great eminence, giving talks on television. "I can still get him, though," his mother would say. "I'm the only one he'll still come to." Winkel had been married to a woman whose frugality supposedly made him insane. Driving from Newark to the opera one night, Winkel and his wife, so the story went, had gone off the road and into a tree, the windshield shattering and glass getting into Winkel's head. With half an hour remaining to curtain time, his wife left him in the car, forehead red, hands locked about the wheel in shock, and went to redeem the tickets. Weeks later, he ran amok while performing an appendectomy and cut two deep crosses in his kneecaps with a scalpel. Now he sat in a room, his practice gone, coming into the street only for occasional cherry sodas. Stern knew what his mother would say if Stern suggested that Winkel come look at his son. "Even with half a mind he knows more than anyone else. Do you know how big that man was? And I can still get him, too. He'll come to me in two seconds if I want him, no matter how crazy he is."

[Pg 46]

[Pg 47]

[Pg 47]

The swelling disappeared mysteriously one morning, and in a few days Stern, with a leaping heart, was able to carry his son into his car and back to the house. He kept his nose deep in his son's neck and marveled that some good had come out of the sickness. He had finally been among people in this bleak town, nurses and doctors and visitors in the halls. A day later, he spotted a blossom on the cancer side of the wild cherry tree—and there were other things, too, that happened quickly. A new stop sign on Stern's corner, one that would prevent motorcycle boys being shot out of cannons; a shortcut across the estate; a plan to kill his boiler; and a new attitude on the part of the dogs.

And then, of course, a week afterward, the man had said kike and looked between his wife's legs.

There were only three other occasions on which Stern and his wife discussed the kike man. One occurred the very next night when Stern, still in his topcoat, caught her wrists around the oven and said, "I just want to see how it happened."

"What do you mean?" she said.

"I want to get a picture in my mind of what it was all about. Get on the floor and show me exactly how you were. How your legs were when you were down there. It's important."

"I wont do that," she said, breaking through to 

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