HIS MOTHER KEPT an Irish nursemaid when he was a baby. The nursemaid stayed with the family till he was two years old. He remembers her boy friend better than he remembers her. The boy friend was a bus conductor with a red face. The boy friend’s job was to stand at the rear of the double-decker bus and collect fares. The nursemaid would wheel the baby carriage to the bus stop at a certain hour and wait for the boy friend. The boy friend had a ticket punch and a change maker. One day the boy friend gave him a violet-flavored Life Saver. This pleased him and made him proud. Shortly afterward the family moved across the river to another apartment house, and the nursemaid left. She went back to Ireland to get married, his mother told him when he was old enough to ask. His mother also said that he began to talk only after the nursemaid had left. His first sentence, his mother said, was, “When are we going to the old home?” What had the nursemaid looked like? he asked his mother. “She was pretty,” his mother said. “Did she look like anybody?” “No,” his mother said. He didn’t know whether that was good or bad. When he was seven he was given a ticket punch of his own and made quarter-inch holes in many things. One day he looked for the punch, and it was gone. He searched through his possessions but could not find it. Every now and then he yearned for the punch and would go through his things again, certain that a really thorough search would turn it up, but it didn’t. Once when he was ten and in a candy store he asked for violet-flavored Life Savers. The candy store man didn’t have them and had never heard of them. On the way home he went into a drugstore that had a greater selection of Life Savers and asked the cashier for violet. “You mean grape,” the cashier said. “No, violet.” “Violet isn’t a flavor, it’s a color,” the cashier said. But he knew exactly how it would taste if he could find it. One evening he visited a show business couple, who after dinner broke out some marijuana. He had never tried it, didn’t believe it worked, had been drinking, and smoked both the pipe and the cigarettes that were passed to him. Soon a plant against the wall, as in a movie trick, turned into a church palm. The space in the room divided itself into vertical and horizontal planes. He could focus his attention either deeply and narrowly or broadly and shallowly. Then the room turned into a long tiled path that led back to his birth. High tile walls stood on either side of the path. Above, the sky was clear and blue. The distant tiles, near his birth, were bright yellow and orange. The tiles near him were dirty and dark. The causes of the darkening, many and varied, stood like markers out of sight on the far sides of the walls. He could not see them, but he knew they were there. Suddenly at the far end of the path, the figure of a woman ascended slowly into the sky. He strained to see her face, but either it was averted or it had no features. He understood that her facelessness was due to a failure of memory and that the tile-darkening troubles in his life outside the walls were beyond the power of his mind to identify specifically. After the figure had disappeared into the sky a voice said, “It was bad to lose her when you were two, but it has been worse to love her more than your mother.” This message struck him as so important and he thought it so likely that he would forget it that he asked the host, who under the influence of marijuana was taking notes like a scientist, to write it on a piece of paper and give the paper to him. Soon he will lunch with a friend, a middle-aged college teacher. He will tell the friend about the experience and show the friend the paper, which he will still be carrying with him in his wallet. The friend will study the paper and say that for the first time he realizes that he married his wife because she resembled his nursemaid. “Has it been a happy marriage?” he will ask the friend, knowing that it hasn’t been; the friend will raise his hand, palm down, tilt it from side to side, and say, “Apparently there are more variations to the Oedipus complex than Freud ever dreamed of in his philosophy.” Shortly before his mother dies he will tell her, too, about the experience. He will think that it will be an even more momentous revelation to her than it had been to him. “Oh,” his mother will say, “I knew that. She was a very nice girl and very fond of you.”