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start.”
    “I guess it is. I hadn’t planned it.” He shook his head; his lips pushed out as if he were saying “Whew” again. “That kid’ll wreck me yet.” He poured more coffee and looked at her as if something had occurred to him for the first time.
    “Did you and Dad have to go through this sort of stuff with me and the girls?”
    “Of course we did. All parents have to if they have definite designs on their children.”
    “Meaning about their kids’ prejudices?”
    She nodded. “Out there in California the problem was a little special—remember a boy called Petey?”
    “Alamacho? Sure, Dave and I and he were The Gang.”
    “Well, Dave. Your father and his were such good friends, you boys just would be, too.”
    “But Petey?”
    “You know the Mexican thing there.”
    “Oh, California.” He made a face. “And the Filipino thing and the Chinese and the Nisei and the Negro thing —what a hotbed of a place for kids to grow up in!”
    “Every place can be a hotbed. It’s only each house that decides it. Belle and Mary and you never heard any prejudice from Dad or me, even the disguised kind, so you didn’t fall for it in school or anywhere.”
    “Mm, I guess.”
    “All kids are so decent to start with.” She smiled at him and went back to the dishes. He thought uneasily of Belle and wondered whether his mother also had. He picked the newspaper up from the floor. A headline about the Marine Corps caught his eye.
    He read it, and went to his desk. He spread out last night’s penciled notes and read them. He yawned. Ashy and cold, the stuff lay there before him. The promise of future success it had contained only a few hours ago seemed burned out for good.
    The house buzzer sounded. He didn’t move. Mail never mattered to him, except when he’d been at camp or overseas. He picked up a pencil. On the sheet headed “Antisemitism in Business,” he idly sketched the insigne of the Marine Corps and beneath it scrupulously began to letter “Semper Fidelis.” As he drew, he thought of Kathy.
    Only after he’d joined the Marine Corps in the spring of 1941 had he begun to go out with girls and remain free of an irrational sense of infidelity to Betty. With some of those girls, the evenings had passed in a vague, tentative unconcern about how they would end; with others, he’d been ridden from the first moment with a kind of sullen plan to get through with whatever preliminaries were needed to get them to bed. There was no beauty in it, but there was reassurance. He was young; he was, after all, not the inert man he thought he had become.
    “Package for you,” his mother called. She came in with two large Manila envelopes, each one crammed and straining against the red twine twisted around the cardboard button on its flap. Inside were hundreds of clippings from newspapers and magazines.
    He began at once to read them, making no exceptions and taking them in the order they came. He made careful notes of names, incidents, dates, committees, entering them below major headings that followed his rough breakdown of subjects. On a separate sheet of paper, on which he printed the word ANGLE, he jotted down fragments of ideas as they came to him. Off and on through the next hours he thought back to his breakfast talk with Tom, thumbing through it, as it were, to see if he could spot some clue that might lead to the solution of his problem. Maybe he could slant the whole series from the point of view of parents anxious to keep bigotry from their own children.
    Before he finished formulating the idea, he discarded it. Even thinking it embarrassed him. It was real enough when it happened, but it would sound phony, a tear-jerky patriotic kind of phony if he tried to pin a whole series to it. For the first time the conviction that this was an impossible assignment took hold of him. Fine in an editor’s head—or a girl’s—but journalistically a dud. He should have rejected it; for the first job, anyway.
    He