MO 6-2367 was the number of the Mount Kisco funeral home, he was to have called them yesterday morning to tell them how many cars they would need to follow the hearse when they put his dead wife in the ground, when they covered his Grace with earth, when they
“No!” he screamed.
He sat upright on the bench and stared into the darkness. His heart was pounding, his hands were trembling.
“No,” he whispered softly.
In a little while, he fell asleep.
He awoke.
He could not have been asleep for more than a few hours, and yet he felt curiously refreshed, coming instantly awake without passing through that fuzzy borderland he usually associated with rising. He knew exactly where he was. He seemed only mildly surprised to discover he was wearing his street clothes, but then he supposed one did not sleep in pajamas on a wooden bench in Central Park. He sat up and rubbed a hand over his face, not to wash away any weariness — more, he suspected, as a gesture of habit. Then he glanced across the path and beyond the iron railing to where the ground sloped to a small lake. The lake ended in a narrow finger capped by a huge outcropping of primeval rock, the man-made concrete of Fifth Avenue beyond and in the distance, and behind that a pale blue sky.
Who am I? he wondered.
The quotation from page 7 is from Collected Poems 1960–1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright, 1936, by Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.; © 1963, 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.
Lyrics of the following songs have been used by special permission of the respective copyright owners:
“Chattanooga Choo Choo” — Lyric by Mack Gordon, music by Harry Warren. Copyright © 1941, Twentieth Century Music Corporation. Rights controlled by Leo Feist, Inc., New York, NY. Used by permission.
“Luna Mezzo Mare” — Copyright MCMXXVII by Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., Inc., New York, NY. Copyright renewed MCMLV and assigned to Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., Inc.
“I Will Follow Him” — English lyric by Norman Gimbel & Arthur Altman; original lyric by Jacques Plante. Music by J. W. Stole & Del Roma. Copyright, Leeds Music Coproration, 322 West 48 Street, New York 36, NY, sole selling agent in USA and Canada.