“She was a white girl. I had vivid memories of Amsterdam Avenue. In those days I’d sooner have slit my throat.”

“And now?”

“Now?” For years the little French girl had been a principal figure in his sexual and social fantasies. Repeatedly he had asked himself what might have happened if he had stayed, come really to know her, courted her, done the marriage thing with her, become a European. At times the lost dream had made him numb with longing and regret; most of the time, however, he decided that the result would have been disaster. The lovely young girl probably would have grown into a shrewish woman, the people would in time have lost their color blindness, the snake would have wriggled his way into Eden. “Now . . . I think you ask too damned many questions,” he said.

He asked her to have dinner with him and she refused. “My parents are expecting me.”

“I’ll drive you home.”

“It’s too far,” she said, but he insisted. She laughed when she saw the wagon-bus. “You’re not a musician. You’re some kind of delivery boy.”

“A band leader is a delivery boy. You transport a bass player, a couple of horns, a wailer and a cat lugging a whole set of drums.”

She was silent.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“You act afraid.”

“How do I know who you are?” she burst out. “A man I allowed to pick me up at a public beach. You could be a pusher. You could be lots worse.”

His laughter spilled out. “I’m a beachcomber,” he said. “I’m going to take you to a desert island and plait frangipani into your hair.” He almost told her about the medical thing then and there but he was enjoying himself and his amusement was spontaneous enough to reassure her; her mood changed and she became voluble and almost gay. He was deriving kicks just being with her and before he knew it the Volks was lumbering off the Massachusetts Turnpike at a place called Natick. The house was only a couple of minutes from the toll road, a painfully-neat bungalow of weathered shingles in an otherwise-white neighborhood. The mother was thin and spare, with sharp features that hinted at long-forgotten white rape. The father was a brown and quiet man who looked as though he spent his spare hours manicuring lawn, snipping hedge, casting anxious glances of comparison at nearby Anglo-Saxon and Semitic lawns and shrubs.

The parents shook his hand uncertainly but were plainly pleased that the girl had brought someone home. There was a child, a three-year-old named Marion with kinky black hair and café-au-lait skin. He found himself involuntarily looking from one face to the other, noting the duplicated features.

Her child, he told himself.

Mrs. Williams had a finely-tuned native perception. “We call her Midge,” she said. “Because she’s so small, you know. The daughter of my youngest, Janet.”