“Once, at one of the very rare and savory moments when my own teammates grudgingly allowed me to take the ball around one of the ends, Seymour, playing for the opposite side, disconcerted me by looking overjoyed to see me as I charged in his direction, as though it were an unexpected, an enormously providential chance encounter. I stopped almost dead short, and someone, of course, brought me down, in neighborhood talk, like a ton of bricks.”

“Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd ever see me again. Boy, did it scare me. You can't imagine. I started sweating like a bastard – my whole shirt and underwear and everything. Then I started doing something else. Every time I'd get to the end of a block I'd make believe I was talking to my brother Allie. I'd say to him, "Allie, don't let me disappear. Allie, don't let me disappear. Allie, don't let me disappear. Please, Allie." And then when I'd reach the other side of the street without disappearing, I'd thank him.”

“When Seymour and I were five and three, Les and Bessie played on the same bill for a couple of weeks with Joe Jackson -- the redoubtable Joe Jackson of the nickel-plated trick bicycle that shone like something better than platinum to the very last row of the theater. A good many years later, not long after the outbreak of the Second World War, when Seymour and I had just recently moved into a small New York apartment of our own, our father -- Les, as he'll be called hereafter -- dropped in on us one evening on his way home from a pinochle game. He quite apparently had held very bad cards all afternoon. He came in, at any rate, rigidly predisposed to keep his overcoat on. He sat. He scowled at the furnishings. He turned my hand over to check for cigarette-tar stains on my fingers, then asked Seymour how many cigarettes he smoked a day. He thought he found a fly in his highball. At length, when the conversation -- in my view, at least -- was going straight to hell, he got up abruptly and went over to look at a photograph of himself and Bessie that had been newly tacked up on the wall. He glowered at it for a full minute, or more, then turned around, with a brusqueness no one in the family would have found unusual, and asked Seymour if he remembered the time Joe Jackson had given him, Seymour, a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle, all over the stage, around and around. Seymour, sitting in an old corduroy armchair across the room, a cigarette going, wearing a blue shirt, gray slacks, moccasins with the counters broken down, a shaving cut on the side of his face that I could see, replied gravely and at once, and in the special way he always answered questions from Les -- as if they were the questions, above all others, he preferred to be asked in his life. He said he wasn't sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson's beautiful bicycle.”

“Walt, at about eleven, had a routine of looking at Seymour's wrists and telling him to take off his sweater. "Take off your sweater, hey, Seymour. Go ahead, hey. It's warm in here." S. would beam back at him, shine back at him. He loved that kind of horseplay from any of the kids. I did, too, but only off and on. He did invariably. He thrived, too, waxed strong, on all tactless or underconsidered remarks directed at him by family minors. In 1959, in fact, when on occasion I hear rather nettling news of the doings of my youngest brother and sister, I think on the quantities of joy they brought S. I remember Franny, at about four, sitting on his lap, facing him, and saying, with immense admiration, "Seymour, your teeth are so nice and yellow!" He literally staggered over to me to ask if I'd heard what she said.”

“I could see my mother going in Spaulding's and asking the salesman a million dopy questions - and here I was getting the ax again. It mad me feel pretty sad. She bought me the wrong kind of skates - I wanted racing skates and she bought me hockey - but it made me sad anyway. Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.”

“My father wrote beautifully,” Esmé interrupted. “I’m saving a number of his letters for posterity.”I said that sounded like a very good idea. I happened to be looking at her enormous-faced, chrono-graphic-looking wristwatch again. I asked if it had belonged to her father.She looked down at her wrist solemnly. “Yes, it did,” she said. “He gave it to me just before Charles and I were evacuated.” Self-consciously, she took her hand off the table, saying, “Purely as a momento, of course.” She guided the conversation in a different direction. “I’d be extremely flattered if you’d write a story exclusively for me sometime. I’m an avid reader.”I told her I certainly would, if I could. I said that I wasn’t terribly prolific.“It doesn’t have to be terribly prolific! Just so that isn’t childish and silly.” She reflected. “I prefer stories about squalor.”“About what?” I said, leaning forward.“Squalor. I’m extremely interested in squalor.”

“Sometimes I see me dead in the rain.”