110
PARTISAN REVIEW
little
ferry
boat would move silently down the swift dark stream
among the reflections of the stars. And at night, when Peggy was
asler:p, he and Tansy would argue, have a moonlight swim, talk
some
morr: over a pot of tea about Time, Life, Thomas Mann,
Communism, the Partisan Review, the sthenic confusion of technolo–
gical advance, the responsibilities of education, Peggy's future, Gurko's
Angry Decade---
"In 79 A.D. the catastrophe occurred. For 36 hours Vesuvius
poured down upon the town a rain of pumice stone followed by a
rain of ashes and boiling water which mixture formed into a mas!
that covered the earth with a layer several yards thick. The survivors
returned after days of terror."
Suddenly Roderick remembered an evening last summer, re–
membered it with such intensity and longing he stared about him
a moment as if seeking some escape from the Restaurant Vesuvius.
A baby seal had come swimming up on the beach a few afternoons
before; he and Sigbjorn Wilderness had picked it up, fearing
it
might
be threatened or starve without its mother, and they'd kept it for
several days in their bathtub. This particular day they'd taken the
seal for a swim and suddenly, in a flash, it slipped away and was
gone. They'd swum after it hopelessly, they'd walked along the beach,
searching, and his father-in-law, who rightly considered the whole
procedure puerile in the extreme, had annoyed him slightly by
choosing this moment to mumble to them at length a story about
a mermaid he claimed to remember some fishermen having once
picked up at Port Roderick in the Isle of Man and also put in a
bathtub. (According to
him
they had boiled some eggs for the
poor monster, but while they were doing this the mermaid escaped
and he recalled distinctly that when they returned from searching 'for
it along the beach, all the water had boiled out of the saucepan.)
Because a killer whale-and not merely a killer whale but a white
killer whale, an albino, the first seen in nineteen years-had been
sighted from the control tower of the Second Narrows Bridge swim–
ming their way into the inlet (one of a school, but it was the Mel-
, villian qualification that had supplied the menace), they were anxious
about the seal, cursed themselves for picking it up at
all,
questioning
too the humane paradox of the whole thing since the seal was the
greatest enemy of their friends the 'fishermen, and Roderick and
