HE HEARD THAT a boy in his apartment house would soon die from a rare disease. The boy was small and pale but otherwise looked and acted well. The boy spit a lot; he wondered whether this was a symptom of the disease or a brave gesture. The boy once told him that a classmate had exposed an erect penis under the desk in the back of the classroom. “It was so straight!” the boy said a number of times in reporting the incident. The boy moved away. The only child in his grammar school class to die was a dull, quiet boy named Matthew, who later was thought to have been saintly; one nun suggested that special requests, such as for help in remaining pure, might be addressed to Matthew in heaven. Some of his friends in the city had only one parent living; all the children at the beach community had both. One day he called a city boy whose mother was dead a son of a bitch; the boy punched him on the cheek and said, “If you ever insult my mother again I’ll kill you.” Many grandparents died, and not much was made of it. After one boy’s grandmother died and was laid out in the living room the boy told him he had felt her breasts when no one was looking. His father took him every Sunday to visit his grandmother, who lived with two aunts and an uncle. The grandmother was bedridden and had straight white hair, which one of the aunts regularly cut. When the grandmother died she was displayed in a funeral parlor; visitors were invited to kneel in front of the body and pray. An aunt beckoned him forward; he shook his head; she tried to push him from behind; he became rigid, and only a look from his father made her stop. One evening after a phone call his father told his mother that one of the father’s brothers had died. “Heart?” his mother said; “Heart,” his father said; and they both nodded. Nine of his original high school class of ninety died in the war. Afterward a Jesuit explained the percentage in this way: the boys had been Catholic, therefore idealistic; they had gone into the service in 1943, when the safe jobs were filled; they had been eighteen or nineteen, too young for special training, which would have delayed combat. When his father died his own doctor watched him closely, explaining that sons sometimes took the deaths of their fathers hard, developing irreversible high blood pressure. Nothing happened immediately, but a year later he became certain that he would die at any moment from a heart attack. He went to bed for two weeks, resenting that his daughters, who were seven and four at the time, would survive him. Later, when he told this to a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist pointed out that most people would have been upset at the thought of not being survived by their children. He took this for a rebuke, and the psychiatrist tried to recall the remark. When he learned on the subway, from a headline in a newspaper held by a weeping black woman, that Kennedy had been shot, for an instant he was glad, although he was an admirer of Kennedy: he had stayed up late many nights to see TV reruns of the press conferences, lifting his beer can or snapping his fingers at Kennedy’s wit. There have been no natural deaths among his close friends, although he hears of the deaths of friends from the past, and friends tell him about the deaths of their friends. One such report concerned a man his age who had died from throat cancer. A month later he felt an obstruction in his throat, which he could neither swallow nor clear by hawking. For months he talked about it with a psychiatrist, who refused to answer hypothetical questions about cancer and instead kept urging him to go to a specialist for a diagnosis. Only after he was sure he was dying and had nothing to lose did he go. The doctor examined him, said he was all right, and suggested that when he felt uncomfortable he suck on a piece of hard candy. He now plays games with newspaper obituaries, picking one at random and saying, “I will die at the age this person has died at.” If the age is less than his, “I’ve outlived the prediction; it’s false.” If the age is much greater he computes the difference and says, “In the meantime anything can happen.” If the age is a little greater he reads the obituary for special background details: “He was a striver, now he’s paid for it,” or “Theatrical people lead desperate lives, and this one sounds queer.” As he gets older he will sometimes try to inquire into his deepest wishes, hoping to find a weariness with life that would make death less fearsome, but can’t.