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exquisite blue-tile benches that lined the plaza and studied this representation of my father as memories haunted me.
    In 1943, after I had spent a tour bombing Japanese-held islands in the far Pacific, I was granted leave for home rest in Alabama, where I found that my father had rigged a darkroom where he kept a white sheet hanging on the wall. Day after day he projected his color slides onto this sheet and sat and conversed with his old friends long dead. I must confess that when I heard about this I suspected that his mind was faltering, but when I first sat with him and saw the big, superhuman-sized photograph of the rancher Don Eduardo Palafox staring down at me, his full lips almost bursting into speech, it seemed entirely natural to greet him, so when Father cried: "Hey there, Don Eduardo! Good times in the fighting days, eh?" I was not surprised. Indeed, I almost expected Palafox to reply: "We fooled Gurza and his bandits, didn't we?" But when I watched my father talking to his old friends who were no longer here, I felt deep sorrow for a man who had gone into exile twice, each time from a land he loved. The first was when he spiritually cut himself off from Virginia, the Clay homeland, and from Richmond, the noble city he had never seen. The second was when he fled Mexico and his legion of friends there. During that brief respite from war I vowed that I would never allow myself to be exiled from any culture that had nourished me, but now in Toledo, as I saluted my father, I felt as deeply isolated as he had ever been. And I could visualize myself in my late sixties as forlorn and bereft as he had been.
    My father's exile from Mexico was self-imposed, of course, and he knew he would always have been welcomed among the Mexicans, but after what he called "that dark and evil day of March 18, 1938," he felt that no honest man could possibly live in Mexico, so he left.
    I was twenty-nine at the time, visiting him in Toledo on vacation from the magazine. I remember his coming into our home at the Mineral, gasping for breath, and slumping into a chair. "It can result only in war," he mumbled in Spanish. "Only in war."
    "What happened?" I asked.
    'That madman, President C a rdenas," he gasped.
    "What's he done now?"
    "He's expropriated the oil wells. We'd better pack."
    "You think ..."
    "Think?" he roared at me from his chair. "Of course there'll be war. How else can President Roosevelt react?" Then, seeing my unwillingness to believe that the United States would declare war over some oil wells, he jumped up and cried, "Even a damned fool like Roosevelt will recognize the necessity."
    My father had been reared in Southern traditions and was a determined Democrat, but like most of his acquaintances from the South--those gentle and confused people who frequented our Mexican home in the winters--he despised his American president, Roosevelt, almost as much as he did his Mexican president, Cardenas. "How could two glorious nations like the United States and Mexico get such utter incompetents at the same time?" he would wail.
    He waited vainly for Roosevelt to declare war or for some patriot to assassinate Cdrdenas, and when neither of these events occurred he fell into a deep depression from which he was never to recover. After giving the two errant presidents eight months to come to their senses, he abruptly shut down the mine, packed all his personal belongings, and gave the Mexico City newspapers a tempestuous interview in which he said that as an honorable man he could not tolerate a nation that expropriated personal property and, moreover, he predicted the decline and fall of Mexico.
    He never saw the country again, and when rumors reached him that Mexico, instead of perishing, was yearly better off than it had been the year before, he muttered ominously, "Just wait!"
    But his hatred was mainly directed at President Roosevelt, possibly because there were in Alabama other old-timers who enjoyed venting their anger against