HIS MOTHER WENT to the door to kiss his father when his father came home from work. Sometimes his mother would comment that his father had had a drink; his father would agree and explain that he had stopped off with a few of the men on the way from the office. His mother did not drink; she claimed it gave her palpitations. He liked the smell of liquor on his father’s breath but on no one else’s. The bungalows of their summer community were close together; some of the childless couples drank on weekends, visited back and forth late into the night, and occasionally had playful fights with carbonated water. One summer his parents brought a woman from the city to help with the housework; the first day the woman finished off the gin (filling the bottle with water, his father later discovered), and the next day she was sent back to the city. He and a friend sold cold canned beer to men who came from the city to fish along the shore. One day he and the friend were left with ten unsold cans, which they drank rather than carry back. They giggled, fell on the sand, stumbled in and out of the water, and later agreed that they had had a good time. In the second year of high school he and some other students took to going to a rathskeller in the afternoon; they lied about their ages, drank Tom Collinses, and discussed the seduction of the owner’s two pink-faced daughters, who waited on table in peasant costume and seemed more available as the afternoons progressed. One weekend when his family was at the beach he finished two thirds of a fifth of whiskey, not getting drunk, but nipping away, listening to the radio, napping, writing poetry and letters. Monday his mother saw the empty bottle and, weeping, pleaded with him not to drink; her father had died from drink, she said. (Years later she told him that her father had left the family one day and not come back.) Some nights he would come home drunk from dates, and if his parents were awake he would stand for a moment at the door of their room to report bits of the evening. Once he asked his mother if she had noticed that he had been drunk on these occasions, and she said no. When he was in the army he brought back from a three-day pass a bottle of peach brandy, which, since he slept on the top bunk, he could hide on the shelf behind his pillow. Each morning till the bottle was gone he took a swig, which improved the day’s first hour, one of the worst. He considered turning himself into an alcoholic to get a discharge (preferable to faking homosexuality, the most commonly discussed way) but doubted he could get the liquor. He wrote his first novel on beer, drinking one can after another until the writing became confused, usually on the third page, between the fourth and fifth can. When he left his family he drank a lot; mornings-after, the evenings seemed to have slipped by without thought or incident. One morning after having been at a drunken party he saw that his car was damaged: the convertible top was torn, the hood was dented, and a piece of wood stuck out from behind the bumper. At first he thought that the damage had been done during the night while the car was parked on the street, then he vaguely remembered having driven through an unattended police barrier on a highway; as he recalled the details he realized that the obstacle might as well have been a stone wall, and he gave up drunken driving for a while. He worries about his drinking, and brings it up with his doctor, who feels his liver and says that if he thinks he is drinking too much by all means cut down. As he gets older he will drink less, to compensate, he says, for his decreasing mental agility. Actually drinking will give him heartburn, and he will develop a fear that if he drinks he may vomit in his sleep and choke to death.