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cursive.
    N.Y. to St John’s College, Fordham, The Bronx.
    Strongly advise take Harlem North train. Check sched. on G.C. board. Costs more than 3 rd Ave. El but direct to Fordham Sta. without change. Same route return G.C. Depot.
    Penn Central Depot, Hoboken, N.J.
    (for Chicago w. connect. for Minneapolis w. connect. for Winnipeg)
    From G.C.D. 3 rd Avenue El, so. to 14 th Street.
    14th Ave. car. w. to end of line. Walk so. to 10th St. Pier & Penn. Central Ferry crossing Hudson R.
    If overnight in N.Y.
    Society of Jesus, 39 E. 83rd St.
    Show this note. They will give you a bed.
    Your Father in Christ,
    Jeremiah Lillis, S.J.
    After breakfast they hurried back to Grand Central. The pace of the city forced everyone to speed, and it was impossible for them not to hurry. Clearly, though, some people had dropped out of the race. Vagabonds lay on the sidewalks, smothered in humps of rags. At the corner of 42 nd Street and Fifth Avenue a burly woman with a face like a purple pumpkin and slits for eyes held out a tin cup, the crowd streaming around her as if she were a rock in a river,
    Help Me
    I am Blind
    scrawled on cardboard hung around her neck.
    At the depot Joe looked up at the board and found a Harlem North train leaving in seven minutes. They raced through the tunnels and boarded it just in time. Their car was nearly empty, and they both claimed window seats just as the train started to roll. Soon it had left the tunnels and was running along elevated tracks. Joe stared down at long avenues hectic with horse cars and omnibuses, with children dodging traffic and boys at every street corner standing on crates, hawking newspapers. Streets flashed by in swords of light, offering glimpses of the shiny East River. Women with bare arms leaned out the windows of tenements, panting in the heat, so near Joe felt he could almost touch them. There was something charged and warm about such relentless, impersonal intimacy. Hundreds of people eating breakfast in tiny kitchens, with no one bothering to look up as the train rumbled past.
    There were houses full of whores in Ottawa, women of all nationalities. He had overheard his cooks and bunkhouse men talk of whores who’d do anything for a dollar — and three dollars bought a fellow the whole night. This city was probably full of such women. He could certainly afford the money. But anyone with three dollars could have a whore, and it was purity that attracted him, purity and cleanliness. He must have the sort of clean girl whose family wouldn’t let her have anything to do with a fellow from the clearings. Not until he had made something of himself, done something powerful — and even then they’d be wary.
    He glanced at his brother across the aisle. The Little Priest was fast asleep, head thrown back, mouth wide open.
    The train crossed the black ribbon of the Harlem River, more or less saltwater, Joe figured, and therefore an arm of the sea, which joined everything and separated everything: the rim of the world.
    For many months after his father’s disappearance Joe had imagined him still alive in their house — living there in secret, hiding out behind the walls. Putting his ear to the plaster when no one was watching, Joe would listen for sounds through the whitewash and lath, through wadded insulation of horsehair and crumpled newspapers. Of course, all he’d ever heard was the scrabbling of mice.
    He would be making his own way from now on, teaching himself what he needed to learn. No need of ghosts rattling inside the walls. No need of anyone. He knew how to hold himself within himself. A fellow needed a good hard shell to survive. It was important to be able see things as they were.
    ~
    The morning had thickened into a blaze of spring heat by the time the Harlem North train deposited them on the sleepy platform of Fordham Station and slid away into the deeper mysteries of Westchester. In the Pontiac on such a warm spring day, the birches would be