CHAPTER FOUR
It took Frankie Koerner a long time to realize there was anything wrong. He lived in a busy and generous world, a world bursting with places to play and shout, a world alive with reflections on good worlds past and just as good worlds to come. Every time he walked the three blocks down and around the corner from Eighty-seventh Street to Eighty-sixth and on to school, the bounties and enchantments of being alive stormed at him from everywhere. The washing hung out from the red tenements as clean and valiant as flags. The other boys were spilling out into the cobbled streets hollering, “Frankie, you’re a bat!” The girls were coming out more primly and pretending not to notice him, but he knew perfectly well they did. The little stores and shops and bars and delicatessens offere
