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looked as though a little too much force might well bring down the works. From the hallway I was able to see into the living room, where the two Herzes were standing beside the dining table. Paul’s arms were around his wife’s waist, and his chin rested on her black hair. I stood with my hand on the bathroom door, unable to move one way or the other; I saw what Libby could not: her husband’s face. His eyes were closed like a man in prayer. I heard him say, “
Please
don’t complain. All you’ve done all night is complain.” Earlier Libby had changed into a black full skirt, and now her hands were held close up against it; her head was bowed and no part of her touched her husband that could be prevented from touching him. “I’m not complaining,” she said. “Every time I tell a story
you
think I’m complaining.” Herz took his hands from her. “Well, you
were
complaining.” I did not know what might come next and did not want to know; at the risk of unhinging the whole place, I laid my shoulder into the door and came clomping down the hallway, a man with shoes and ears entirely too large for himself. For our separate reasons, we were all uncomfortable saying good night.
    From this I had come home to hear myself indicted for spitting on parental benevolence. Here was I (I had been reminded) with all that these Herzes were without. When my mother died, in fact, she had left to me all that her family had left to her, which, if not a fortune, was enough to spare me from calamity for the rest of my life; on top of this there was my father and his checks. Phone calls. Love. Money. It did not seem very manly of me to be suffering over my abundance, and I began to wonder, as I went to sleep that night, how I would perform if I were Paul Herz.

    The following morning, out in the sunlight, I got a good look at Herz’s new coat. It could have been handed down from a beggar; it had, I’m afraid, that much class. A big brown tent, it enveloped him; for all anyone knew, within it he might be living a separate life. When he walked no knees were to be seen anywhere. Cloth shuffled and he moved three feet closer to wherever he was going. Standing still and seated he picked up more dignity. Swimming brown eyes, good dark skin, and hair that rose in tenacious kinky ridges off a marked brow gave him a grim and cocky air. On the first of November he had had to give up on the T-shirt; now in a dark brown shirt and a frayed green tie he had the look about him of a dissatisfied civil servant, a product of some nineteenth-century Russian imagination. In class he inhabited not the room but just his own chair. Where the others skittered on the syntax of their
Beowulf
like a pack of amateur mountain climbers, Herz, when asked to recite aloud, delivered Old English so that the blackboards shook; the vowels were from Brooklyn, but the force was strictly for meadhalls. Finished, he slid his books into a crumpling tan briefcase—the smell of egg salad wafted up from its bottom—and head down, left the room, silent as the North Pole. The separate life lived under the new coat was dead serious.
    The morning after our evening together, this same coat—whose cuff I noticed had already been sewn into one piece again—was swinging to and fro beside me. No words came from its owner, which made speech somewhat difficult for me. Upon arising I had thought of how I might be able to help Herz alleviate one of his problems; now his reticence made me hesitate to say what was on my mind. I had the feeling that he was nettled at me for having been witness to all that had happened the night before. If I were to make my suggestion, it would probably seem to him that I was prying into his affairs.
    I asked him how Libby was and he replied with the shortest of answers: fine. I invited him to the Union for coffee, but by the time we reached the stairs I couldn’t think of anything more to say that wouldn’t really have been beside the point—so I went