CHAPTER 1

In my younger and more impressionable years, my father advised me, "Whenever you feel like criticizing someone," he said, "just remember that not everyone in this world has had the advantages you've had."

He didn't elaborate, but we've always communicated unusually well in a reserved manner, and I understood he meant much more than that.

Consequently, I tend to withhold all judgments, a habit that has allowed me to encounter many intriguing individuals and also made me a target for a number of seasoned bores.

The abnormal mind is quick to detect and latch onto this quality when it appears in a normal person, and thus, during college, I was wrongly accused of being a politician because I

was privy to the secret sorrows of many wild, unknown individuals. Most of these confidences were unsolicited—often, I would feign sleep, distraction, or a superficial cheerfulness

when I sensed an intimate revelation was imminent—since the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the manner in which they express them, are often derivative and marked by obvious omissions.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I still fear missing something if I forget, as my father snobbishly suggested,

and I snobbishly repeat, that a sense of fundamental decency is unevenly distributed at birth.

And, after boasting of my tolerance, I must admit it has its limits. Conduct may be based on solid principles or unstable grounds, but beyond a certain point,

I don't care what it's based on. When I returned from the East last autumn, I felt a desire for the world to be uniform and in a state of moral vigilance forever; I no longer wanted any more chaotic excursions with privileged glimpses into the human soul.

Only Alex Sterling, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Alex, who embodied everything I held in genuine disdain. If personality is a continuous series of successful gestures,

then there was something magnificent about him, a heightened sensitivity to life's promises, as if he were connected to one of those intricate machines that detect earthquakes thousands of miles away.

This sensitivity was not related to that feeble impressionability often termed the 'creative temperament'—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness I've never encountered in anyone else and which I am unlikely to find again.

No—Alex turned out fine in the end; it is what preyed upon Alex, the foul dust that tainted his dreams, that temporarily extinguished my interest in the unproductive sorrows and fleeting joys of people.

My family has been prominent, well-to-do people in this Midwestern city for three generations. The Parkers are somewhat of a clan and we have a tradition that we are descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father continues today.

I never met this great-uncle, but I'm supposed to resemble him—especially regarding the rather stern painting that hangs in Father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter-century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I returned restless.

Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Midwest now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everyone I knew was in the bond business, so I assumed it could support one more single man.

All my aunts and uncles discussed it as if they were selecting a prep school for me and finally said, 'Why—yes' with very serious, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays, I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find accommodations in the city, but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we rent a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last moment, the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country alone.

I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed, cooked breakfast, and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning a man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.