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and it doesn’t make sense to throw away money for no reason. Don’t worry about the money, he says to her. He will pay. She mustn’t worry about anything.
    By the end of the following week, she is up to her neck in forms. Not just from the state universities in Florida, but from Barnard, Vassar, Duke, Princeton, and Brown as well. She fills them out, composes all the required essays (which he reads over but does not alter or correct, since no alterations or corrections are necessary), and then they return to life as they once knew it, before the college madness began. Later that month, he receives a letter from an old friend in New York, one of the boys from the gang of crazy kids he used to run around with in high school. Bing Nathan is the only person from the past he still writes to, the only person who has known each one of his many addresses over the years. At first, he was mystified by his willingness to make this exception for Bing, but after he had been gone for six or eight months, he understood that he couldn’t cut himself off completely, that he needed at least one link to his old life. It isn’t that he and Bing have ever been particularly close. The truth is that he finds Bing somewhat off-putting, at times even obnoxious, but Bing looks up to him, for unknown reasons he has attained thestatus of exalted figure in Bing’s eyes, and that means Bing can be trusted, relied upon to keep him informed about any changes on the New York front. That is the nub of it. Bing was the one who told him about his grandmother’s death, the one who told him about his father’s broken leg, the one who told him about Willa’s eye operation. His father is sixty-two years old now, Willa is sixty, and they aren’t going to live forever. Bing has his ear to the ground. If anything happens to either one of them, he will be on the phone the next minute.
    Bing reports that he is now living in an area of Brooklyn called Sunset Park. In mid-August, he and a group of people took over a small abandoned house on a street across from Green-Wood Cemetery and have been camped out there as squatters ever since. For reasons unknown, the electricity and the heat are still functioning. That could change at any second, of course, but for now it appears there is a glitch in the system, and neither Con Ed nor National Grid has come to shut off the service. Life is precarious, yes, and each morning they wake up to the threat of immediate and forcible eviction, but with the city buckling under the pressure of economic hard times, so many government jobs have been lost that the little band from Sunset Park seems to be flying under the municipal radar, and no marshals or bailiffs have shown up to kick them out. Bing doesn’t know if Miles is Underwood for a change, but one of the original members of the group has recently left town, and a room is available forhim if he wants it. The previous occupant was named Millie, and to replace Millie with Miles seems alphabetically coherent, he says. Alphabetically coherent. Another example of Bing’s wit, which has never been his strong point, but the offer seems genuine, and as Bing goes on to describe the other people who are living there (a man and two women, a writer, an artist, and a graduate student, all in their late twenties, all poor and struggling, all with talent and intelligence), it is clear that he is trying to make a move to Sunset Park sound as attractive as possible. Bing concludes that at last word all was well with Miles’s father and that Willa left for England in September, where she will be spending the academic year as a visiting professor at Exeter University. In a brief postscript he adds: Think it over.
    Does he want to return to New York? Has the moment finally come for the wayward son to crawl home and put his life together again? Six months ago, he probably wouldn’t have hesitated. Even one month ago, he might have been tempted to consider it, but now it is out of the