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possible for him to accept it as the sort of normal mishap which befalls sensitive girls. It is his confidence in Aunt Emily. As long as she is mistress of his house, the worst that can happen, death itself, is nothing more than seemly.
    Presently Uncle Jules leaves for the office. My aunt speaks to Walter in the hall. I sit in the empty dining room thinking of nothing. Walter joins me for dessert. Afterwards, as Mercer clears the table, Walter goes to the long window and stands looking out, hands in his pockets. I am prepared to reassure him about Kate, but it turns out that it is the Krewe of Neptune, not Kate, which is on his mind.
    â€œI wish you would reconsider, Binx.” There is an exhilaration in his voice which carries over from his talk with Uncle Jules. “We’ve got a damn good bunch of guys now.” Ten years ago he would have said “ace gents” that was what we called good guys in the nineteen forties. “You may not agree with me, but in my opinion it is the best all-around krewe in Carnival. We’re no upstarts and on the other hand we’re not a bunch of old farts—and—” he adds hastily as he thinks of Uncle Jules, “our older men are among the ten wealthiest and most prominent families in New Orleans.” Walter would never never say “rich”; and indeed the word “wealthy,” as he says it, is redolent of a life spiced and sumptuous, a tapestry thick to the touch and shot through with the bright thread of freedom. “You’d really like it now, Jack. I mean it. You really would. I can give you positive assurance that every last one of us would be delighted to have you back.”
    â€œI certainly appreciate it, Walter.”
    Walter still dresses as well as he did in college and sits and stands and slouches with the same grace. He still wears thick socks summer and winter to hide his thin veined ankles and still crosses his legs to make his calf look fat. In college he was one of those upperclassmen freshmen spot as a model: he was Phi Beta Kappa without grinding for it and campus leader without intriguing for it. But most of all he was arbiter of taste. We pledges would see him in the fraternity house sitting with his hat on and one skinny knee cocked up, and so the style was set for sitting and wearing hats. The hat had to be a special kind of narrow-brim brown felt molded to a high tri-cornered peak and then only passable after much fingering had worn the peak through. He liked to nickname the new pledges. One year he fancied “head” names. He lined them up and sat back with his knee cocked up, pushed up his hat with his thumbnail. “You over there, you look to me like Pothead; you talking, you’re Blowhead; you’re Meathead; you’re Sackhead; you’re Needlehead.” For a year after I joined the fraternity I lived in the hope of pleasing him by hitting upon just the right sour-senseless rejoinder, and so of gaining admission to his circle, the fraternity within the fraternity. So when he stopped before the last pledge, a boy from Monroe with a bulging forehead and eyes set low in his face, he paused. “And you, you’re—” “That’s Whalehead,” I said. Walter raised an eyebrow and pulled down his mouth and nodded a derisive nod to his peers of the inner circle. I was in.
    A pledge too felt the privilege of his company and felt the strain too. For one lived only to walk the tightrope with him, to be sour yet affable, careless but in a certain style of carelessness, sardonic yet likable, as popular with men as with women. But strain or no strain, I was content to be his friend. One night I walked home with him after he had been tapped for Golden Fleece—which was but the final honor of a paragraph of honors beneath his picture in the annual. “Binx,” he said—with me he had at last dropped his sour-senseless way of talking. “I’ll let you in on a