‘We got chicken for supper tonight,’ said the wife, ‘enough for extras, enough for company…’

And the years turning and flying away, the voices, and the faces, and the people, and always the same first conversations. The voice of Emily Robinson, in her rocking chair, in summernight darkness, the last night he stayed with her, the night she discovered his secret, her voice saying:

‘I look at all the little children’s faces going by. And I sometimes think. What a shame, what a shame, that all these flowers have to be cut, all these bright fires have to be put out. What a shame these, all of these you see in schools or running by, have to get tall and unsightly and wrinkle and turn gray or get bald, and finally, all bone and wheeze, be dead and buried off away. When I hear them laugh I can’t believe they’ll ever go the road I’m going. Yet here they come! I still remember Wordsworth’s poem:

‘When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.’ That’s how I think of children, cruel as they sometimes are, mean as I know they can be, but not yet showing the meanness around their eyes or in their eyes, not yet full of tiredness. They’re so eager for everything! I guess that’s what I miss most in older folks, the eagerness gone nine times out of ten, the freshness gone, so much of the drive and life down the drain. I like to watch school let out each day. It’s like someone threw a bunch of flowers out of the school front doors. How does it feel, Willie? How does it feel to be young forever? To look like a silver dime new from the mint? Are you happy? Are you as fine as you seem?’

The baseball whizzed from the blue sky, stung his hand like a great pale insect. Nursing it, he hears his memory say:

‘1 worked with what I had. After my folks died, after I found I couldn’t get man’s work anywhere, I tried carnivals, but they only laughed. “Son,” they said, “you’re not a midget, and even if you are, you look like a boy! We want midgets with midgets’ laces! Sorry, son, sorry. So I left home, started out, thinking: What was I? A boy. I looked like a boy, sounded like a boy, so I might as well goon being a boy. No use lighting it. No use screaming. So what could I do? What job was handy? And then one day I saw this man in a restaurant looking at another man’s pictures of his children. “Sure wish I had kids,” he said. “Sure wish I had kids.’ He kept shaking his head. And me sitting a few seats away from him, a hamburger in my hands. I sat there, frozen;’ At that very instant I knew what my job would be for all the rest of my life. There was work for me, after all. Making lonely people happy. Keeping myself busy. Playing forever. I knew I had to play forever. Deliver a few papers, run a few errands, mow a few lawns, maybe. But hard work? No. All I had to do was be a mother’s son and a father’s pride. I turned to the man down the counter from me. “I beg your pardon,” I said. I smiled at him . .