"Quit?"
"If you needed a place to hide ... or if you just wanted to stay here, with me."
He started to answer, but his mouth was suddenly dry. He swallowed, then in a voice that almost cracked, "Listen, Diane. I wasn't even a teenager when the first men set foot on the Moon. That's where I've wanted to be ever since that moment. There are new worlds to see, and I want to see them."
"But that's turning your back on this world!" 19
"So what?" He pushed his chair from the table and got to his feet. 'There's not much in this world worth caring about. Not for me."
He strode to the door, then turned back toward her. She was still at the table. "Sorry I disappointed you, Diane. And, well, thanks ... for everything."
Diane got up, walked swiftly across the tiny room to him, and kissed Kinsman lightly on the lips.
"It was my pleasure, General."
He laughed. "Hell, I'm not even a lieutenant yet."
"You'll be a general someday."
"I don't think so."
"You could have been a hero today."
"I'm not very heroic."
"Yes, you are." Diane smiled at him. "You just don't know it yet."
Unshaven, in his wrinkled uniform, Kinsman stood at his father's side through the funeral, rode silently in the cortege's limousine to the cemetery, and watched a crowd of strangers file past the casket, one by one, placing on it single red roses. His mother had detested red roses all her life.
As they rode back toward Russian Hill in the velvet- lined, casketlike limousine, Kinsman turned to his darkly silent father.
"I know I've disappointed you," he said in a low swift voice, afraid he would be cut off before he could finish, "and I also realize that you wouldn't be so angry with me if you didn't love me and weren't worried about me."
His father stared straight ahead, unmoving.
"Well ... I love you, too, Dad."
The old man's eyes blinked. The corners of his mouth twitched. Without moving a millimeter toward his son, he whispered, "You are a disgrace. Staying out all night and then showing up looking like a Bowery derelict. The sooner you leave the better!"
