Broadway dreamed off to her lullaby.
She began, "Say it with music—"
I thought of Palmer Gymnasium on the Princeton Campus in about 1922—the June, the quiet trees, the cigarettes like cherry-colored fireflies, the flappers, a cicada competing with strings and woodwinds, and me outside because I didn't have the spondulix and the tux. My throat thickened with something sharper than carcinoma.
If only I had known then what I know now.
And suddenly I remembered that I had known.
In that musky dark, in the dark of a thousand other disappointed evenings, in the beam and blister of every day, I had been tightening the spring for the run. The anticipated journey—the slatting of my choo-choo train around its silver track.
I knew then because I was doing it.
And I knew now, but differently, because it was done.
That poignancy was not this.
Beneath the fragrant maples and beyond the envious desuetude had burned the gathering assurance.