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Pole, another a candy bar, another a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and so on. As younger brother of one of the founding architects, I had a special relationship to the igloo, being one of the first guests permitted entrance and, thereafter, more or less free to enter and exit at my own judgment at such moments as the crowd inside was not too great. It was a source of considerable amazement to me how, in this hemisphere of snow, my house, my yard and the Bronx, New York, disappeared in space and time, I was further engrossed by the paradox of the warmth of a structure made of solid ice. You sweated in there, it was so hot. You took off your hat and snowsuit jacket or you were, almost immediately, glisteningly hot as on the hottest day of summer.
    The igloo lasted physically long after the builders and everyone else grew bored with it. Inside a week it was almost totally forgotten. It began to shrink, but maintained its geometry even as it grew smaller and greyer and less interesting. I had discovered this about ice cream cones too—that they maintained theiroriginal proportions even as they were consumed. Long after I had lost any interest in sitting inside the igloo I nevertheless took pleasure from its integrity of form, almost as if my brother and his friends had used the magic of an ethereal idea as something to hand—like the most skillful magician.
    Eventually I joined some other children working at the igloo and kicking it down into a pile of solid snow. It seemed as important to do that as it had been to go inside and sit down when the thing was in its fresh, crystal glory and all the world was reduced to the cold and silent space of an Arctic night, and the faces of your fellow humans looked at you, red and expectant, with the light of the candle flame filling the centers of their widened eyes.

FIVE
    A s my birthday, January 6, approached each winter I anticipated it with the conviction that the number six was sacramental, my number, the enumeration of my special being. It was like my name, which was mine alone. The holiday season and the New Year seemed to me just a lighting of the way, an advance fanfare for the culminating event, like all the motorcycle policemen in their slouch caps and riding boots, and with their captains in the sidecars, roaring down the street ahead of the President.
    My mother inadvertently confirmed my feeling by considering my birthday, as she did every ritual, in its historical context.
    “Can you imagine not wanting this golden little boy?” she said to her friend Mae as they sat in the kitchen having tea. We were waiting for the first of my party guests.
    In my white shirt and tie and my short pants held up by attached suspenders, I stood by my mother’s side leaning my elbows on the table and indolently eating a cookie. She combed her fingers through my blond hair and I shook my head as a horse shakes his mane.
    “Give him to me if you don’t want him,” Mae said, who was an unmarried woman. She winked at me. Unlike my round-armed mother, Mae was skinny. She wore thick eyeglasses that made her eyes small. And she smoked cigarettes, which mymother did not do. With her elbow crooked, Mae held the cigarette between her index and middle fingers and she pointed it at the ceiling.
    “Oh, we like him now all right, I suppose,” my mother said. She pulled me up on her lap. “Now that he’s here, we’ll keep him.”
    More than once my mother had told me that I was a mistake. What this meant I both knew and did not know, in that way children have for getting just enough of the sense of something not to want to pursue it in detail. The idea that I was not expected or striven for did not injure me, however. I felt assured of my mother’s love, as troublesome as I may have found it.
    “He’s always been difficult,” she said proudly. “Full of surprises, from the day he was born. A breech birth no less.”
    “An acrobat,” Mae said.
    “I’ll say. Except the