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I figure they could get along without me for a while, so I go for a swim and wander down the beach a ways and eat a hot dog and swim some more.

When I come back, I see Tom and Hilda just coming out of the water, so I join them.

Hilda says, "Come have a coke. Tom says he's got to try swimming to France just once more."

I don't know just what she means, but we go get cokes and come back and stretch out in the sun.

She asks me do I want a smoke, and I say No.

It's nice to be asked, though.

We watch Tom, who is swimming out past all the other people.

I wish I'd gone with him.

I say, "Lifeguard's going to whistle him in pretty soon. He's out past all the others."

Hilda lets out a breath and snorts, "He'll always go till they blow the whistle. Always got to go farther than anyone else."

I don't know what to say to that, so I don't say anything.

Hilda goes on: "I used to wait tables in a restaurant down near Washington Square. Tom and a lot of the boys from NYU came in there. Sometimes the day before an exam he'd be sitting around for hours, buying people cokes and acting as if he hadn't a care in the world. Some other times, for no reason anyone could tell, he'd sit in a corner and stir his coffee like he was going to make a hole in the cup."

"Tom was at NYU?" I ask.

I don't know where I thought he'd been before he turned up in the cellar.

I guess I never thought.

"Sure," Hilda says.

"He was in the Washington Square College for about a year and a half. He lived in a dormitory uptown, but I used to see him in the restaurant, and then fairly often we had dates after I got off work. He has people out in the Midwest somewhere—a father and

This is a lot of information to take in all at once and leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

The first one that comes into my head is this: "How come he got thrown out of NYU?"

"Well, it makes Tom so sore, he's never really told me a plain, straight story.

It's all mixed up with his father.

I think his father wrote him not to come home at Christmas vacation, for some reason.

Tom and a couple of other boys who were left in the dormitory over the holidays got horsing around and had a water fight.

The college got huffy and wrote the parents, telling them to pay up for damages.

The other parents were pretty angry, but they stuck behind their kids and paid up.

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