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dollars when he could, to keep the family going. He sold newspapers, he carried copy for the Newark Ledger, he spent a summer as a counselor in a camp in the Adirondacks, he worked as a delivery boy, and tutored backward children and performed whatever jobs were available for a hungry and inexperienced adolescent during the black years of the Depression.
    When he was a freshman in college he was one of a group of students who were promised fifteen dollars apiece, plus tips, to serve as waiters on New Year’s Eve at a country club in western Pennsylvania. The boy who made the arrangements was a casual friend of Benjamin’s called Dyer, whose father was the manager of the country club. Since the golf course was closed and the tennis courts shut down for the winter, there was only a skeleton staff on duty and help for the huge party that was being held on New Year’s Eve for the members and their guests had to be collected at random, with no questions asked about previous experience at waiting on table. All they needed was a pair of black pants and a white shirt. Black bow ties and white jackets were to be supplied by Dyer’s father. The boys, fourteen in number, were to travel from the school to the country club in three borrowed cars, and they would get back late on New Year’s Day.
    Young Dyer, working on his father’s behalf, made the whole thing seem very attractive, almost like a holiday. Dyer was a sophomore, with a little more money than most of his classmates, and was a campus politician with a smooth, confident way of talking and a quietly careless way of dressing that he hoped would make strangers believe he was an undergraduate at Princeton.
    Benjamin was also involved in his first love affair that winter, with a girl who sat next to him in his English class. Her name was Patricia Forrester, and Benjamin blessed the orderly brain of the English teacher which had decreed that all students were to be seated alphabetically in front of him. Patricia was small and dark, with a pale, fine-boned, flowering face that for several years Benjamin believed to be unsurpassed in the long treasury of feminine beauty. From the first time he met her on a warm September afternoon, Benjamin had ignored all other girls and was coldly impervious to their attentions. For weeks after Pat told him that she loved him he wandered around the school grounds and through his classes in a foolish daze, forgetting where he had left his books, losing keys, turning up for the wrong courses at odd hours, staring unseeingly at his assigned reading, with Pat’s face swimming, gently smiling and rich with love, between his eyes and the printed page.
    They were both virgins when they met, and they kissed in doorways and in the autumn woods around the campus and in the back seats of the ramshackle cars that one or two of Benjamin’s friends nagged away from their parents on Saturday nights. Even after they both realized they wanted to make love, it took weeks of planning to find a place they could use for the consummation. Benjamin lived in a dormitory; Pat lived with her mother and father and two younger sisters in an apartment a mile away from the school; the houses they went to for Saturday-night parties were always full of people, and parents in those days made a practice of returning home before midnight. The idea of going to a hotel and registering as man and wife, even if they could have afforded it, was distasteful to both of them. Their first love, they decided, could not be built on a snickering lie. Anyway, they were both sure there wasn’t a hotel clerk in America who would believe that they were man and wife, no matter how many suitcases they carried into the lobby.
    Benjamin was despairingly certain that if it depended upon his ingenuity he and Pat would never do more than kiss and pet in the back seats of cars until he was old enough and rich enough to marry. Eight years, he figured, bitterly. It was only when Pat took matters into