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“Finnerty upstairs?”
    “I sent him on over to the club. Kroner and Baer got there early, and I sent Finnerty over to keep them company while you get dressed.”
    “How does he look?”
    “How did Finnerty always look? Awful. I swear he was wearing the same baggy suit he wore when he said goodbye to us seven years ago. And I’ll swear it hasn’t been cleaned since then, either. I tried to get him to wear your old tuxedo, and he wouldn’t hear of it. Went right over the way he was. I suppose a stiff shirt would have been worse in a way. It would have showed how dirty his neck is.”
    She pulled the neck of her dress lower, looked at herself in a mirror, and raised it slightly again—a delicate compromise. “Honestly,” she said, talking to Paul’s image in the mirror, “I’m crazy about that man—you
know
I am. But he just looks awful all the time. I mean, after all, a man in his position, and not even clean.”
    Paul smiled and shook his head. It was true. Finnertyhad always been shockingly lax about his grooming, and some of his more fastidious supervisors in the old days had found it hard to believe that a man could be so staggeringly competent, and at the same time so unsanitary-looking. Occasionally, the tall, gaunt Irishman would surprise everyone—usually between long stretches of work—by showing up with his cheeks gleaming like wax apples, and with new shoes, socks, shirt, tie, and suit, and, presumably, underwear. Engineers’ and managers’ wives would make a big fuss over him, to show him that such care of himself was important and rewarding; and they declared that he was really the handsomest thing in the Ilium industrial fold. Quite possibly he was, in a coarse, weathered way: grotesquely handsome, like Abe Lincoln, but with a predatory, defiant cast to his eyes rather than the sadness of Lincoln’s. After Finnerty’s periodic outbursts of cleanliness and freshness, the wives would watch with increasing distress as he wore the entire celebrated outfit day in and day out, until the sands and soot and grease of time had filled every seam and pore.
    And Finnerty had other unsavory aspects. Into the resolutely monogamous and Eagle Scout-like society of engineers and managers, Finnerty often brought women he’d picked up in Homestead a half-hour before. When it came time, after supper, to play games, Finnerty and the girl would generally take a highball in either hand and wander off to the shrub-walled first tee, if it was warm, or out to his car, if it was cold.
    His car—in the old days, anyway—had been more disreputable than Paul’s was today. In this direction, at least—the most innocuous direction, socially—Paul had imitated his friend. Finnerty had claimed that his love of books and records and good whisky kept him too broke to buy a car and clothes commensurate with his position in life. Paul had computed the value of Finnerty’s record, book, and bottle collections and concluded that the Irishman would still have plenty left for even two new cars. It was then that Paul began to suspect that Finnerty’s way of life wasn’t as irrational as itseemed; that it was, in fact, a studied and elaborate insult to the managers and engineers of Ilium, and to their immaculate wives.
    Why Finnerty had seen fit to offend these gentle people was never clear to Paul, who supposed the aggressiveness, like most aggressiveness, dated back to some childhood muddle. The only intimation as to what that childhood had been like had come not from Finnerty but from Kroner, who took a breeder’s interest in his engineers’ bloodlines. Kroner had once remarked, confidingly and with a show of sympathy, that Finnerty was a mutant, born of poor and stupid parents. The only insight Finnerty had ever permitted Paul was in a moment of deep depression, during a crushing hangover, when he’d sighed and said he’d never felt he belonged anywhere.
    Paul wondered about his own deep drives as he realized how much