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what’s bothering him and—”
    “I worry so.”
    “I know it.”
    “I want him to be happy.”
    “I know that too. And he is.”
    “I wish I believed that. I’m so afraid Clark thinks . . . that he’s always thought, that he’s—”
    “No.”
    “Alone.”
    “How could he possibly think that? He’s fine.”
    “What did he tell you?”
    Mr. Kent draws a long breath, lets it out. “It’s just . . . oh, it’s just as you said. The boy feels bad for going out when he could’ve stayed home and taken care of you.”
    “He’s a good boy.”
    “Yes,” says Mr. Kent, “he’s a very good boy, our son.”
    6
    Washed in moon glow, Clark Kent straddles his barn’s peaked roof, staring out into the middle distance, seeing insects, bats, and owls in the blackness, and wondering uneasily what he’s supposed to do with all of these crazy talents he just keeps finding out that he has. After a while he gets up jiggling that mashed wad of lead in his left hand. And flings it suddenly, hard as he can.
    It climbs, keeps climbing, and doesn’t arc . . .

II
    A disreputable profession. Temper tantrum.
The Berg family. A young man and his camera.
Breaking and entering.
●
    1
    Although she graduated college the previous June and was theoretically grown, Lois Lane (who skipped the fourth, sixth, eighth, and eleventh grades) still was only seventeen last August when she trained down to New York City from Monticello. She was moving there to take graduate journalism classes at Columbia University, and her father, concerned about her safety and virtue, had installed her in an oldfangled women’s residency hotel. The Dolly Madison on East Twenty-seventh Street. Quite a distance from Morningside Heights, but lord knows he didn’t want his daughter living in Harlem. Staying at the Dolly Madison was the one condition he’d set before giving her his grudging permission to pursue an ambition he felt was not just crazy and common, but dangerous.
    Time and again Lois would remind him—gently, with a girlish smile; she knew how to handle the old man—that it was a journalist in Cuba directly responsible for making her father’s reputation, which led—remember, Daddy?—to practically everything good in his uncommonly good life. From his hero’s welcome home, to his Congressional Medal of Honor, to his rise in the marines and all of those plum postings, to his current position as first vice-president of the Hatlo Machine Company, everything had sprung from a newspaper reporter’s two-hundred-word cable about a wounded young sergeant heroically wigwagging a makeshift flag under ferocious gunfire at Cuzco.
    To all of that “Captain” Lane—he would forever be the “captain,” though he’d retired from the corps in 1919—to all of that he would respond by saying yes, true enough, but Lois ought not to use Mr. Stephen Crane as a career model, the boy had been a brawling hothead and a drunkard, he’d smoked cigarettes like a fiend, married a divorced woman of questionable virtue, and died of consumption before he turned thirty.
    Oh, Dad, she’d say, I don’t want to be a war correspondent, just a regular old reporter.
    Regular old reporters, he’d scoff, are nothing more than Peeping Toms on a salary!
    Oh, Dad . . .
    But if you simply must, I want you living at the Dolly Madison.
    Which looked like a miniature Southern plantation and was run like a genteel sorority house with strict rules, including white gloves at dinner, a nine o’clock curfew, no smoking, no alcohol, and absolutely no gentlemen callers beyond the receiving parlor.
    Lois stayed at the Hotel Dolly Madison, the dreaded Dolly, scarcely three months. Around the time she turned eighteen in late November, she checked out of there and into an automatic-elevator building on East Twenty-ninth Street, rooming with Betty Simon, an O.R. nurse at Roosevelt Hospital the boys had nicknamed Skinny because she was anything but.
    When he found out about the move, the