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Chapter One
 
This was a time of day he was most apt to like. A June evening, and a silence along the office halls after the twittering departures of the secretaries, young tamping of heels on the steel stair treads worn to silver, the last typewriter tilted back into its desk with decisive thump, the whirl and rattle and subsonic resonances of the mill itself stilled, the last cars leaving the lot.
 
He sat quite still at his desk, breathing the silence. He heard the sounds of the girl in the outer office, a stealthy sliding of desk drawer and the small, bright snap of purse, then her steps on the rug as she came to the doorway.
 
“Will there be anything else, Mr. Delevan?”
 
“No. You can go now, Miss Daley.”
 
“Good night, sir.”
 
He treated this one with controlled patience and was amused at himself because the net, to her, was perhaps an impression of kindliness. Whereas the bitterly efficient Miss Meyer, now on her annual vacation, was often target for unwarranted irritation. Meyer was his right hand, comrade in many battles, she of stone routines, of razored loyalties. The only one who seemed even less than he to have a life outside the worn and ugly walls. Together now in this place for twenty-five years. And this was the year that it was half his life. He had thought about that a great deal lately. As though the very figures had some symbolic meaning. Last year more of his life had been spent outside the Stockton Knitting Company, Incorporated, than in it. And next year the outside life would become the minor fraction. It added a haunting significance to this year, like the echo of a sound that cannot be identified. When, he thought, had he passed the midpoint of the years he would be here? A prisoner can compute his term. One who will be pensioned can estimate retirement. But a man who works to keep a thing alive cannot guess how long he will be successful.
 
He wondered if Meyer ever thought in this way. You could not get close to her, ever. They had come here at almost the same time. It was difficult to think of her outside the offices and more difficult to imagine her on vacation. Once, on a Saturday, he had been walking along one of the downtown streets and had seen her in a shoe store, salesman talking earnestly up at her, her lips pursed as she studied the shoe she was considering. It was strange to think of her as a person who must buy shoes, wash her face, think of the future, talk with friends. If she bought the wrong size, her feet would hurt. That was a shocking concept. And oddly heartbreaking.
 
This was the time of silence. It was a healing time of transition from the life inside to the life outside. On those days when his younger brother, Quinn Delevan, waited to ride home with him, the healing process was flawed. He was then too aware of Quinn down the hall, glancing at his watch, aimlessly handling papers.
 
Benjamin Delevan stood up and pushed his chair forward again, socketing it neatly into the kneehole of the desk. He closed his windows and closed his office door behind him. There was nothing at all on top of the secretarial desk in the outer office. Perhaps Meyer had explained, in her cool voice, “Mr. Delevan likes it that way.”
 
He stood for a moment. The corner in its airlessness seemed faintly perfumed by the girl who had sat there these past few days. He shut the outer door of the office behind him and walked down the corridor, walked stolidly down the steps of steel and rubber to the tile of the ground floor. The watchman gave him his nightly surly nod and performed the ritual of leaning in over the switchboard and pulling the night plug from his phone. He always yanked it free with more emphasis than necessary. Benjamin Delevan suspected that it was an evening routine which obscurely comforted them both.
 
His car was in the small ell of the parking lot reserved for the executive personnel, nosed against the brick on which was affixed the small wooden signs of reservation. B. DELEVAN. The car had been shaded from the late sun, but the steering wheel was still warmer than his hands. He drove out of the lot and down the narrowness of Hickman Street with its sidings and warehouses on either side, caught the green light at the end and turned out onto the six-lane asphalt of Vaunt Boulevard, into the tapering flow of the evening rush, up over the sleek hump of City Bridge, and out the long glossy blue river of the boulevard with its bright new yellow traffic-lane markings, its synchronized lights, past showrooms and used-car lots, angular new shopping centers and, further out, the drive-ins, the outdoor movies, an anachronistic and spanking new miniature golf course. For many years he had had to fight and inch his way through the narrow old streets of the city of Stockton, cursing the delivery trucks, the suicidal pedestrians, the uncoordinated lights. All the cities of the Mohawk Valley had been like that. Strangled spasms of evening traffic. Rome and Troy, Syracuse and Albany, Utica and Rochester. But now Mr. Dewey’s Thruway was taking away the congestion of the cross-state traffic, and the cities themselves were building these hushed black rivers to drain the twisted stone swamps of the old parts of the cities.
 
Though now it was much easier to commute—he could make the trip from the plant to Clayton Village in twenty minutes of restful driving rather than fifty minutes of nerve fray—he often had the feeling that something had been lost. The cars had jammed up where carriages had once rolled. Some elms survived there, and stone quarried long ago, and scrollwork on the Victorian cornices. There were curbs dished by many years, and ornate iron on the lamp standards, and the prehistoric bulge of old trolley tracks under the skin of patched asphalt. When the main street made an entirely unnecessary turn, you could think of some stolid farmer of long ago who made his neighbors go the long way around his property and perhaps stood in the evening and leaned on the fence rail and gave them uncompromising stares, sound in his belief in ownership.
 
But now the sleek highway, through condemnation proceedings, implemented by bond issue, symbol of sterile union of slide rule and high-compression ratio, had flattened a swath through the most ancient slums, riding smoothly on rough fill that had once been buildings of old stone, bursting out into the flatlands beside the river where once there had been only marsh and discarded bedsprings and snaky adventures for small boys. It had simplified flow, enriched the farsighted, and spawned those bordering strips of plastic and glass brick, fluorescence and floodlight, where the Deal of the Day turned slowly under candy-striped canopy, where every orange was precisely the same size, and sapphire from Ceylon tipped the juke needles.
 
Sometimes on the drive home he would imagine a civilization where this delicately engineered river of asphalt had become too cramped, too slow, too dangerous. Then it would become secondary and the bright plastic would fade and the light tubes fail and fabrics with catchy chemical names would flap in the night wind off the marsh. It would die then, but without grace. Not the way the old city had died. The old city died in the way a forgotten doll is found up there behind trunks with rounded tops, wooden legs carved with care. And this would die like a tin toy, stamped into the ground and rusting.
 
When he thought that way, he could see the little indications of the decay. Streaks rusted down from the air conditioning units. Balled napkins hurrying along, enclosing mustard. A big window labeled with paint that had run. This stuff would not last bravely, with dignity. There was no stubborn persistence in it. It too quickly acknowledged defeat. There were no lost causes for it.
 
Ten miles from the city he turned right, a gentle diagonal right down an incline to the octagonal yellow of the stop sign, and then turned left again, through the tunnel under the highway he had just left, leaving it to hurry on westward while he turned south along the winding two-lane farm road that had led to the village square.
 
Off to his right as he neared the village was a new suburban development that had grown up in the past few years, was still growing. It had its own shops, primary school, playgrounds, park, social clubs. The houses had been put up in wholesale lots, with three and sometimes four variations of the basic design. This variation, plus the alterations in color, plus variations in plantings, plus subtle changes in the way the houses were placed on their lots, partially destroyed the flavor of sameness.
 
Once he had read in the newspaper, with a certain amount of wonderment, that each house in Amity Park contained: electric stove, refrigerator, washer, dryer, dishwasher, and disposal; attic room that could be finished off at owner’s option; tile shower; breezeway; radiant-panel heat; concrete slab foundation with utility room; television corner; heatolater fireplace. And, knowing that, he would drive by, as on this June evening, by the streets with their new names—Three Brooks Lane, Dell Road, Grindstone Road, Persimmon Lane—and see the sprinklers turning and the bikes racing and the bent backs over the new plantings and the cars being washed and diapers drying—and it would suddenly look most odd and fearful. As though all these people had come from some alien place beyond the sun and through their very pronounced and exaggerated conformity sought to deceive us who were born here. The street scenes were too suburban, the young wives too consciously harassed and pretty, the young husbands too solemn and jolly, the children entirely too childlike. Where did they come from? Certainly not from the city. They had never lived anywhere else on this planet. Only here, at Amity Park, the alien eyes cold and waitful, aware of the times that were coming.