oman nibbling late middle-age. Slowly he realized she had
stopped talking, had asked him a question and was awaiting his answer.
He smiled apologetically and said, "Sorry, mother, I must have been
wool-gathering."

"You're tired, lamb." No one had called him that in twenty years. "And
no wonder, with all that _run_ning around for Mr. Simms on the
_news_paper."

Mr. Simms--that would be Patrick "Paddy" Simms, his managing editor,
the old-school city-room tyrant who had taught him his job so well that
he had gone on to make a successful career of public relations and the
organization of facts into words--at rates far more imposing than those
paid a junior reporter during the Great Depression.

In his swell of memories Coulter almost lost his mother's question a
second time, barely managed to catch its meaning. He sipped his drink
and said, "I agree, mother, the burning of the books in Germany _is_ a
threat to freedom. But I don't think you'll have to worry about Adolph
Hitler very long."

She misread his meaning, of course, frowned charmingly and said, "I _do_
hope you're right, Banny. Nellie Maynard had a few of us for tea this
afternoon and Margot Henson, she's tre_men_dously chic and her husband
knows _all_ those big men in the New Deal in Washington--not that he
a_grees_ with them, thank goodness--well, _she_ says the big men in the
State Department are really _wor_ried about Hitler. They think he may
try to make Germany strong enough to start an_oth_er war."

"It could happen, of course," Coulter told her. He had forgotten his
mother's trick of stressing one syllable of a word. Funny, Connie, his
wife--if she was still his wife after whatever had happened--had the
same trick. With an upper-class Manhattan dry soda-cracker drawl added.

He wondered if he were going to have to live through it all again--the
NRA, the Roosevelt boomlet, the Recession, the string of Hitler triumphs
in Europe, the war, Pearl Harbor and all that followed--Truman, the Cold
War, Korea, McCarthy ...

Seated across from her at the gleaming Sheraton dining table, which
should by rights be in his own dining room in Scarborough overlooking
the majestic Hudson, he wondered how he could put his foreknowledge to
use. There was the market, of course. And he could recall the upset
football win of Yale over Princeton in 1934, the Notre Dame last-minute
triumph over Ohio State a year later, most of the World Series winners.
On the Derby winners h