to meet him and a Jewish girl from New York City. It was intended, just as it was intended that he would hear Amelita Galli-Curci at the Lexington Opera House. “Listen to yourself,” he would urge. “Do not listen to others. I know you. You are like me. Listen to the voice. It will tell you. This Amy, she is for you.”

I did not tell Amy or Carter or anyone about Whitman’s Child. I believed the story would have amused them. Or, perhaps, it would have frightened them as, in moments, it frightened me.

Only Harry Burger seemed to understand what Avrum was saying to me. I could sense Harry’s concern, could see it in the worried way he watched me. Occasionally, after I had spent time with Avrum, Harry would whisper to me in the dining room, “Take care, take care. Avrum, he likes to pull the strings. When you are old, the strings have all been pulled away. Not so, when you are young. The strings are many when you are young.”

At the end of the summer, on the day that he left the Pine Hill Inn to return to his home on Long Island, Harry took me aside. He said, “Go live your own life, Bobo Murphy. Live it without Avrum. When you leave for your Georgia, leave him on his bench. Leave him with his music. He is a dreamer and sometimes dreamers can be selfish. They want everyone to dream their dreams.”

’But I thought he was your friend,” I said.

“Ah, friend. Yes, yes, he is,” Harry murmured. “And he is your friend, but friends are not always right. When they are wrong, you forgive them. When they are right, you love them.”

“I guess so,” I said.