“What about you guys—where are you goin’?” Lucy asked us. I thought she was being a little encouraging. We walked together, east to Lexington Avenue, and along Lexington to East Sixty-fourth Street, to the little Barlows’ pied-à-terre. Lucy had a look at the writing team’s apartment, while Mr. Barlow and I packed up our things and changed our clothes. I had my writing notebooks with me, and all the other stuff I’d brought from Vienna.

I hadn’t noticed that the snowshoer was wearing a bra until we were walking against the wind on Lexington Avenue. The wind whipped the little English teacher’s necktie over his shoulder and pressed his white dress shirt flat against his chest, where I got a glimpse of the bra—only briefly, before the snowshoer clutched his overcoat closer to his chest. The cups of the bra were too small for my mother. Was Mr. Barlow buying his own bras now? I wondered. A training bra, I presumed. At least it was white, I was thinking—a black bra would have been more noticeable under a white dress shirt.

“Lose the bra, Elliot,” I said to him when we were changing our clothes for the train.

“I thought you’d never notice,” the snowshoer said.

“I noticed it, too!” Lucy called to us from the living room.

I felt I had failed to be the snowshoer’s good shepherd. At Zim’s memorial, of all occasions, I had failed to watch out for Mr. Barlow. I’d let the little English teacher pick a fight with a couple of Bonesmen in a bra. What a bad soldier I would have been, I was thinking, as the three of us took a taxi to Penn Station.

“Don’t worry—I’m not goin’ all the way to New Hampshire, but I’ll take a ride to Penn Station,” Lucy had told us.

Our taxi driver was a hippie with a dirty-blond beard and a ponytail tied with a red ribbon. His cab was adorned with peace symbols, and he had a GET OUT OF VIETNAM bumper sticker. All the way to Seventh Avenue, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” was playing on the radio—the old Pete Seeger song, but it was the Peter, Paul and Mary version.

I was also thinking I had failed Francine DeCourcey, Zim’s fiancée. I believed I could have comforted her more—I should have tried harder to reach her in her grief. The song just repeated itself. Peter, Paul and Mary just kept singing. Lucy sang along with them. They were asking where the flowers, the young girls, and the soldiers had gone.

Where has the snowshoer gone—where is he going? I was worrying. Peter, Paul and Mary just sang. Our hippie cab driver was singing, too. The young girls in the song would never learn—that was the message.