806
PARTISAN REVIEW
send the map, I kept forgetting it and forgetting it, until I had, with
some relief, lost his address.
On his very last communication to me, Hal had scrawled only
his name; it was the program for a production of
Wailing for Lefty
put on in some seedy Boston Hall by a group of fellow-traveling
Harvard students, all conspiratorially listed under obvious pseu–
donyms: George Spelvin, Homer Stoopnagle-but Hal, who had a
small part ("Why that son-of-a-bitch is my own lousy brother!")
had, with spectacular arrogance, used
my
name.
There was a not quite accountable shudder in seeing that familiar
constellation of letters (spelled correctly, too, in added insult) on
the alien sheet. In what precise sense Hal understood the joke I had
no way of knowing; what in it was insolence, what a claim, what the
inversion of love I did not then concern myself with sorting out.
Chiefly, I resented what I felt as the offensive camaraderie of the
blackmailer, exacting something: tenderness or embarrassment, identi–
fication or begrudged affability, for a dated and unprofitable com–
plicity.
I suffered from an excess of pride that was especially vulnerable,
secure in having made a real escape from the implications of our
adolescence, sure of having discovered motives outside the flight from
innocence, or that fear of allegiance which protects the outsider from
rebuffs and love. This pride I called humility.
"Comrade, Comrade," I would have told Hal, "I no longer
share your lonely country. Bus drivers greet me, knowing my stop;
I buy wood for my fireplace, and I practice before my mirror the
harmless face of the bourgeois." But I could not reach him, and I
touched Vivian instead, who was beside me, fingering her shoulder,
her pale red hair, the real evidence of belonging and peace.
"Hal?" she asked, looking at the envelope in my hand, at me
troubled. She used the names of people she knew only from my
memories with a familiarity I found charming and that was to her
somehow an assurance.
"Yes-Hal.
If
that joker was a ghost he would haunt me."
"No danger," she said, "he seems very much alive."
"He'll never die.
It
would be out of character."
I believed that then, in a way, as much as I had ever believed
anything, and when, astonishingly, Hal lay dying at the age of
