Ted’s sense of himself and his sense of irony grew in proportion to each other. His ego was counterbalanced by the inexplicable shyness that people would comment on for the rest of his life. He had a strong inkling that he could pretty much get anything he wanted, and he was genuinely abashed at the possibilities.

He joined the Royal Air Force at eighteen, parting with boyhood. He had every expectation that they were going to teach him not only how to fly, but also how to kill from the air. He talked it over with his father and neither could come up with a better means of death for him, if death, indeed, were fated. “No one truly survives youth,” his father said, exhibiting the old soldier’s acerbity that might well have, if the time and the stars had been different, spared Ted the liability of romanticism. “Best in many ways,” Dad said, “to be through with youth young.” The Royal Air could not come up with a shooting war, and Ted had trouble taking the service seriously as a result. His father was secretly pleased, Ted suspected, that his son was not going to be shot at and had done nothing untoward to avoid the prospect. Combat soldiers, Ted knew from his father’s tales, tended to revere the lucky in advance of the brave.

They stationed him close to home. For two years, he was the caretaker of an isolated radio base in Heptonstall, his “communications” bent in school put to its proper use. He spent much of his time pondering the hills and climbing to the ridgetops in order to listen to the cadenzas of the wind, and to contemplate the rhythmus of language amid the roaring silence. And later the States. He had met an American girl, a Fulbright scholar no less, at a Cambridge Saint Botolph’s Review party. The girl took a long, unblinking look at Ted with his hair uncombed, the continent of a grass stain across the front of his pale turtleneck from an impromptu rugby session on the grounds, and his big jaw clenched as though he had just bitten off an opponent’s foot. The American girl said to herself, aloud, “So, that’s who I am, aren’t I?”

Ted and Sylvia lived in America from ’57 to ’59. She catechized at Smith and he gave classes at UMass at Amherst. Sylvia stressed that Northampton, Massachusetts, the town where they were quartered, was a college hamlet and that Ted would be protected from the endemic American ignorance. This was untrue and beside the point. It wasn’t the ignorance that put him off, coming as he did from the English countryside where they stoned the crows to keep the Devil from the door, so much as it was the disorienting excess. Take for instance the meat annex of the local supermart, where obese women rolled teeming caissons along the aisles and flesh that he could not recognize the veracity of lay in little plastic cubes under cling wrap, and with undue stage lighting overhead. The woodsman in him was galled by the long, winding rows of sterile mutilation. It was as though the wilderness, his wilderness, was pouring forth, neutered and prepackaged, from a faucet. “Who kills all of this?” he asked his wife and, even now, he feels a power surge of fondness when he recalls the gush of her smile, the big front teeth, not bucked but wafered and tusk white, starlet white, spilling from between her lips, barricading her laughter for the eternity of a stage beat. The smile was juxtaposed with the abrasion on her cheek, that third-degree burn upon the rose.

“The U.S. Department of Auschwitz,” she giggled.

He listened and then he heard it. The blade in her laughter. The same blade that was so unaccountably blunted in her poetry. The blade that, once honed, would consummate their marriage. Ted hoped.

The open-air galleries of the American parking lots unsettled him as well. The sun flaring in the swim fins of those Apollonian brass buggies.