WHEN HE WAS TWO years old he moved to a new apartment house. He liked the new house, but he did not like leaving the old one. The new apartment house had twelve entrances, all facing a garden. In the center of the garden, under an arched bridge, was a pond. Goldfish swam there in the summer; in winter the pond was drained. He and his friends wondered where the goldfish were kept in the winter. Across the street from the front of the building, to the west, stood the Boy Scout Hall, a small wooden house on top of a hill, under a large tree. To the south was a large yellow-brick building in which yeast company chemists did experiments, also an empty lot where boys played baseball, played football, sledded, or made fires, according to the season. To the east and rear was a train yard. And on the north was a rocky plateau where long weeds grew that could be pulled up and used as spears and where the ground broke into dry clumps that could be thrown or dropped and would burst on impact into clouds of dust. The window of his room opened onto the junior playground, which was filled with sand. The sand in the shady part stayed damp; with it he and his friends made runways for toy autos. When he was kept in for being bad or sick he talked to his friends from the window. Boys of ten and older could use the senior playground, on the opposite side of the building. It was made of brick and concrete and was good for playing handball, punchball, stickball, and catch. The windows of one of the stores in the rear of the building were painted dark green to a point above the eye. This store was the Men’s Club, where men in the building played pool and cards. Members had to be twenty-one. His father played cards there one night a week and discussed the game with his mother at dinner the next evening. The building had many cellars. These were used for storing furniture, carriages, and sleds, and for housing dumb-waiters, boilers, and coal. Over the years he and his friends had obtained keys to the cellars and explored all of them but one, the deepest, reaching far under the garden. Lighting no matches for fear of being seen by Fred, the lantern-jawed German janitor who lived there, they worked their way along the rough walls. When they could go no farther they lit a match. Hundreds of water bugs, big as toys, scurried to and fro over the black floor. The boys bruised themselves in their panic to get out and never went back. When he was seven his family moved to a larger apartment in the building so he and his brother could have separate rooms. He did not like sleeping alone and losing his view of the playground. Now his window opened onto the train yard, and at night the light from the switched tracks flashed on his ceiling. When he was thirteen his family moved again, to another building four blocks away. He went back every Sunday to the old house to visit a friend, thinking his parents thought he was in church. Later his mother told him they knew he was visiting the friend. Now that he was no longer a resident he realized he would never be a member of the Men’s Club. Actually he went into the army when he was eighteen, and by the time he got out he had no use for clubs or all-male companionship. Also, because of the postwar business boom the club-room was rented to a dry cleaner. Other changes occurred over the years. The Boy Scout Hall burned down, the hill on which it had stood was dug away, and a great white courthouse was erected. The yeast company moved out of the city, and a ten-story apartment house, the highest in the neighborhood, appeared on the site. The same sort of thing happened to the rocky plateau. The train yard remains, but before long the air space above it will be sold and a twenty-three-story apartment house will be built and will be called “Skyline Spires.” Although he will return by chance and intention every now and then he will not realize how shabby the building has become until one autumn evening when, in his fifties, he will stroll into the garden and on the bridge begin to chat with the night watchman. He will see the boy in the face of the watchman, who is about his own age, and will ask the watchman if by chance the watchman grew up in the neighborhood. No, the watchman will say, he comes from Pennsylvania. And, yes, the place has changed. “There’s a different element here now,” the watchman will say. Garbage in the halls. A murder two months before. “People like yourself come in here and talk about how it used to be.” Did the watchman know the names of any of these people? “No, but it must have been a nice place. There’s a different element here now.” The slate paths through the garden, for no reason that he can imagine, will have been cemented over. The building will be standing when he dies, but only because the neighborhood will have fallen into decline.