them was called Down There—by some decadent French writer. It was one of Anastasia’s favorites, not because it was decadent but because it told of that extraordinary figure in French history—Gilles de Rais. He had been a follower of Jeanne d’Arc. He had murdered more children—he had depopulated whole villages, in fact. One of the most enigmatic figures in French history. She begged me to glance at it sometime. Anastasia had read it in the original. She could read not only French and Italian but German, Portuguese and Russian. Yes, in the convent school she had also learned to play the piano divinely. And the harp.

Can she blow the trumpet? I asked derisively.
She gave me the horse laugh. Then followed this revelation:
She can play the drums, too. But she has to be a little high first.
You mean drunk?
No, hopped up. Marijuana. There’s no harm in it. It’s not habit forming.

Whenever this subject came up—drugs—I was sure to get an earful. In Mona’s opinion (probably Anastasia’s) everyone ought to become acquainted with the effects of different drugs. Drugs weren’t half as dangerous as liquor. And the effects were more interest ing. Yes, she was going to try them someday. There were lots of people in the Village—respectable people, too—who used drugs. She couldn’t see why people were so afraid of drugs. There was that Mexican drug which exalted the sense of color, for example. Perfectly harmless. We ought to try it sometime. She’d see if she couldn’t get some from that phoney poet what’s-his-name. She loathed him, he was filthy, and so on, but Anastasia maintained that he was a good poet. And Anastasia ought to know…

I’m going to borrow one of her poems one day and read it aloud to you. You’ve never heard anything like it, Val.
O.K. I said, but if it stinks I’m going to tell you so:
Don’t worry! She couldn’t write a bad poem if she tried.
I know—she’s a genius.
She is indeed, and I’m not joking. She’s a real genius.
I couldn’t resist remarking that it was too bad geniuses always had to be freaks.
There you go! Now you’re talking just like everyone else. I’ve explained to you again and again that she’s not like the other freaks’ in the Village.
No, she’s a genuine freak!
She’s made maybe, but like Strindberg, like Dostoievsky, like Blake…
That’s putting her rather high, isn’t it?
I didn’t say she had their talent. All I mean is that if she’s queer she’s queer in the same way they were. She’s not insane—and she’s not a fraud. Whatever she is, it’s real. I’ll stake my life on it.
The only thing I have against her, I blurted out, is that she needs so damned much looking after.
That’s cruel!
Is it? Look … she got along all right until you came along, didn’t she?
I told you what a condition she was in when I met her.
I know you did, but that doesn’t impress me. Maybe if you hadn’t nursed her along she would have picked herself up and stood on her own two legs.
We’re back where we started. How many times must I explain to you that she simply doesn’t know how to take care of herself?
Then let her learn!

How about yourself? Have you learned yet?
I was getting along all right until you came along. I not only took care of myself, I took care of a wife and child.
That’s unfair of you. Maybe you did take care of them, but at what a price! You wouldn’t want to live that way forever, would you?
Of course not! But I’d have found a way out—eventually.
Eventually! Val, you haven’t got too much time! You’re in your thirties now—and you have yet to make a name for yourself. Anastasia’s just a girl, but see what she’s accomplished already.
I know. But then she’s a genius…
Oh, stop it! We won’t get anywhere talking this way. Why don’t you quit thinking about her? She doesn’t interfere with your life—why should you interfere with hers? Can’t I have one friend? Why must you be jealous of her? Be just, won’t you?

All right, let’s drop it. But stop talking about her, will you? Then I won’t say anything to hurt you.

Though she hadn’t explicitly asked me not to visit The Iron Cauldron I kept away out of consideration for her wishes. I suspected that Anastasia spent much of her time there daily, that during Mona’s swings the two were always together somewhere. In roundabout ways I would hear of their visits to the museums and art galleries, to the studios of Village artists, of their expeditions to the waterfront, where Anastasia made sketches of boats and sky-line, of the hours they spent at the library doing research. In a way the change was good for Mona. Gave her something new to think about. She had little knowledge of painting, and Anastasia apparently was delighted to act as her mentor. There were veiled references occasionally to the portrait Anastasia intended to make of Mona.

She had never done a realistic portrait of anyone, it seems, and she was especially reluctant to do a resemblance of Mona.

There were days when Anastasia was incapable of doing a thing, when she was prostrate and had to be nursed like an infant. Any trifling event could bring them on, these fits of malaise. Sometimes they occurred because Mona had spoken foolishly or irreverently of one of Anastasia’s beloved idols. Modigliani and El Greco, for example, were painters about whom she would allow no one, not even Mona, to say the wrong thing. She was very fond of Utrillo, too, but she did not venerate him. He was a lost soul, like herself: still on the human level. Whereas Giotto, Grunewald, the Chinese and the Japanese masters, these were on a different level, represented a higher order. (Not so bad, her taste!) She had no respect whatever for American artists, I gathered. Except for John Marin, whom she described as limited but profound. What almost endeared her to me was the discovery that she always carried with her Alice in Wonderland and the Too Teh Ching. Later she was to include a volume of Rimbaud. But of that later…

I was still making the rounds, or going through the motions. Now and then I sold a set of books without trying. I worked at it only four or five hours a day, always ready to knock off when dinner time came. Usually I would look over the cards and choose a prospect who lived a good distance away, in some run-down suburb, some bleak and barren hole in New Jersey or out on Long Island. I did this partly to kill time and partly to get completely off the track. Always, when heading for some dingy spot (which only a dotty book salesman would think of visiting!), I found that I would be assailed by the most unexpected memories of dear, beloved places I had known as a boy. It was a sort of inverse law of association at work. The more drab and commonplace the milieu, the more bizarre and wonderful were these unbidden associations. I could almost wager that if I headed of a morning for Hackensack or Canarsie, or some rabbit hole on Staten Island, by evening I would find myself at Sheepshead Bay, or Bluepoint, or Lake Pocotopaug. If I didn’t have the carfare to make a long haul I would hitch hike, trusting to luck that I would run into someone—some friendly face—who would stake me to a meal and the fare back. I rode with the tide. It didn’t matter where I ended up nor when I got home, because Mona would be sure to arrive after me.

I was writing things down in my head again, not feverishly as before but calmly, evenly, like a reporter or correspondent who had oodles of time and a generous expense account. It was wonderful to let things happen as they would. Now and then sailing along on even keel, I would blow into some outlandish town, pick a shop at random—plumber or undertaker, it made no difference—and launch into my sales talk. I hadn’t the least thought of making a sale, nor even of keeping my hand in, as they say. No, I was merely curious to see the effect my words would have on a complete nobody. I had the feeling that I was a man descended from another planet. If the poor victim felt disinclined to discuss the merits of our loose-leaf encyclopaedia I would talk his language, whatever it was, even if it were nothing but cold corpses. Like that I often found myself lunching with a congenial soul with whom I hadn’t a thing in common. The farther away from myself I got the more certain I was to have an inspiration. Suddenly, perhaps in the midst of a sentence, the decision would be made and off I’d scoot. Off searching for that spot which I had known in the past, a very definite, a very marvelous past. The trick was to get back to that precious spot and see if I could reconstitute the being I once was. A queer game—and full of surprises. Sometimes I returned to our room as a little boy dressed in men’s clothes. Yes, sometimes I was. little Henry through and through, thinking like him, feeling like him, acting like him.

Often, talking to utter strangers out there on the fringe of the world, there would suddenly leap to mind an image of the two of them, Mona and ‘Stasia, parading through the Village or swinging through the revolving door of a museum