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remember,” said Oscar.
              “And this is Helen,” said Francis. “She hangs out with me, but damned if I know why.”
              “Oscar Reo’s what I still go by, folks, and I really do remember you boys. But I don’t drink anymore.”
              “Hey, me neither,” said Pee Wee.
              “I ain’t turned it off yet,” Francis said. “I’m waitin’ till I retire.”
              “He retired forty years ago,” Pee Wee said.
              “That ain’t true. I worked all day today. Gettin’ rich. How you like my new duds?”
              “You’re a sport,” Oscar said. “Can’t tell you from those swells over there.”
              “Swells and bums, there ain’t no difference,” Francis said.
              “Except swells like to look like swells,” Oscar said, “and bums like to look like bums. Am I right?”
              “You’re a smart fella,” Francis said.
              “You still singin’, Oscar?” Pee Wee asked.
              “For my supper.”
              “Well goddamn it,” Francis said, “give us a tune.”
              “Since you’re so polite about it,” Oscar said. And he turned to the piano man and said: “‘Sixteen’ “; and instantly there came from the piano the strains of “Sweet Sixteen.”
              “Oh that’s a wonderful song,” Helen said. “I remember you singing that on the radio.”
              “How durable of you, my dear.”
              Oscar sang into the bar microphone and, with great resonance and no discernible loss of control from his years with the drink, he turned time back to the age of the village green. The voice was as commonplace to an American ear as Jolson’s, or Morton Downey’s; and even Francis, who rarely listened to the radio, or ever had a radio to listen to in either the early or the modern age, remembered its pitch and its tremolo from the New York binge, when this voice by itself was a chorale of continuous joy for all in earshot, or so it seemed to Francis at a distance of years. And further, the attention that the bums, the swells, the waiters, were giving the man, proved that this drunk was not dead, not dying, but living an epilogue to a notable life. And yet, and yet… here he was, disguised behind a mustache, another cripple, his ancient, weary eyes revealing to Francis the scars of a blood brother, a man for whom life had been a promise unkept in spite of great success, a promise now and forever unkeepable. The man was singing a song that had grown old not from time but from wear. The song is frayed. The song is worn out.
              The insight raised in Francis a compulsion to confess his every transgression of natural, moral, or civil law; to relentlessly examine and expose every flaw of his own character, however minor. What was it, Oscar, that did you in? Would you like to tell us all about it? Do you know? It wasn’t Gerald who did me . It wasn’t drink and it wasn’t baseball and it wasn’t really Mama. What was it that went bust, Oscar, and how come nobody ever found out how to fix it for us?
              When Oscar segued perfectly into a second song, his talent seemed awesome to Francis, and the irrelevance of talent to Oscar’s broken life even more of a mystery. How does somebody get this good and why doesn’t it mean anything? Francis considered his own talent on the ball field of a hazy, sunlit yesterday: how he could follow the line of the ball from every crack of the bat, zap after it like a chicken hawk after a chick, how he would stroke and pocket its speed no matter whether it was lined at him or sizzled erratically toward him through the grass. He would stroke it with the predatory curve of his glove and begin with his right hand even then, whether he was running or falling, to reach into that leather pocket, spear the chick