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had once been home to them. “I'm sorry, Bernie … I guess everything changed …” They were both crying and he nodded his head.
    “I know …it's not your fault…” His voice was hoarse as he wondered whose fault it was then. He kissed her, and she looked up at him.
    “Come to San Francisco if you can.”
    “I'll try.” But he never did.
    Sheila spent the next three years in a commune near Stinson Beach, and he completely lost track of her, until he got a Christmas card finally with a picture of her. He would never have recognized her. She lived in an old school bus, parked near the coast, with nine other people and six little kids. She had two of her own, both girls apparently, and by the time he heard from her, he didn't care anymore, although he had for a long time, and he had been grateful that his parents hadn't made too much of it. He was just relieved when his mother didn't mention her for a while, and she was relieved that Sheila had disappeared.
    She was the first girl he had loved, and the dreams had died hard. But Europe had been good for him. There had been dozens of girls he had met in Paris, London, the south of France, Switzerland, Italy, and he was surprised that traveling with his parents could be so much fun, and eventually they went on to meet friends, and so did he.
    He met three guys from school in Berlin and they had a ball, before they all went back to real life again. Two of them were going to law school, and one was getting married in the fall and having a last fling, but he was in great part doing it to avoid the draft, which was something Bernie didn't have to worry about, much to his embarrassment. He had had asthma as a child, and his father had documented it carefully. He had been classified 4-F when he registered for the draft at eighteen, although he hadn't admitted it to any of his friends for two years. But in some ways it was convenient now. He didn't have that to worry about. Unfortunately he was turned down at the schools he applied to, because he didn't have a master's yet. So he applied to Columbia and planned to start taking courses there. All the prep schools had told him to come back again in a year, when he had his degree. But it still seemed a lifetime away, and the general courses he'd signed up for at Columbia didn't fascinate him.
    He was living at home and his mother was driving him nuts, and everyone he knew was away. Either in the army or in school, or they had gotten jobs somewhere else. He felt like the only one left at home, and in desperation he applied for a job at Wolffs in the Christmas rush, and didn't even mind when they assigned him to the men's department and had him selling shoes. Anything would have been better than sitting home by then, and he had always liked the store. It was one of those large elegant halls that smelled good and where the people were well dressed, even the sales personnel had a certain amount of style, and the Christmas rush was a hair more polite than it was everywhere else. Wolffs had once been a store which set the styles for everyone, and to some extent it still did, although it lacked the pizzazz of a store like Bloomingdale's, only three blocks away.
    But Bernie was fascinated by that, and he kept telling the buyer what he thought they could do to compete with Bloomingdale's, and the buyer only smiled. Wolffs didn't compete with anyone. At least that was what he thought. But Paul Berman, the head of the store, was intrigued when he read a memo from Bernard. The buyer apologized profusely to him when he heard about it, he promised that Bernie would be fired at once, but that wasn't what Berman wanted at all. He wanted to meet the kid with the interesting ideas, so they met, and Paul Berman saw the promise in him. He took him to lunch more than once, and he was amused at how brazen he was, but he was smart too, and Berman laughed when Bernie told him he wanted to teach Russian literature, and was going to night school at Columbia