But their fathers would pointedly say, "What about the radioactivity, Old Man?"
"I'm alive," he'd reply. "There's no radioactivity out there."
But they'd say, "How can we be sure? There are individual differences of susceptibility. Probably you are unhurt by dosages that would kill any normal person."
And the mothers would say, "Eat some more, Old Man. Eat—and go. Bring our babies dreams, if you like, but don't try to tempt them Outside. Even if it isn't radioactive there, you've admitted it gets hot and it gets cold and the wind blows fiercely hard. Our babies were born under shelter, and under shelter they must stay, like us and our parents before us."
So Old Arch would brush off his whiskers one last time and maybe put on an old shirt the father dug up for him and then go out the back way. In spite of what might have been said, he would have to walk the twenty flights down to the ground because he wouldn't be invited to walk through the apartment to the front hall where the elevator was.
Sometimes people were hostile when he spoke to their children, and they would have him arrested. He was then bathed and barbered in the jail, and was given all new clothes. But they'd always burn his bed, and he'd have trouble getting a new one. And sometimes a jailor might covet the pocketknife he carried, or take away his billy can. On the whole I think he preferred not to go to jail except perhaps in winter, when it was cold outside the City.
There were always those ready to talk of asylums, and the need to put him away for his own good. But nobody was sure where his legal residence was, so he wasn't really eligible for public hospitalization.
He kept to his rounds. My grandfather remembers standing in his mother's kitchen listening to Old Arch. It was like meeting one of Joseph's brethren and being told exactly what the coat looked like. Something exciting out of a dream from the remote past, when all the worlds had on them those bright moist diamonds Arch described as morning dew.
My grandfather wanted to see the morning dew, though he knew better than to say so.
Old Arch understood. He tried to make the thing possible. But an opportunity to see the morning dew was something he just couldn't give to my grandfather or anybody else.