His story of Amelita Galli-Curci had been Harry’s story, almost verbatim. Yet, in Avrum’s telling it was not the gossip that Harry had tried to make of it; with Avrum, it was real.

“So,” Avrum said. “Do you not remember?”

“I’m not sure,” I told him.

“Then I will say it again.” He opened his eyes and looked at me. “It is very painful to love someone and believe you cannot be with them.”

“Yes, sir, I remember,” I said.

He closed his eyes again. A muscle trembled across his mouth. He licked his lips. A sad smile settled into his slender face.

“Do not be so afraid,” he advised. “That is the only thing that can hurt you. Nothing else.”

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“Do not be so afraid,” he repeated. “I know. Ja, I know.”

After I left Avrum, I went into the dining room, and with the blade of a dinner knife I made the faint imprint of the letter T in the tablecloth beside Amy’s plate.

It was a signal that Amy had devised as a playful game the day following our first movie date in Margaretville— code letters pressed lightly into the tablecloth, like writing with invisible ink, almost indiscernible. The letters would tell me where she wanted to meet at night. T meant the birch tree. A meant Arch’s. S meant the swimming pool. B meant the base of the ski lift on Belleayre Mountain. R meant room, or, to Amy, her room. The R, I told her, would never be used. I was not a fool.

It was a teenage thing of the fifties, the code letters, a kind of flirtation, like the passing of notes in a classroom. Still, in the giddiness of the game, it was as personal and as secret as a kiss.

The first time I saw a letter pressed into the tablecloth beside her plate, it was an R. When I removed her soup bowl, I deliberately scratched through it with my thumbnail and she laughed. Her mother looked at her, and then at me, curiously.

“I’m sorry,” Amy sputtered. “I thought you were about to drop the soup bowl.”

Amy was waiting for me at the birch tree after dinner. She kissed me easily.

“Is anything wrong?” she asked.

“Why did you ask that?” I said.

“You hardly looked at me during dinner.”

I handed her the brochure.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Something somebody left for me after lunch. I found it in my waiter’s jacket.”

She opened it and read it. She did not speak. She folded the brochure into a small, thick square and knelt and took a rock and clawed a hole into the ground. She pushed the wadded brochure into the hole and covered it with dirt and the rock, then she stood and glared at the spot. “Let it rot,” she said bitterly.

“It’s all right, Amy.”