The men around his mother at the bar told dirty jokes to her, and one afternoon one of them, holding his palms wide apart and parallel, said, "Baby, my buddy here has one this long, so help me." His mother folded up with laughter on her barstool, and Stern, suddenly infuriated, hit the man in the stomach to protect her. His mother pulled him back and said, "You can't say things to his mother. He'll kill for her." Later, getting ready for dinner, Stern's mother would take him into the shower with her and he would stare at the pathetic, gaping blackness between her legs, filled with a terrible anguish and loss. Then he would rush down to cut another flower for her and, in the coolness of the evening, begin to feel very lush and elegant, as though no other boy in the world was having as wicked and luxurious a time as he, the only boy in a grown-up resort. His mother would tell him, "You're growing up too fast. You know more than kids ten years older than you." And later in the year, at school, Stern would tell his friends, "Boy, do I know things. Did I see things this summer. My mother isn't like other mothers. She just doesn't go around acting like a mother." And yet, with all the panty glimpses on the volleyball court and the barroom sips of drinks, the dirty jokes and the nervous showers, what did he actually know? It remained for a busboy in back of the resort kitchen to tell him about the sex act. Stern couldn't believe the actual machinery and said, "Really?" and the busboy said, "Yeah. When you put it in them, they get a funny feeling up their kazoo." The Grove Rest Home had the sweet summer coolness and the proper fragrance, but it was a parody of a resort, with all its facilities torn and incomplete. Stern heard there was a small golf course and borrowed clubs one morning, setting out to look for it. He tramped the length of the institution and finally spotted a flag in the center of some tall weeds far beyond the kitchen. A bald man with a thick mustache stood alongside the single hole of the golf course, hands locked behind his back, puffing out his cheeks and flexing an artificial leg in the style of a British colonel surveying a battlefield. He said he was an electrician. A hot wire had fallen on his leg and sheared it off. His main difficulty had been in dealing with his grown son, who couldn't get used to having a one-legged father. "I told him you get older, these things happen, but he wouldn't buy it and kept spitting on the floor." The man spoke with a thick Brooklyn accent, but when he was silent, flexing his leg, he took on an amazingly autocratic demeanor, a British colonel once again. "Are you playing?" Stern asked him. "No, I'm just standing next to the hole here."