I built, of blocks, a town three hundred thousand strong, whose avenues were paved with swine-colored rug and decorated by large leaves outlined inappropriately in orange, and on this leafage I’d often park my Tootsie Toy trucks, as if on pads of camouflage, waiting their deployment against catastrophes which included alien invasions, internal treachery, and world war. It was always my intention, and my conceit, to use up, in the town’s construction, every toy I possessed: my electric train, of course, the Lincoln Logs, old kindergarten blocks—their deeply incised letters always a problem—the Erector set, every lead soldier that would stand (broken ones were sent to the hospital), my impressive array of cars, motorcycles, tanks, and trucks—some with trailers, some transporting gas, some tows, some dumps—and my squadrons of planes, my fleet of ships, my big and little guns, an undersized group of parachute people (looking as if one should always imagine them high in the sky, hanging from threads), my silversided submarines, along with assorted RR signs, poles bearing flags, prefab houses with faces pasted in their windows, small boxes of a dozen variously useful kinds, strips of blue cloth for streams and rivers, and glass jars for town water towers, or, in a pinch, jails. In time, the armies, the citizens, even the streets would divide; loyalties, friendships, certainties, would be undermined; the city would be shaken by strife; and marbles would rain down from formerly friendly planes, steeples would topple onto cars, and shellfire would soon throw aggie holes through homes, soldiers would die accompanied by my groans, and ragged bands of refugees would flee toward mountain caves and other chairs and tables.

On Saturdays I would sometimes walk to town down Market Street, lingering in front of the long lawns which lay rolled out like rugs before the Orphans’ Home and the City Hospital, their faintly yellowish, underfertilized grass dotted with dandelions and defined by whitewashed rocks, sprinklers jerking and spewing like pinwheels during the dry days, and the blackbirds and robins stalking between the circles of spray like preachers ignoring a rain. Market Street was made of brick back then, uneven as a turbulent stream, sensuous and beautiful and better than the cars it carried. I’d dawdle near the windows of the pharmacy, which might have trusses or other obscurely obscene devices on display; and when at last I went by the church where Jerry jobbed for Jesus, I’d study the title of the sermon I might have to hear the next day. Across the street there was a small Italian grocery which, I remember, was regarded as intrusive when it first appeared. The owner’s son played football for the high school team, so now it was like passing a place where some local dignitary had made his mark; and tins of olive oil decorated with exotic designs in silver filigree and dark outlining, gold roses and medallions of victory on a pink ground, were stacked at the site like a trumpet’s flourish. To me olive oil was something that came in skinny little bottles and was shaken over lettuce in discreet drops like perfume, consequently the effect of those towers—and the wide red cans of tomatoes, the long gray ropes of garlic and sheaves of thin brown barley loaves, the sausages as engorged as snakes, the big dark barrels of sardines, I supposed, pickles, olives (who knew what else lived in those salty ponds?), the huge smooth cheeses and jungle-colored peppers, purple eggplants, queerly shaped squash in white, orange, yellow, and green (nothing my mother ever let in the house), the frankly naked hams and raffia-webbed demijohns of wine—was somewhat the same as a carnival: the display was loud, vulgar, bombastic, and unbelievable, and was at once frightened and tempted, intimidated and drawn. I went inside the store once with my father to buy beer, and I can still remember how my senses were assailed, my eyes blurred as though by brightness, and I can still see the waxy white paper speckled trouts were laid on, and a scatter of flat white boxes everywhere on which