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for future achievement that challenge the imagination. The hope of the race is in the great blind forces of the masses properly utilized by capable leaders.’ ” She looked up again, frowning. “Lord, Montgomery
does
go on about him, doesn’t he . . . ?” Clearly she spoke to Hubert, behind the wall against which Sam’s bed stood—still unmade from this morning.
    â€œWhat’s that?” Sam began to shrug off his coat.
    Clarice smiled again. “It’s about my friend I said looked like you . . . ?” She held up
Opportunity
. “Jean . . . ?”
    From inside, Hubert said: “Sam, if that’s you, would you
please
clean up in there a little!”
    â€œI was
going
to spread your bed up,” Clarice said softly from the chair, “only he wouldn’t let—”
    But, coat back on his shoulders and ears hot with embarrassment, Sam was already across the room, tugging up the sheet, swinging over the quilt.
    Indeed, Sam was astonished at how little of Christmas stayed with him that year: he and Hubert celebrated it, of course. He gave Hubert an embossed leather notebook, which cost two dollars. Hubert gave him three sets of long johns, which was supposed to be kind of funny, but Sam started wearing them that morning: they were a pretty good idea. And Corey and Elsie had a tree hung with both glass and colored-paper ornaments, strung with cranberries and yarns of popcorn and cotton wool all around its base, just like at home; but (and it was the first time Sam had ever experienced this, so that for a few days it really bothered him) it just didn’t
feel
like Christmas.
    When it was over, the only thing that remained with any vividness was a pre-Christmas Saturday morning trip to the post office forElsie and Corey, to mail the three shopping bags full of gifts back to Raleigh. (One bag was Hubert’s and his.) The building like a fort—
    The lines of people—
    Within, pine bows were draped all around the upper molding on the marble walls—
    Bells of shiny red and silver paper hung, soundless, in each corner. Black rubber mats were splayed over the floor, slopping with the slush people tracked about in rundown shoes and open galoshes with jingling clasps. Wreaths with red berries and red ribbon were wired to the doors. But even inside, the marble room was chill and damp enough for your breath to drift away in clouds.
    Were all these black and yellow and tan and brown faces, in all these lines in front of all the brass-barred windows, sending presents back to some ever-shifting, generalized, and hopelessly unlocatable place (but never baffling the postal readers of the carefully printed or clumsily scrawled addresses on brown paper under twine) called home? Certainly, to look at the bags and parcels they carried, it seemed so.
    The clerks behind the bars, Sam had noticed, were all white.
    Postal clerks were white at home too, but there were only three windows in the post office he went to in Raleigh. Here, between marble columns—and it wasn’t even the central post office—ten windows lined the wall, so he’d just expected, well . . . maybe
some
dark faces behind the squared brass bars.
    With broad, brown cheekbones, brown eyes large and crossed, and wearing an old black coat, a girl settled herself next to him, to stare up. From within her blunt, strabismic gaze, a glint of blue surfaced in Sam’s mind—from the staring boy back on the train. Then it sank into the estuary of her curiosity, to swirl away. Looking down at her and in a voice more friendly than he felt, Sam asked her age-absent stare (was she eleven? was she fifteen?): “Now who are you?”
    She held up her hand to him, or rather her wrist—with her fingers bent down. The hand was deformed—or at least . . . its deformity surprised, even shocked, him: the forefinger was thumb-thick and