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trustworthy. And he likes Demmie. He thinks he’s protecting her. But it isn’t even personal. You aren’t sore, are you?”
      “Sore at Humboldt? He’s too fantastic to be sore at. And especially as a protector of maidens.”
      Demmie appeared amused. And any young woman would find value in such solicitude. She asked me later in her abrupt way, “What’s this mission stuff about?”
      “Nonsense.”
      “But you once said something to me, Charlie. Or is Humboldt only talking through his hat?”
      “I said I had a funny feeling sometimes, as if I had been stamped and posted and they were waiting for me to be delivered at an important address. I may contain unusual information. But that’s just ordinary silliness.”
      Demmie—her full name was Anna Dempster Vonghel—taught Latin at the Washington Irving School, just east of Union Square, and lived on Barrow Street. “There’s a Dutch corner in Delaware,” said Demmie. “And that’s where the Vonghels came from.” She had been sent to finishing school, studied classics at Bryn Mawr, but she had also been a juvenile delinquent and at fifteen she belonged to a gang of car thieves. “Since we love each other, you have a right to know,” she said. “I have a record —hubcap-stealing, marijuana, sex offenses, hot cars, chased by cops, crashing, hospital, probation officers, the whole works. But I also know about three thousand Bible verses. Brought up on hellfire and damnation.” Her Daddy, a backwoods millionaire, raced around in his Cadillac spitting from the window. “Brushes his teeth with kitchen cleanser. Tithes to his church. Drives the Sunday-school bus. The last of the old-time Fundamentalists. Except that there are scads of them down there,” she said.
      Demmie had blue eyes with clean whites and an upturned nose that confronted you almost as expressively and urgently as the eyes. The length of her front teeth kept her mouth slightly open. Her long elegant head grew golden hair and she parted it evenly, like the curtains of a neat house. Hers was the sort of face you might have seen in a Conestoga wagon a century ago, a pioneer face, a very white sort of face. But I fell first for her legs. They were extraordinary. And these beautiful legs had an exciting defect—her knees touched and her feet were turned outward so that when she walked’fast the taut silk of her stockings made a slight sound of friction. In a cocktail crowd, where I met her, I could scarcely understand what she was saying, for she muttered in the incomprehensible fashionable Eastern lockjaw manner. But in her nightgown she was the perfect country girl, the farmer’s daughter, and pronounced her words plainly and clearly. Regularly, at about 2 a.m., her nightmares woke her. Her Christianity was the delirious kind. She had unclean spirits to cast out. She feared hell. She moaned in her sleep. Then she sat up sobbing. More than half asleep myself, I tried to calm and reassure her. “There is no hell, Demmie.”
      “I know there is hell. There is a hell—there is !”
      “Just put your head on my arm. Go back to sleep.”
      On a Sunday in September 1952 Humboldt picked me up in front of Demmie’s apartment building on Barrow Street near the Cherry Lane Theatre. Very different from the young poet with whom I went to Hoboken to eat clams, he now was thick and stout. Cheerful Demmie called down from the third-floor fire escape where she kept begonias—in the morning there was not a trace of nightmare. “Charlie, here comes Humboldt driving the four-holer.” He charged down Barrow Street, the first poet in America with power brakes, he said. He was full of car mystique, but he didn’t know how to park. I watched him trying to back into an adequate space. My own theory was that the way people parked had much to do with their intimate self-image and revealed how they felt about their own backsides. Humboldt twice got a rear wheel up on the curb and