“Haven’t you ever been in the locker room of a Y.M.C.A.?”

She smiled and shook her head.

“Well, he hands out the towels, of course. And among other things he pushes the little buzzer that lets people into the pool. Every day after I got out of school and delivered my Pittsburgh Press route I’d walk over to Whitfield Street and Vito would let me into the swimming pool. When finally they caught on that I wasn’t paying dues, everybody had gotten to know me and they gave me a Newsboy Club scholarship. A great ‘Y’ coach named Jack Adams took me in hand and I was a fancy diver by the time I was twelve. I dove so much I picked up an ear infection and that’s why sometimes now I have trouble hearing.”

“I never noticed. You’re deaf?”

“Only very slightly, on the left side. Just enough to keep me out of the army.”

She touched his ear. “Poor Adam. Did it bother you a lot when you were growing up?”

“Not really. As a diver I represented the ‘Y’ and my high school, and I got through four years of Pitt on a full athletic scholarship as a member of the swimming team. Living high off the hog. Then my first year in medical school I found myself suddenly poor again. To get enough money for food and a bed I picked up and delivered clothing at all the dorms for a dry cleaner every morning. Every evening I covered the same route with a carton of sandwiches.”

“I wish I had known you then,” she said.

“I wouldn’t have had time to talk to you. After a while I had to drop both the cleaning service and the sandwich route, school was too demanding. For two terms I worked in a hash house for my meals and borrowed from the university for my room. That first summer I worked as a waiter at a hotel in the Poconos. I had an affair with one of the guests, a wealthy Greek woman who was married to a man who wouldn’t divorce her, the president of a chain of specialty stores. She lived in Drexel Hill, not far from where I went to school in Philadelphia. I saw her all the time, for almost a year.”

She sat and listened.

“It wasn’t only that we had an affair. Sometimes she gave me money. I didn’t have to work. She’d call me on the telephone and I would come to her house and afterwards she often tucked a bill into my pocket. A large bill.”

Her head was turned away from him. “Stop it,” she said.

“Finally I stopped seeing her. I couldn’t stand myself any longer. I got a job shoveling coal, where I really had to sweat for my money, as if to expiate.”