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of those two boys he’d helped to create just before he’d become the real Koo Davis. They were both in boarding school, Lily at that time living in Washington, an unpaid consultant on various welfare projects, and when Koo phoned her to ask if he could have the boys on one of their vacations she was sardonically amused—she wasn’t afraid of his comedy anymore—but she did agree; he could have the boys for two weeks in April.
    And it was a disaster. Koo didn’t know children, and more importantly he didn’t know these children. He had the use of a mountain ranch in Colorado, complete with horses to ride, streams to fish, hills to climb, real life cowboys as ranch-hands, and even some of Koo’s showbiz pals dropping in for a day or two. But the whole thing went to hell in a handbasket, and by the end of the two weeks Koo was drinking all day long and shooting zingers at his own kids.
    The almost constant rain didn’t help much, of course, but the real problem lay deeper than that. Children, particularly when just entering their teens, tend to become absorbed in one or two special interests, and to ignore everything else that life has to offer. At eleven years of age, Frank was utterly wrapped up in music: swing music, that being the very end of the big band era. Ralph Flanagan, Sauter-Finegan, Billy May: those were Frank’s heroes, and his dream in life was to be a big band arranger. Cowboys and mountains had no place in Frank’s life, and he spent the entire two weeks fretfully hunkered over the ranch’s only radio, a huge pre-war monster that could barely bring in Albuquerque. He clearly saw himself as a prisoner—an innocent prisoner at that—with Koo as the evil jailer.
    As for thirteen-year-old Barry, his passion was even fartherfrom trout streams and backpacking; he was a science-fiction fan, a voracious reader and a constant designer on graph paper of rockets and space stations, all prominently featuring the American Air Force star-in-a-circle. (This was before Sputnik dampened the science-fiction fans’ more chauvinistic sentiments.) Barry ran out of reading material the fourth day and graph paper the sixth. Also, Koo made the mistake of ordering him out of the house and onto a horse, during one break in the rain. It was probably sulky Barry’s fault that the normally placid horse eventually threw him into a rail fence and broke his arm. (“Two weeks from now,” a misguided pal told Koo, “you’ll think back on this and laugh.” Koo gave him a look: “Twenty years from now,” he said, “if anybody mentions this and laughs, I’ll kill him.”)
    This disaster didn’t stop Koo from trying. He knew at last he’d made a mistake in shutting those kids out of his life, and he was determined to make up for it, so over the next several years he took the children from time to time on their vacations from school, and gradually learned to leave them alone with their enthusiasms. A kind of distant respect grew up on both sides, an aloof sort of tolerance. The boys were never warm toward Koo, but they liked him well enough, as though he were a long-term friend of the family; not of their generation, but basically all right. Koo, feeling the guilt of his earlier omission, circled cautiously around the boys, accepting whatever affection they could show him.
    Did he love them? He never asked himself that question, wouldn’t have considered it in any way to the point. The point was to get them to love him; his own feelings didn’t matter. In truth he did love them, fiercely and with terror, but that love had only surfaced the once, during Barry’s pneumonia. He—and they—remained essentially unaware of it, and operated at a much cooler and less passionate level. The fact was, the missing years could not bereclaimed. Koo was not their father any longer; he had waited too long.
    With the children’s maturity, the pressure eased. It was permissible, after all, to leave grown children to their own devices.