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private wish was to abandon the college altogether. I had already seen Bertram send off my third quarter's tuition: I was obligated to him. I was, in a sense, his ward, as in those old English novels I was reading night after night, Dickens and Trollope and George Eliot, one after another.
    Bertram picked up Middlemarch and opened to an illustration of Dorothea and Casaubon. Casaubon sat cramped with his candle, ringed by a heap of fly-specked books. Dorothea's finely molded neck arched backward. "Dorothea resists Casaubon," the caption read.
    "Tell you what," Bertram began, "how would you like to move into the dorms for the rest of the term?"
    "The dorms? You mean live at the college?"
    "Sure. It's not that much extra, I can swing it. Then you wouldn't be alone so much of the time. You'd be with people your own age."
    "My father said they're like dungeons."
    "Oh come on," Ninel said, "from what Bert's told me your father never so much as set foot over there. He never even saw those dorms, he just didn't want to pay the fees."
    Then I understood that Ninel meant to drive me out of Bertram's life.
    This made me brazen. It made me rough. "Did you decide?" I asked Bertram. "About the Party, about joining?"
    He twisted up his little smile; he hardly minded. But the smile was for Ninel. "Well, you can't hang around Ninel and not end up committed."
    "But Ninel isn't committed to you. She won't marry you."
    "Oh for Pete's sake," Ninel said.
    "It's only an empty figment, Rosie. A piece of paper."
    "Mumbo jumbo," Ninel said.
    "Look," Bertram said, "we've got to figure out some sort of new arrangement—"
    "It's already figured out," Ninel broke in. "Bert's selling the furniture and moving in with me. It doesn't make sense these days to keep up a big place like this, all full of monstrosities."
    That night I answered Professor Rudolf Mitwisser's advertisement in the Albany Star.
    And that same night—as a reward, I thought, for my promised departure—Bertram came into my bedroom, put his knee on my bed, and kissed me, for the first time, fully on the mouth. The pressure on my lower lip was heavy, painful, voluptuous. I felt I was being bitten.
    In this way I was expelled from Albany's obscure and diminutive radical pocket.

5
    E VEN AFTER two entire weeks, my position in the Mitwisser household remained amorphous. I could not fathom what my obligations were, and if I attempted to ask, the answer was dissolved in chaos. "Just fill those boxes with papa's books," the oldest child ordered. Her name was Anneliese; she spoke good English—she spoke it casually, familiarly—though with a distinct accent. Except for the youngest, all the children had been enrolled, for some months now, in the Albany public schools, and (so Mrs. Mitwisser had intimated that first day) they had had a tutor besides. They had already acquired a patina of the local vernacular. It was several days before I could arrive at exactly how many Mitwisser children there were. They rushed around on this or that mission (the whole house was packing for the move to New York); it was like trying to identify the number of fish swimming in a pond. At first I counted six, then four—the actual total was five. Their names were so many bird-chirps whirling around me: Anneliese, Heinrich, Gerhardt, Wilhelm, Waltraut. Waltraut was the easiest to remember, a round-eyed, curly-haired girl of three, who would cling to whoever happened to be passing by. Mrs. Mitwisser (I tried on occasion to call her Frau Mitwisser) was not often seen. She was hidden in a bedroom upstairs and appeared to have little to do with the fierce activity all around.
    I could not distinguish Heinrich from Wilhelm, or Gerhardt from Heinrich. This was made all the more difficult because now and then they addressed one another as Hank, Bill, and Jerry, and then would rapidly switch back to Heinz, Willi, and Gert. "Papa doesn't like it when they do that," Anneliese instructed me. "Papa is a purist." Anneliese