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warehouses of northern Manhattan. Sometimes in the spring I used to see cricket played there on Friday afternoons. Friday was the only day I didn’t take the school bus. A few of the teachers met at Dorney and Malone’s, a bar underneath the elevated tracks, and drank beer (rarely more than one) and ate popcorn from wooden bowls, before taking the train into town and beginning the weekend. Students passed by us on their way home and sometimes caught us going in. It pleased them, to see signs of ordinary life in their teachers; they felt they had something over us.
    The hill is steep enough that I paused at a bend in the drive to catch my breath and look back. Van Cortlandt expands as you rise above it; the dirty industrial face of Inwood appears over the treetops. The last time I walked up that hill I was twenty-three years old, and most of the things that now define my life had not yet occurred. I was unmarried, daughterless; I had never published a book. But as I approached the school gates, the strong original sense of my first impressions returned to me – including the dread I always felt each Monday morning on re-entering a world of children.
    Peter and I, whenever we could, used our free periods to wander the streets. ‘Shuttered with branches,’ as he once put it, and away from them . We stopped sometimes in front of the gabled houses, set back behind driveways and driveway hoops; looked at the expensive cars, the lawns maintained by men in overalls, filling the daylight hours with slow work. Peter had the trick of falling in step with the kind of conversation I might have had with myself. We described the weather or talked about some of the kids. We also discussed the deep restlessness of a schoolmaster’s life: the things we thought about while we lectured or looked at out of the classroom window. Teachers are sometimes granted a second chance at the friendships of youth, which are based on the small intimacies of people bounded on all sides by unwanted tasks.
    I entered the grounds through the parking lot (Peter always stood just outside the gates to smoke his pipe) and climbed over a low wall. Two or three concrete steps led to the back door. Classes, at least, were in session; most of the halls were empty. Only a few of the older kids had gathered around their bags in the corridors. I used to reckon up in the first few years after teaching the number of students who would remember me if I came back. Diminishing year by year: teachers and students alike pass slowly through the bloodstream of school life after they leave and then disappear altogether. It was actually a relief when my youngest class graduated, though I still dream sometimes about entering a room full of kids whose names I have forgotten, about losing my way in the halls.
    At reception, I asked the way to Heinz’s office. The bird-like Irish woman at the black phones, smaller than she used to be, blinder (her pale staring blue eyes were fading into the whites), remembered me. ‘Sure I know you,’ she said, ‘tall as you are. You were Mr Pattieson’s great friend.’
    â€˜I knew him a little and liked what I knew.’
    â€˜A very amusing man. A great one for impressions.’
    â€˜I never heard his impressions.’
    â€˜Well, I suppose he didn’t intend them for the upstairs.’ Most of the department offices were on the second floor. The ground floor housed administration, and that’s where she directed me now, back the way I had come. ‘To the door with the window in it,’ she said. I stopped a moment at her desk; she worked in a little cubicle just off the main entrance, with an old-fashioned switchboard over her head that hadn’t been used in years.
    â€˜I hear he died a few years ago. I was very sorry to miss the funeral.’
    â€˜You weren’t the only one who was sorry.’
    â€˜I hear he wrote a few books.’
    She gripped me confidentially on the