Across Boylston Street voices were raised in song and laughter, and car doors slammed.

“That’s the Playboy Club,” Spurgeon said. “Lots of dicty broads with cottontails on their ass.”

Calvin nodded. “I’ve been to the one in New York,” he said. “But thanks for the definition.”

“It’s hard for me to put into words,” Spurgeon said.

“I think it’s time you did,” Calvin said. “I couldn’t love you any more if I was your flesh-and-blood daddy. You know that.”

Spurgeon nodded.

“You never in your life asked me for anything. Not even when you were a kid.”

“You always gave things to me before I could ask. You know what Rap Brown and Stokely have been saying about whitey cutting our balls off?”

Calvin looked at him and nodded.

“Well, it’s something like that.”

“I cut off your balls?” Calvin said faintly.

“No, no, that’s not what I mean at all. Look, you saved my life. Everywhere I look, I see that. You saved my life.”

“I’m not a lifeguard. I want to be your father.”

“Then listen to what I’m saying. And try to understand. You’re a special guy. Letting you do things for me for the rest of my life would be easy. Like drowning.”

Calvin looked at him hard and nodded. “Yes. I can see that.”

“Let me be a man, Calvin. Offer me no more help.”

Calvin still looked at him. “You’ll telephone your mother? You’ll come home when you get a chance?”

Spurgeon smiled and nodded.

“And if you ever need me—really need my help—you’ll ask? As if I were your blood father?”

“I promise.”

“What would you have done if they had hated me?” Dorothy asked him a few days after Roe-Ellen and Calvin went back to New York.

“They didn’t hate you.”

“But if they had?”

“You know,” he said.

Without the necessity of many words an understanding of interdependence had grown between them, but he found it increasingly difficult to treat her as though they were adolescents, a difficulty compounded by the fact that they were seeing a great deal of Adam Silverstone and Gaby Pender, who were so obviously reveling in fleshly pleasure he sometimes felt like a voyeur in their presence.