snatched up her handbag from the table next to the door where she'd hurled it when they got home. "But it's over with. He's going to live this thing down and turn out to be a man. That's all."

She wedged the bag under her arm, glared at them both, and stamped out of the room. A door slammed.

The man and boy waited in the stale-smelling living-room with its drab wallpaper and humped couch and chairs. Jack Nickerson stared down at his son, his brown, dog's eyes round and vacant. Bob sat up and wiped the tears off his face with his sleeve. Then another sob racked him and he bent forward again. In the back of the house the toilet flushed.

Aggie reappeared in the doorway.

"You've got grease paint on your neck. You'd better get it off before you go to bed. I don't want it on the pillow case."

12.

"Glad to know you, Bob," Harvey Stokes said.

He was a large, broad-shouldered young man, dressed in white. Across his T-shirt in red were the letters SGYMCA. On a leather thong around his handsome neck hung a metal whistle. He was deeply tanned, and when he smiled his teeth shone white as his clothes. His hand gripped Bob's painfully hard, then let go and took Aggie's elbow. He steered her, with Bob trailing after, out of the uproar of shouting boys and clacking ping-pong balls in the lobby of the Y building.

They passed through a flapping gate and crossed the narrow space behind the lobby desk where there was a PBX board, a wall of pigeon holes for mail, and a rack with room keys dangling from it. Baseball gloves, bats, balls, tennis nets, volley balls, were piled on the floor and on shelves under the counter.

Stokes opened a door and led them into his office.

"Won't you sit down?"

Bob waited for Aggie, and when she perched nervously on the edge of one wooden armchair, he let himself down onto the other.

Stokes sat in a swivel chair that twanged. "What can I do for you?"

"I want to enroll Bob in the full Y program," Aggie said. "I want him to swim and get on teams and go camping and all the rest of it." She worked her hands on the purse in her lap. "It's for-well, psychological reasons." Her neck turned red under its creases.

Stokes' eyes fastened for an inquiring moment on Bob's face. While he looked at him, he spoke to Aggie.

"Psychological reasons?"

Then he stopped staring and opened his desk drawer. He brought out a pad of printed forms and a ballpoint pen. He scratched the pen point along the margin of the sheet until it began to make marks. Then he tore off the page, tossed it into the waste-basket, and glanced with his eyebrows raised at Aggie.

Bob blurted, "Aggie, why tell that? What difference does it make? I'm here, aren't I? I'll do it. Only why tell?"

Aggie ignored him. "I don't mean it's mental," she smiled at Stokes. "Nothing serious, you know. It's-" Her face got very red. "Just a little trouble about sex he's having." She swallowed and then laughed feebly. "It's kind of embarrassing to talk about."

"Well," the tanned man said easily, turning to Bob, "most boys have some trouble about sex. The bad thing is to start worrying too much about it. It gets too important then. Thing for a growing fellow to do is to find things to occupy