HIS MOTHER TOLD him that people are not what they seem. One fall, returning to the city after the summer, he met a boy a year older than he; the boy had recently moved into the neighborhood, was amusing and good-looking, and liked him. He told his mother that he had made a new best friend, whom he would be friends with always. His mother said that no one yet knew much about the boy’s family, and indeed when he first met the boy’s parents he was put off that the mother was taller than the father. By the next summer he and the boy hardly spoke to one another. The nuns in grammar school taught that everyone was created by God and endowed with an immortal soul. If some people seemed less attractive and gifted than others, despite God’s intention, it occurred to him that the difference might be an illusion. Perhaps the reason adults were so often unpleasant was that they lived their real lives with other adults and were not themselves among children; perhaps ugly, cruel, or stupid children would eventually be changed by intense compensatory love from their parents; perhaps bums had virtues that events would bring out. In grammar school classes there were at least one very good boy and very good girl not smart or lively; teachers and other students used them as examples and even asked their opinions on moral matters. Their goodness showed in their faces; these boys and girls were usually fair and blue-eyed, with a sad and impassive expression. They were often elected to class office, and sex was not discussed in relation to or in front of them. In high school it became hard for him to see what a disagreeable boy’s compensating or excusing virtues were. For instance, in senior year when the students voted for the best among themselves in various categories one untalented and hermetic boy voted for himself for best poet. The poems the boy had offered to the school magazine had been ordinary; and the boy had made not one clever remark in or out of class. The other students privy to the vote were amused, but he himself had been elected best poet by an overwhelming majority and thought that for the first time he was seeing a person without redeeming qualities. There was much cruelty in the army; he somewhat excused it by considering that soldiers led an unnatural life. It was difficult to account for the fact that everyone he spoke to, including German POWs, wanted the war to end and yet it did not. Although he had been taught about the devil he had also been taught about individual responsibility, so that he thought it possible that national leaders accounted for evil. In his first serious job he worked under a man who used a fatherly manner on subordinates. This and the subordinates’ desire to be in the hands of a just boss led most of them to think well of the man, despite the fact that the man placed people in the wrong jobs so that they would think less of themselves, praised inferior work to disorient superior workers, and resisted suggestions presented with passion. In time the man confessed secret homosexuality, a wife’s alcoholism, and that a son (according to a psychiatrist) was full of anger; this was the first person he knew whom he thought evil. He had a literary success, which brought out qualities he had not seen in people before: some fawned on him frightenedly, as if they wanted to avoid being humiliated by him; others waited for signs of overreaching and humiliated him when they occurred; after his marriage broke up he saw that expectations of compensatory justice were being satisfied. One evening, after he had fallen in love and had been shopping with the young woman, they were going to his apartment, their arms full of bundles; they were stopped in the lobby by three black men. He offered his wallet; the leader, holding a gun, refused it and ordered them upstairs into the apartment. He said he wouldn’t go. “You want me to blow her brains out?” the leader said. One of the other blacks pricked his neck with a knife and said, “Move!” Still he wouldn’t. Two male tenants arrived, and the blacks fled. The next day he decided that if he could kill the black men with impunity he would, shooting them one by one between the eyes. It wasn’t that they were evil, but that they were his mortal enemies, having intended degradations worse than death. Less and less will he think of people as good or bad; rather it will seem to him that benefactors look good to the beneficiaries, injurers bad to the injured, and that the rest is taste.