It's shortly after midnight, and I've chosen to play the third movement of Johannes Brahms's third symphony in my study. The soaring strings and burnished brass, on this matchlessly crystal clear CD recording, once again perform their magic. None of his other four symphonies does quite the same. This third symphony, for reasons I can't quite fathom, calls up a vision I don't even will. And it has for literally close to half a century.

She stands there, a young girl of about six years old. She is of medium height, for her age, with shoulder-length, wavy, black hair, peaches-and-cream complexion, a modestly up-turned nose, an easy laugh and smile.

Strangely, her bare knees are caked with dirt.

Since we were in school together in those days before class photos, I have no picture of her, but memory keeps my vision of her ever-green before me. Sherrie Tatham, my deathless, immaterial dream girl.

Larchmont, New York, was, in 1945, right after World War II, an upscale, that is to say "exclusive," and sparsely populated suburb of New York City, about 45 minutes away by the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. Henry Barnard Elementary School was only about a 5-minute walk from my house. From Mrs. Schroeder's kindergarten to Mrs. Elbert's sixth grade class, about 15 of us boys and girls, all white, mostly Protestant, passed mildly from one grade to the next, learning what we were supposed to learn.

Our parents were of the Silent Generation, happy to be out of the armed forces, thrilled to be making more money in their hermetically sealed suburban community than they'd ever believed possible. And of course they passed their insular values along to their kids. Maybe those values, as well as the formidable money it cost to be there, were the real reason my whole class was white.

I don't remember when I first noticed Sherrie Tatham in my class; the first I noticed, she'd just always been there, together with her very close friend Susan Bromley, whose older sister Linda had recently "placed" sixth in the nationwide Miss Reingold Beauty contest. The pair was stunningly beautiful, it seemed to my inexperienced eyes. It seemed to me, however, that Sherrie was the more attractive. She was the more outgoing and effusive. She had a bounce to her gait.

But in that era, kids obeyed the teacher and shut up when she was talking to the class. As a result, I don't remember ever chatting with anyone during the day's 10-minute recess, except Dickie Wheeler, whose desk had been placed next to mine, and whose father, I learned, had been mistaken for Charles Lindbergh, and mobbed, some hour or so before the actual Lindy had landed at LeBourge, in Paris, in 1927. No, I just sat in class, doing silently what I was told to do, a teacher's perfect pupil. Between class projects, I focused my eyes on Sherrie Tatham … and stared.

In second grade, my mother bought me a pretty, black-and-red autograph book, and in mid-June, I cruised Barnard's halls asking for autographs. What you'd get, in those years, were over-used flip phrases, like Sherrie's: "Violets are red, roses are blue; if you were cracked, you'd think so, too."

But I didn't mind that pedestrian entry, because she'd started off with a penciled "Dear Charles."

Funny, she'd apparently thought twice about that, because she'd erased the "Dear" and inserted "Hi" in its place. I've pondered that erasure for half a century now. What did it mean? What sudden impulse grabbed hold of her?

One spring day, while we were in fifth grade, my whole class, in mid-morning, and led by our teacher, Miss Isabel Dwyer, marched from Barnard School, up Mountain Avenue, down Normandy Lane, and into my house at number 9, to watch as General Douglas MacArthur, fired by President Truman for insubordination in Korea, marched, "just faded away," down Fifth Avenue, in New York City. My dad and a friend, who happened to be visiting that day, had moved our dining room table and all the rest of the furniture for that room into our living room, so all my 15 classmates and I could sit on the floor for lunch., which each of them had dutifully brought in their metal Hopalong Cassidy, or Howdy Doody, lunchboxes.

This was the only reason I can think that Sherrie knew my way home and came up to me at 3:10, of that spring afternoon and asked me, "Do you want to walk home with me through a neat forest?"

Indeed I did! If she'd asked me to walk with her to Larchmont's incinerator, I think I would have said, "Lead the way!" I felt so humbly and gloriously chosen. At the school's closing, the two of us walked across the street together, side by side, from the school and started climbing, she before me, the extraordinarily steep hill of a vacant lot, which was, in fact, a kind of miniature forest, studded with full-grown trees.

As she climbed, half with her legs, and half on her bare knees, she suddenly slipped and came tumbling back and slipped nicely into my suddenly opened arms. When she turned around and saw her knees were caked with dirt, my first impulse was to use my right hand to wipe the dirt off those precious parts of her anatomy. But I restrained myself, and soon she did what I'd chickened out of.

When we reached the top of the hill and came to the street where Sherrie departed for her own house, and I continued up Mountain Avenue to my own, we must have said something, but I don't remember a thing. I've forever regretted it.

I think it must have been shortly after that episode when my father, on his updated Magnavox sound system, played a new "LP" recording of Fritz Reiner conducting the Chicago Symphony in Brahms's Symphony No. 3. When it came to the gorgeous, melting Third Movement, the image of Sherrie Tatham came to my mind. It was purely involuntary, this image of her warm body, in my arms, forever. As I recall it, this was not sexual, unless it might be called "pre-sexual."

After all, I had to ask my father, in another year or two, what "sex" was, thereby triggering a terrible hemming and hawing, on his part.

After my Barnard School gang had graduated from sixth grade and were on their way to Albert Leonard Junior High School, and I was headed to Watertown, Conn., to embark on grades 7 through 9, I saw none of them, except for an occasional "assembly dance," where I met all my Barnard friends, and got to dance a dance or two with Sherrie, happy at last to hold her warm right hand with my eager left, and thrilled to hold the warmth of her bare back in my right.

We were instructed to wear thin white gloves, to prevent us all, I think the dance's proctors believed, from getting any lascivious ideas, conscious or un -- .

A few weeks after Barnard's graduation, my mother stopped me and said, "Well, Chuck, I ran into Sherrie Tatham and Susan Bromley this morning at Gristede's, and I must say she's a real beaut." I think, in reply, I must have said something inane like, "Thanks, Mom!"

A year or two later, I happened to run into Jimmy Webber, an early classmate who lived on a street nearby. He'd gotten a temporary job driving a delivery car for Bill Allen's liquor store, and he picked me up, when he saw me walking home from "the village" of Larchmont. After filling in each other, I asked him if he'd seen Sherrie Tatham recently. "Oh, yeah," he replied, "she's put on a lot of weight."

And that was all he said. I've never forgotten Jimmy's remark, but neither have I ever felt compelled to believe it, because it violated my fancy and imagination.

In 1964, I married Ginny Giacopasi, the most remarkable girl I'd ever met, whose constructive nature defies description, and the mother of Jessica, whose young life constantly brings me more rewards than I think I rightly deserve. I love them both very much. I'm not the easiest person to live with, but they've managed, and for that I'm grateful. I'm willing to admit that I owe my life to Ginny Nash.

Still, the very thought of Sherrie Tatham causes memories and regrets that I didn't get to know her well rush back on me. Where is she now, at age 60+? I don't really want to know.

Dream girls aren't, after all, supposed to lead mortal, perishable, lives.