And Hook remembered Douglas somberly showing him through a corner bedroom containing nothing except a water pipe and empty wine bottles and a scattering of sleeping bags and cot mattresses.

“Here’s where I slept,” Douglas said, indicating an area next to two windows that looked out on the backyard. “I used to put my pillow right on the windowsill and just lie there and look out and dream, you know? I would be great, of course. A great man. I never doubted that. The night was like some woman out there waiting for me, a world waiting for me.”

“A beast slouching toward Santa Barbara,” said the bearded youth, their unofficial host and escort by then.

“Yeats,” Hook heard himself say.

The youth laughed. “Right on, Pops.”

Then later there was wine, a bottle of red and a bottle of white being passed back and forth between the bearded youth and Douglas and the girl from the kitchen and two other men Hook had not seen before, one with a bald pate and silky blond hair hanging down his back. He was sitting in a rocker, holding a little girl who was sucking hard on a pacifier as she watched the miniature television set, on which a roller derby was playing now. Douglas was the only one talking, telling them all how he remembered being on the floor in this very room, in front of his family’s four-foot-high Philco radio on the Sunday the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. “I was only seven or eight,” he kept on. “And I was sitting right there playing with lead soldiers, and I think the ‘Disney Parade’ was on when they broke into it and made the announcement. You know what? I bawled. I really did. I cried because there was a war on, and I was too young to be in it. Can you believe that?”

Hook had looked at their faces one by one, but not in any of them did he see a thing. They were vacant, Locke’s tabula rasa.

And finally Hook remembered being up in the attic alone with Douglas and the bearded youth, who by then had given up his role of host in order to play one-man audience to Douglas’s buffoon, most of the time patiently and smilingly hearing him out, though wincing every now and then as the older man slurred his words or doggedly kept repeating them, struggling to make himself understood. And then abruptly the youth would cut in with some hip word of amazement or just an easy laugh, a gesture of utter, unbelieving contempt.

But Douglas kept on. He had practically dragged Hook and the youth over to a built-in window cabinet, which he said once had contained his father’s World War One uniform. Lovingly, Douglas recounted how as a child he had come up to the attic and regularly hauled the uniform out of its moth-balled box and tried it on in front of an antique swivel mirror—and oh Christ, the smell of it, he said, the weight, it was like a coat of mail, it really was. The cabinet also had contained three old war books, he went on, pictorial histories of “the old man’s war,” volumes that he had never been able to get enough of, had thumbed and studied and absorbed until they were almost falling apart in his hands, until names like Belleau Wood and Big Bertha and the Marne and Black Jack Pershing were more real to him than the names of his own family and the streets where he lived and played. And it was then he stripped himself before the bearded youth, knelt down and laid his head on the block of the young man’s scorn.