AT HOME HE was taught that he could do what he wanted with what was his except destroy it or give it away. At school giving was good: frequent collections were taken for the Foreign Missions, which ministered to poor, usually yellow people; and once a year money was collected for Catholic Charities, a fund for needy local Catholics. The teaching at home closest to charity was not to waste. If you were frying an egg for a sandwich, say, and looking forward to biting the yolk, which would mix with the melting butter and soak into the pores of the bread, and the yolk ruptured in the pan, you ate the broken egg, you did not begin with another. His mother gave his old clothes and those of his brother that could not be handed on to him to the grammar school principal to distribute among families down on their luck. Occasionally he would recognize a piece of his clothing on a boy and wonder if the boy knew where it had come from. He mentioned to his father that to avoid embarrassment the school might exchange its clothing with another school’s. His father was impressed with the suggestion and urged him to pass it along to the principal; he felt he had said cleverer things without credit. Panhandlers asked him for money more often when he was with a girl than not, and he gave more often then. The first time he was panhandled by a woman he gave her nothing and later realized he had almost given her all the money with him. When he was first married he and his wife lived in a community of veterans going to college. A couple might suddenly need money—the government check had not come, a baby had to go to the hospital—and a quiet collection was taken up. This was the first charity he thought about and approved of: help to equals. He never knew or heard of anyone aided by organized charities and avoided giving to them if he could. For a while newspapers ran articles about beggars faking incapacities and making big money. He watched beggars bumping and tapping through subway cars, gauged the money collected and the time spent, and concluded their income was probably low. One Christmas Eve when he and his wife were doing last-minute shopping after dinner and snow had begun to fall an unkempt and bearded man walked toward them in the light of store windows. He gave the man a dollar, apologizing as he did. He and his wife watched from the corner: half the passers-by gave the man money, mostly bills. Two years after he left his family, when he was moving from one bachelor apartment to another, to save money he hired hippie movers. He liked them for their beards and easy manner; the next day he discovered they had stolen a carton of his shoes and clothes. That afternoon a drunk on the street asked him for money. “Fuck off!” he said. “God bless you!” the drunk said. One of the neighborhoods he lived in a friend described as for people on the way up or on the way down: he wondered how the friend saw him: early middle-aged, living alone, most of his income going to his former wife for child support. Hung over at work some mornings, he thought it would be easy to be fired, dropped by friends, avoided by relatives, finally supported by his mother and brother with small corrective donations. Because of his Catholic training he had believed that the helpless were blessed; now they seemed self-willed victims. When a beggar asks him for money he walks on, stony-faced, feeling that if he gives even a small amount of his little money he will be drawn down toward the beggar’s debasement. When his children are grown and his money free he will see more sense in charity. When he comes across a confused old woman in the streets he will wonder whether she has children somewhere; if so how she came to be separated from them: had she abandoned them young, they her old? He will think how unwanted a woman is who has passed the age of sexual attractiveness and how little camaraderie there is among women, so eager to help children and animals, so slow to help one another: an old woman does not approach a young one the way an alcoholic does a businessman. He will not see himself in the place of old bums; if nothing else they have hair, he’ll be bald.