Fern pulled up to the curb. “You won’t have much of a walk from here,” she said.

Max could smell the oily waters of the harbor. It always excited him; the waterfront was the first place he went in any city he visited. He had stood on wharves in San Francisco, in New York, in Boston, in Seattle, staring down at the parrot colors of oil stains moved back and forth by the tides, sighting along a hawser until, with a thrill of delight, he saw the great bulwark of a ship rising above him.

It was the waterfront that had brought him into the party. He had been in his senior year at Berkeley in 1934, just six years ago, when the maritime workers struck. Half dreaming among the leaning stacks of books in the Sather Gate Bookshop, he had been awakened from his languor by a classmate who had snatched away the book he’d been holding in his hands. “My God! A general strike!” the man had cried. “What the hell are you reading Stephen Crane for? Let’s go!”

Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, blending insensibly into the ranks of the longshoremen in their white caps and blue workshirts, into Harry Bridges, into the silent ships at rest, into the fear and hilarity, the joy at the real conflict that was coming; yes, it had been extraordinary, like the quiet that precedes an earthquake, the air breathless, the earth waiting.

“Thank you,” the girl was saying, moving to the door. “I’m so grateful. I don’t know how I’d have gotten here without you.”

“Someone would have picked you up,” Fern said, looking the girl full in the face. The girl flushed as though accused.

She got out of the car, dragging the ugly handbag after her.

“Good-by,” she said to Max, smiling.

“Call Jake!” he cried as Fern shifted into gear. The girl had walked a few steps away when she suddenly turned. “Wait!” she called back. “Your name? What is your last name?”

“Shore,” he called out from the window. “Max Shore.”

She nodded and turned and walked away. He continued to watch her as Fern pulled the car awkwardly out into the street. He was struck suddenly, after all that smiling, those apologies, by a curious conviction that the girl was stubborn, that she had will. Almost at once, he missed her presence and he was bewildered by the force of his feeling.

Fern said, unexpectedly, “Well, Max, you’re kind. I’ll say that for you.”

Max, astonished by Fern’s compliment, thought of Rousseau’s priest, M. de Pontverre, about whom he had remarked, “a kind man, he certainly was not a good man.”

I am not a good man, Max thought, without much regret, only a sense of something lost, lost too long ago for mourning. He sighed and turned his thoughts toward the convention.

Chapter 3