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too many memories—and those people in black shirts!
    I wonder whether other rich ladies noticed that all might not be well in Italy or Germany. I don’t put the question. I talk about Laura’s house and vineyards and the cooperative that makes white wine with the grapes she grows. Also about her gallery, which I haven’t seen.
    Cousin Emma wishes to know whether I have made a romantic declaration. That is the expression she used, year after year, about Kate, whom she never met. I think about Laura’s organs and shake my head. When I take my leave,she reaches into her corsage and hands me a check. She has given me money before, sometimes at Christmas and on my birthday, but never such a large amount. I try to kiss her again, but she waves me away. She has a strange way of laughing, like a bass giggle. It had to be a big check, she tells me, to fill the space left by her missing bosoms!
    Perhaps it is then that the plan takes form: This boy will not have children, he will never marry, or if he marries it will be an old woman. Can I appoint my money and have it stay in the trust? First to this Max, since there is nobody else, and then, if I am right and there are no little Hafter children, to the pickaninnies?
    I learned later that the next day she telephoned the bank lawyer.

III
    S TILL A HERO in China: at the banquet at Quan Ju De, the best of duck restaurants, a two-story duck hospice really, after we had eaten our way through all the recognizable parts of our web-footed friend, and were about to attack bowls of fragrant duck soup that only looked as though it had been made with cream, my friend and mentor, Mr. Dou Lizhen, the chief of the legal department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, started his formal toast. I had grown accustomed to these obligatory spurts of oratory, predictable like a bad sonnet, and in fact had already become able to work within the form myself, free of embarrassment or stage fright. Although his English was close to perfect, he spoke in Chinese, for the benefit of our fellow guests. I was the only foreigner. After every couple of sentences he would pause to allow Miss Wang, the young woman who had been assigned to be my guide and guardian, to interpret. I tried to catch the four-tonal directions of a Mandarin speaker’s speech, which give distinct meaning to what would otherwise be homonyms, missed most of them, and then, smiling with appropriate modesty, relaxed as the beautiful Miss Wang, standing at parade-ground attention beside Mr. Dou,rattled on, in her brisk BBC manner, about the bridges of friendship I had built through my work on the joint venture law, the many times my Chinese friends and I would walk over these bridges hand in hand (here I wanted to shout, Wang and Dou, block that metaphor!) straight into the open doors of the new China, and how, in the spirit of mutual benefit and with due regard to the four great principles of modernization decreed by the newly minted Chairman Deng, my seminar on contract law problems had strengthened the relations between our countries. Normally, when the speaker had treated these main themes, he stopped—unless by way of a coda there was to be an anecdote about me, and I rather thought that this time a personal touch might be in order. Instead, my state of devil-may-care ease induced by glass after glass of mao-tai gave way to watchfulness as I heard my Mr. Dou recommend that President Reagan, having recovered from Hinckley’s bullets (Dou put that more periphrastically), give full respect to America’s great leader Mr. Nixon and study deeply his ways of bringing peace to the world. I knew that minutes after he sat down I would have to be on my feet and in my answer touch on that very subject, as to which it would not do to disagree with the previous speaker. Fortunately, he did not go into the matter deeply. That made it possible—after the quiz-kid feat of addressing each of my fellow duck eaters by his full name as I went around the