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without glancing at the typewritten yellow pages, picked up his daughter’s letter. Every time he got a letter from either one of his daughters, he remembered the dreadful confession Scott Fitzgerald’s daughter had written somewhere that whenever she got a letter from her father while she was in college, she would tear it open and shake it to see if a check would fall out and then toss the letter, unread, into a desk drawer.
    He opened the letter. A father could do no less.
    “Dear Dad,” he read, in Anne’s cramped, schoolgirlish handwriting, “San Francisco is Gloomstown. The college is just about closed down, and it might just as well be a war. The Huns are everywhere. On both sides. Springtime is for Mace. Everybody is so boringly convinced he’s right. As far as I can tell, our black friends want me to learn about African tribal dances and ritual circumcision of young ladies rather than the Romantic poets. The Romantic poets are irrelevant, see. The professors are as bad as everybody else. On both sides. Education is square, chick. I don’t even bother hanging around the campus anymore. If you do go there, twenty people ask you to lay your pure white body down in front of the Juggernaut for twenty different reasons. No matter what you do, you are a traitor to your generation. If you don’t think Jerry Rubin is the finest fruit of young American manhood, your father is a bank president or a secret agent for the CIA or, God forbid, Richard Nixon. Maybe I’ll take up simultaneous membership in the Black Panthers and the John Birch Society and show everybody. To paraphrase a well-known writer: Neither a student nor a policeman be.
    “I know I was the one who wanted to go to college in San Francisco because after the years of school in Switzerland some insane superpatriot convinced me I was losing my American-ness, whatever that is, and that San Francisco was the town where the real action was. And I was planning to get a job as a waitress at Lake Tahoe this summer to see how the other half lives. I no longer give a damn how the other half lives. This may be temporary, I realize. I’m abashed how temporary so many of my ideas are. Most of them don’t last till lunch. And I couldn’t help being American, God help me, if I lived to be a hundred. What I’d like, if it wouldn’t be too much of a burden on you, would be to get on a plane and come over to Europe for the summer and let them sort things out at the college without me before the fall term begins.
    “If I do come to Europe, I’d like to avoid Mother as much as I can. I suppose you know she’s in Geneva this month. She writes me dire letters about how impossible you are and that you are out to destroy her and that you’re a libertine and suffering from the male menopause and I don’t know what all. And ever since she found out I take the Pill, she treats me as though I’m Fanny Hill or a character out of the Marquis de Sade, and the evenings will be long on the banks of Lac Léman if I visit her.
    “Your favorite daughter Marcia writes from time to time from Arizona. She is very happy there, she says, except for her weight. Obviously, no news gets through to the University of Arizona, and it is still like those old college musicals with panty raids and pillow fights you see on the Late Late Show. She is putting on weight, she says, because she eats compulsively because our happy home has been broken up. Freud, Freud, in the ice cream parlor.
    “I’ve made a lot of jokes in this letter, I see, but Daddy, I don’t feel funny. Love, Anne.”
    He sighed as he put his daughter’s letter down. I will go someplace without an address, he thought, without a post office, without a telephone. He wondered what his letters home to his mother and father, written during the war, would sound like to him if he read them now. He had burned them all when he had found them in a trunk, neatly bound, after his mother’s death.
    He picked up Gail McKinnon’s yellow