Honeydew: Stories Part 3

She considered this suggestion. Her sisters would never speak to her again-that would be a blessing. She was an experienced caretaker. The family's nutrition would improve. She could keep an eye on the romances developing in the neighborhood.

"Together we can walk to the Castle," she said. And he took that as the acceptance it was.

Stone She had come south from New York City to live with a small family in a stone house in a flat town. There was lots of wildlife too. She wasn't much of a naturalist, or someone who craved companions.h.i.+p, or a gifted cook. She must, then, be something of a fool.

The flat town was surrounded by low mountains and contained a small college and a river and a single movie house. The family was a decorous threesome. And she, Ingrid? A woman of a certain age, twice widowed, made rich by the second spouse. Member of several boards; at home, always a telephone call away from any one of her interesting friends if she wanted a brief spurt of company; possessed of a little den lined with books when she wanted to be alone. Admired for the arresting angularity of her face; and for her height (she was very tall and her extra-long neck added a few inches); and for the melancholy curve of her smile; and for her golden eyes, halved by bifocals, turning their gaze nowadays toward distant hills, though their usual view was the row of brownstones across the street from her Upper West Side apartment. She lived on Sixty-Third Street.

She had lived on Sixty-Third Street. Now, in this town of no account, she was employed by her first dead husband's dead sister's son. During the past decades he'd grown from a rangy quiet boy into a tall taciturn man with thighs as strong as the trunks of pecan trees. Now she engaged in not-quite-confidential conversations with his underweight wife, Lynne. Lynne was exactly the age-thirty-six-of Ingrid's own daughter, a photographer out in Seattle with a wife who was also a photographer. Strung with equipment, the two women came to New York every so often. Eager, bold greyhounds-next to them Lynne could be taken for a rabbit. Now Ingrid played Sorry! with her nephew's five-year-old daughter, Chloe, exactly the age that her own son had been when disease s.n.a.t.c.hed him from her...well, wouldn't that be synchronous. In fact, her little boy had been only four.

Ingrid missed her favorite lunch place on Broadway. She missed those interesting friends; they would do anything for each other, see each other through sicknesses and crises and losses, supply a word that had fallen through a crevice in the brain and try to patch the other cracks of their shared aging. They wanted her to come home; so said their letters (she had taken a vacation from e-mail). Also she missed her dressmaker, a genius whose designs did not attempt to conceal Ingrid's long, long neck with collars or scarves but instead advertised it with long, long necklines, making it seem something that you might want for yourself.

Here she was, and not a dressmaker for miles.

The house was at the end of a dirt road. Its gray stones glinted, and a fecund trumpet vine ran all over the walls. There was a gable roof of slate and a chimney and a pale garden tended by Lynne. The dense woods pressed on the backyard; it seemed as if the two apple trees in front had pushed themselves forward without permission. The house had an old black stove in its kitchen-an inconvenient appliance you had to light with a sparker. Someday, Chris swore, he would provide his family with a house of his own making-wooden, of course, for wood was his business; porched, the better to admire the flowers outside; a second floor as wide as the first; and, in back, a shed for his tools, now rammed behind the furnace. And a real downstairs bathroom, not just a toilet on the other side of the little room off the kitchen, a room called Useless. Useless had a single high window and a sink in one corner. You could wash one handkerchief in that useless sink. Someday, yes, a new house. Meanwhile, Ingrid thought, the small deep-set windows with their lashes of vines gave the old house a knowing air, as if it heard your thoughts.

Ingrid's living there-it had happened in an accidental way. She had been visiting last June-she came every season for exactly four days. Chris was then completing the arrangements to enlarge his carpentry and woodworking business to include the manufacture of wood pellets. He was converting a small plant a few miles away from the shop. The lining up of suppliers and distributors and the hiring of staff-that work would soon take almost all his time. He needed someone to keep the business itself running. Ingrid and his uncle had run a small leather-brokerage company. And so, seemingly out of the blue, he invited her to be the temporary manager; to join his staff and his household as well. "For about three months, I'd say."

"Me? Why on earth me?"

"You are...wise."

She shook her head so violently that her gla.s.ses flew off-very smart narrow ones, she hoped they hadn't broken-and her hair shook too, hair that had once been the color of an autumn maple leaf but had now faded to wood shavings. Here and there her expert hairdresser had striped it with the old maple color. "Wise," Chris repeated, with one of his rare smiles. "Worldly."

Did he mean old? She sucked in her stomach, and her bosom swelled slightly. She was wearing a V-necked jersey blouse. It had captivated a number of elderly suitors, but paired with these jeans she'd bought yesterday, it probably looked ridiculous. When Chris had first seen the blouse, he turned his face briefly away...Did he think she was too noticeably available? She was still interested in men at seventy-two; perhaps that offended him.

"And warm," he finished, pulled by alliteration. "Can I have you?"

"Oh, good Lord." And she produced an exaggerated and somewhat tactless groan. "I don't think so."

He picked up the fallen gla.s.ses and folded the earpieces inward without touching the lenses. Holding the bridge between thumb and third finger, like a ring, he handed them to her. Almost handed them to her, that is-she'd been told that her eyes without gla.s.ses gleamed like warning lights. And so, warned, he paused, and pressed his well-defined lips together into a grimace of disappointment-no, it wasn't a grimace, he was preventing himself from saying please. Then he gave her the spectacles. "Maybe?" he said.

Of course not, she thought. And then: Why not? A stone house instead of a stone city. An underfunded public library instead of that pretentious den. Rabbits on the lawn instead of monkeys at the zoo...

"Maybe?" he repeated.

"Maybe," she echoed. But it turned out she meant yes.

To slip away from her New York life...it was as easy as stepping on an escalator. Board members would hardly notice her absence; real decisions were made by three or four people who met in a broom closet. She leased her apartment immediately-one of her friends had a cousin from New Jersey eager to spend a season in the city. She gave herself a farewell party on Labor Day.

The following morning, she visited Allegra. Allegra was not bedridden yet, but soon.

"Don't look mournful, Ingrid. You've seen me through a long illness. There are plenty left to help me die."

"I...should be one of them."

"Perhaps I'll hold on." They wetly embraced.

And just like that, Ingrid returned offhandedly to her relatives, as if the visit would be the usual strict four days, not a lax three months. She took a plane from New York to a southern hub with a moving walkway that kept falsely warning her it was about to stop, a mini-plane to an airport thirty-five miles from the town, a bus. At the depot, the driver pulled her single large scuffed suitcase from the bus's belly. "What an item!" Allegra had once said.

"Fido? My second-best friend."

Lynne had wanted to give Ingrid the guest room she occupied during her quarterly visits, one of the three charmed rooms under the slanted roof-she'd been able to hear Chloe cry when the child was an infant, she could hear Chloe's parents' soft lovemaking now. The room would have been perfect for a second child, but Lynne's hysterectomy precluded another child. Ingrid didn't want that room. "I am no longer a guest," she said. "I am an employee." And indeed she was; Chris was paying her a salary; she was quietly depositing it in the trusts she'd set up for her daughter and for Chloe. "An employee of the woodworks, with household and child-care duties at home. I will sleep in Useless. Let's find a bed, a bookcase, a dresser. Secondhand, please." The four of them went right out and bought those items. What more did she need? Well, a mirror would be nice. Chris supplied one he had made himself, probably intended to sell, could sell, after she left. It was oval, framed in cherry.

The woodworking shop was two miles away along a two-lane road. She could have hitched a ride with Chris in his pickup, but at six a.m.! Anyway she liked to walk through the woods. It took more time. She'd discovered she was interested not in saving time but in spending it. She chose a longer route along a path of old-growth trees and new saplings and spiders' webs and busy wasps. Brushwood guarded her way.

Then she turned off again, along a second path that led to a narrow river with a gentle decline. The water splashed swiftly through groups of pearly rocks, then leveled. She called this little plaything of nature the Falls. Alders by the side of the brook were dropping leaves thin as tin. Cylinders hung in tiny cl.u.s.ters from their branches, protecting the pollen of the spring to come. On the other side of the river the ground was green with tiny, ivy-leaved veronica boldly rising. They would straggle through the winter and in April greet the sun. And greet Ingrid too-she often visited in April, when the opera season was over. Nearby, unseen, caterpillars were spinning their coc.o.o.ns.

She noticed one day that a black stone was awaiting her on the path. She picked it up. Partially smoothed and also jagged, veined with green, it seemed to throb on her palm. She slipped it into her back pocket.

From these private Falls, she returned to the main path and went on to the woodworking shop. There, as Chris had predicted, she deftly handled the business of the business. Her office was a little doorless room off the large shop floor. During her few idle minutes, she watched the men at work. She saw chests and dining tables and moldings in the making, and sometimes an artistic element-an elaborate architrave which would surround a simple window. She thought briefly of her own slatted Manhattan blinds. She admired the tools: drills and chisels and gouges and what seemed like hundreds of kinds of saws. She loved the planes that lifted a thin epidermis from a plank. There wasn't much conversation on the floor, although one man, Danny, older than the others, sometimes took his break at her desk and talked about his beekeeping. He lived alone in a cottage and grew vegetables. He told her that the black and green stone now resting on her desk was chromite. The rough part could be smoothed. "I know a silversmith who could set it, and you could wear it dangling from your neck."

My long, long neck... But she didn't say that. "I don't want to tamper with it" was what she did say.

At the end of the day she tramped back through the woods. At the familiar black stove she prepared dinner with Lynne and Chloe. Then came the eating of dinner, and the was.h.i.+ng up, and then Sorry! or television or reading. They had no stereo. She wanted to give them a piano but they wouldn't accept it. She could will her own Steinway to them and then fling herself onto the Falls, but she'd just smash her kneecaps on the rocks.

Sometimes, in the late afternoon, if Chris had loaned his pickup to someone, that someone drove him from the pellet plant to the shop. From there, Chris offered to walk her home, grave as a suitor. He pointed out things that she was not yet clever enough to notice: the hunting spider, which does not build webs but instead spies her prey and chases it and pounces. He showed her a toad crawling to his death while nearby a generation of tadpoles, some of them his progeny, sped through the water. His fingers lifted a low branch and there bloomed a miniature plant with a tiny dark flower: a plant that lives its whole life under a leaf, hostage to its own nature, visible to no one except some expert winged pollinators. Its story would make a good opera, Ingrid thought; no, not an opera, a ballet, a ballet meant for children. She imagined lines of well-dressed kids and their grannies lining up to see The Lonely Flower. If she were in New York she'd be obliged to take Allegra's grandchildren...She was still squatting to peer at the flower. Getting up wasn't as easy as it had once been. Chris held out his hand.

In the evening Danny sometimes dropped in. His bees were swarming, he told her. The queen mates with a few lucky drones-they are her sons, if you want to be accurate, sometimes her grandsons. Nature is no respecter of seemliness.

Happiness lengthens time. Every day seemed as long as a novel. Every night a double feature. Every week a lifetime, a muted lifetime, a lifetime in which sadness, always wedged under her breast like a doorstop, lost some of its bite. When she went back to New York she would feel that a different person had occupied her body for a while, and a different wardrobe had taken over her closet-now she wore only tees and jeans. The stone had found a proper home in her back pocket. The V-necked blouse had been shoved into Fido. Her hair was of course longer, its seemingly random stripes of chestnut-how clever her hairdresser was, how natural they'd looked-now surrendering to honest blond-gray. Brown, pale yellow, gray-she was coiffured in wood bark, wood pulp, and dust. Her gla.s.ses were permanently bent because Danny had sat on them. She could probably be mistaken for a displaced bag lady. Or a beaver, who lived among trees and water and other beavers, and feasted on cellulose.

In November she went back to New York for a few days. Allegra had died.

"I'm sorry for your loss," said the well-brought-up Chloe. "Come back right away," she then commanded. "It's more fun when you're home."

"Keep the chromite for me," said Ingrid. "Rub it once in a while."

In her ragged state, Ingrid attended the funeral and then went to Allegra's apartment. Everybody recognized her except for one woman she had never liked, who glared as if she were a hillbilly freeloader. But other friends asked eagerly when she would return to New York. "I'll be back soon," she promised. She visited a gallery she admired, and also the optician.

And again the big plane, and the talkative moving walkway, and the small plane, and the bus. She stepped down off the bus into tiny Chloe's arms; into Lynne's arms, not much bigger; into Chris's gentle, huge embrace. From the backseat of the car she saw the house over Lynne's shoulder. In the late afternoon of the late fall day, the stones looked mauve, a color borrowed from Odilon Redon. Should she mention that? She should not. A rabbit from the woods was chewing on a carrot that Danny must have dropped.

Sometimes the college hosted a quartet or a singer for an afternoon concert. One princ.i.p.al violinist rose up and down on his toes. A poorly modulated soprano projected into the next county. But there was a good second-rate pianist, and Chloe and Lynne listened attentively, and Ingrid, leaning forward, listened hungrily until the last almost-good arpeggio. She felt Chris's eyes on her. Afterward they went to their favorite restaurant. The waitresses were in their fifties and wore aqua dresses under white ap.r.o.ns. The lamps in the booths were pleated. There was always meat loaf on the menu, and crab, and a vegetarian special. The corn bread was the best she'd ever tasted. They ate from one another's plates like any family-two big people and two little ones.

When they ate at home, Chris served from the head of the table, handing Ingrid the first plate, his thumb flipping a stray string bean back among the others. After dinner, when Ingrid read to Chloe, she read fairy tales-they both had a taste for make-believe, especially if royalty was involved.

"You're our queen," Chloe said one night.

"Queen Giraffe?"

"Yes! Daddy is the Lion King and Mommy's one of those little princesses that gets stolen or put to sleep for a while."

Lynne was doing laundry and missed the exchange. "And what are you?" Ingrid asked.

"The nightingale the king can't live without."

Stones figured in many tales, inert minerals transformed into active partic.i.p.ants. They induced love, they captured memories, they murdered ogres, they arranged themselves on the path so that Hansel could find his way home.

Some evenings, when Chris put his feet up on a particularly ugly brocaded ottoman and closed his eyes, Ingrid and Chloe and Lynne busied themselves in the kitchen making a pot of soup that would last a week. Lynne's garden supplied herbs. Chloe threw in the chromite. Ingrid muttered some syllables. "That's an incantation," she invented.

"Are you a witch?" Chloe giggled.

"No, just a crone."

"A glamour crone," said Lynne. "Always New York beautiful."

"Oh...it's the eyegla.s.ses," said Ingrid hurriedly. "Here's a Chinese proverb that will make the soup even better. Cutting stalks at noontime, perspiration drips to the earth. Know you that your bowl of rice, each grain from hards.h.i.+p comes? I learned that from a healer on Mott Street." It was only a slight exaggeration. She had found the proverb in a fortune cookie; in Chinatown what she'd learned was that there were elderly men whose impa.s.sivity seemed like friends.h.i.+p. In narrow store after narrow store, she'd heard Allegra recite her symptoms. The men pulled out little drawers and scooped up powders and leaves and poured the stuff into sacks and handed the sacks to her friend. Allegra boiled them into a tea.

"How does it taste?" Ingrid asked.

"Rank. Nauseating, like the chemo."

Tonight's soup, unadulterated except for the stone, was perfect. Ingrid put the stone on the windowsill, ready for the next meal.

When Lynne came home exhausted from teaching fourth-graders, Ingrid ordered her into the guest-room daybed and tucked the quilt around her. Mostly, though, it was Chloe who needed time off, time off from being an only child, time off from the helpless scrutiny of her parents. Then Ingrid spirited her away into the woods.

They walked along various paths. Just yesterday they had followed a trail to a little pond. Ingrid pointed to the k.n.o.bs on the willows. Each was a tightly curled leaf, saving itself for next spring. "What goes round comes round," Ingrid heard herself saying. "Death is the gate of life."

"Don't you ever die, Queen Giraffe," ordered Chloe.

"I'll die in my time, darling. Like everyone else."

The child shook her head. "You belong to us," she said, as if that conferred immortality.

And then in January the pellet plant was built and running, and Chris was free to return to the little office off the shop, and Ingrid was free to go back to her real life.

On one of their walks home together, they stopped to rest beside the Falls. "You'll be glad to return to New York-theater, friends, fabrics, museums."

"Fabrics?"

"I meant clothing. The walks in the neighborhoods, I know you love to do that, you've told me. Parties..."

She listened to him telling her what she was presumably feeling.

He said: "I spent a year in New York once, studying wood sculpture..."

"I remember. Your uncle was still alive."

He nodded. "I liked the fresh mornings, the sound of the garbage trucks. But there is so much more that you like. Maybe we've kept you here too long."

"Not at all," she said politely, telling the truth and not seeming to. Let him think she wanted to leave. Let him never know what she really wanted.

Let him never know that she-with the wisdom of crones, of Mott Street medicine men, of memory-laden stones-knew what he wanted. He did not look at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her abundant hair, her eyes kept safe these days behind newly broken gla.s.ses. They had been born thirty years apart, he was thinking, she was thinking; and they had known each other all his life. They stared at a tree which would outlive them both. He wanted to bury his nose in the cleavage she had learned to hide. He wanted to say sweet words.

Instead he pressed his lips together to let no words escape. Stay with us was all he would have said. Stay in my sight. To keep wanting, and not getting-it was a satisfaction of its own. She was another house he would never build.

I cannot stay, she might have said. Oh, Chris. Oh, Lynne, oh, my Chloe, how sweet it sounds, how tender it might be. The four of us living a life, running two businesses, not getting in one another's way. Danny visiting. Bees swarming.

But I see farther than you. I see myself weakening, getting querulous, not useless but not useful either. I see Chloe outgrowing Queen Giraffe. I see Lynne trying to conceal her boredom. I see you mourning the loss of your longing...And beyond that bearable future, there are less pleasant predictions; dirty pictures, you might call them. There's a stroke, and you attach yourselves to the nursing home-not giving money, for I can pay; giving attention you dare not withhold. You cannot leave me day after day, strapped to a chair, calling for my dead child. Or perhaps, mobile, I'll become a demented comic, wandering from floor to floor and stealing my neighbors' false teeth. The home will call you like an annoyed princ.i.p.al. And there are worse scenarios-the illness of organs, who cares which organ or what illness so long as it doesn't kill me as it should but instead keeps me in my room here, visited regularly by strong-armed nurses, the walls shaking with my strenuous attempt not to cry. I'll scream-too late-for the bedpan. I'll throw my stone at the laggard aide. Our dusty street will be invaded by the occasional ambulance. My body still alive but decaying visibly and audibly and odorously next to the kitchen will remind us to regret your invitation, my acceptance. The house will call us fools.

In a few days they drove her to the bus. Embraces all around, like other families. "I put the chromite in Fido," said Chloe.

Ingrid looked at her for a while. "Thank you," she said. "I'll use it. And on my spring visit I'll bring it back to you."

She boarded the bus. They waved and waved. She twisted her neck and watched them until the first curve took them out of her sight. Then, she guessed, Lynne and Chloe got into the car, while Chris kept his arm uselessly in the air.

Her Cousin Jamie At their annual convention-they were both high school teachers-Fern and Barbara always got together at least once for coffee. Last year they had graduated to gin. Now, on the final night, they installed themselves at a little table in the hotel bar. They talked about this and that-about the decay of cla.s.sroom decorum, of course; and about the tumblings that took place at this convention, once-a-year love affairs that saved many a marriage.

"Like emergency medication," Barbara suggested.

"Relieving the flatulence of wedlock," Fern expanded.

Fern in her fifties had a broad, unlined brow, clear gray eyes, a mobile mouth. She was fit, and her blondish hair was curly and short, and she wore expensive pants and sweaters in forest colors: moss, bark, mist...Really, she should have been considered handsome; she might even have been admired. But those athletic shoulders had a way of shrugging and those muscular lips a way of grimacing that said she expected to be overlooked. As for Barbara-wide face, wide lap-she was the kind of person people felt safe telling their stories to. Fine: she liked to listen.

No story had ever come from Fern, though. None seemed to be forthcoming tonight. The two women might have finished the evening in amiable silence-Earth Mother and Failed Beauty, drinking-if a certain colleague hadn't walked swiftly past the bar toward the elevators.

Fern leaned forward. "Jamie!" she called, apparently too late. She leaned back again. "Oh well."

"Jamie," Barbara repeated. "That Jamie is the most scrupulous-looking woman I have ever seen. Pulled-back hair. Round gla.s.ses. Pale lips. Every day a clean white blouse...You're related, aren't you?"

"We're cousins. She's my Cousin of Perpetual Penitence."

Barbara sipped. She sipped and sipped. "Does she have cause for penitence?" she asked at last.

Fern said, "Oh, I couldn't." And then she did.

Decades ago, Fern began.

Remember the fizz of those times? The era, they call it now. Women and blacks, upward and outward, not exactly hand in hand except for certain instances. Well, this was an instance. Jamie was just out of college, doing an a.s.sistants.h.i.+p in Lev Thompson's think tank. Fern had been in New York too, she said, student-teaching children who might as well have been orphans-whose parents noticed them only to knock them around. She and Jamie shared an apartment.

Lev Thompson. A figure. He'd pa.s.sed his sixtieth year; he'd packed those six decades with admirable activity. He'd been a doctor, a civil rights leader, the head of one national organization and adviser to others. Now he spent most of his time on the lecture circuit. His voice wasn't one of those fudge-rich ba.s.sos, no; it was soft and grainy. His skin was the color of shortbread. His mother was a teacher, Fern said, like us.

Jamie's face was too thin and her shoulders too narrow. But her blue eyes were shot with golden glints; and then there was that head of hair: lots of it, mahogany. He liked to hold a thick strand of her hair between his fingers, she told me. She told me everything. He held her hair as if his fingers were tongs, and he slid the tongs down to the end, and then he started again from the scalp.

A flat chest; and her two front teeth overlapped. Some men were wild for such defects, who knew why. She and Jamie came from a certain sort of family, Fern said. You know, Connecticut-money so old that it's gone. Anyway, Jamie, no b.o.o.bs, too aristocratic for orthodontia-she appealed to him. He was populist, he had more than a streak of the preacher; but there was nothing coa.r.s.e about his tastes. The first woman, the one he'd married when he was a young doctor-she was a person of refinement. Their three kids were a credit to them both. The second wife was a Gabonese surgeon-they had a daughter he doted on. The third was a German tennis player-he was still married to her when he and Jamie got together. Cla.s.s acts, the lot of them. Sure, he'd played around some, he told Jamie, who told Fern. But just a little: Jamie was only his second affair this marriage. Schmidt, the tennis player, was on the road a lot, and at his age he didn't like to be alone.

Fern stopped, ordered another drink. Barbara did too.

He needed company, Fern went on. He probably could have done without the s.e.x. But Jamie was in love, just like her predecessors-in love with his voice, his skin, the way he had of shrugging and waiting in argument, palms turned outward, as if he had all of G.o.d's eternity to spend until the other person came around to his way of thinking. The kindly smile-you saw it across the room, stretching his tawny face, and you ached to see it hanging over you, and you on your back...The hair on his chest was silver, Jamie reported. Sometimes, before they happened upon licking, she was slow to come. "So what?" he whispered into her ear. "I'm a patient darky." Well, you know, only a man like that can say a thing like that.

His apartment was books and leather and wood, and there were pictures of his wives and children, including a life-size photograph of Schmidt returning a backhand. Jamie stayed there infrequently, and of course only when Schmidt was on tour. Schmidt liked other women, Lev told Jamie in that tolerant voice-liked men too, liked riding him as if she were a circus performer, her knees up around her ears, her arms stretched diagonally toward the heavens. "Want to try it that way-me the tired old horse, you the young rider?"

Sure: anything for him. But what she liked best was to lie beneath him, to let him envelop her, to raise her own knees only slightly, to listen to his labored grunts and at last his sharp intake and his final sigh and his heart thudding against her chest. His lips, so soft on hers, slid down the side of her cheek and kissed the white pillow.

Together they went to this function and that. Jamie, usually wearing a skinny red dress he admired, hung up his coat, held on to his briefcase, hunted up a can of ginger ale if the event's organizers had provided only water. "My Stepin Fetchit," he'd say later, licking the underside of her chin, her l.a.b.i.a, the backs of her knees; and whenever he licked, wherever, her inner tumblers rolled helplessly until they locked one to the other in shuddering o.r.g.a.s.m. He could lick her earlobe in a taxi with the same quick effect. Jamie said a year later it occurred to her that her own tongue might perform that useful office, and, alone in an elevator, she pressed the inside of her wrist against her open lips and knew her skin's salt and her stringy tendons, mm, oh.

He could give a speech on anything. "Filth as Thou Art" was the t.i.tle of his lecture on Caliban and nature and the need to protect the damaged by a kind of enslavement. "Watch Him While He Sleeps" promoted the t.i.the over the progressive tax. His reputation had been made by a book that likened the undercla.s.s to the population of a late medieval city during the plague. But these later days he talked about a variety of unpopular things: about the right to be rescued-this at the time that mental hospitals were pouring their inmates into the streets; about G.o.d, the living G.o.d, not a forgiving deity or a righteous one, but a G.o.d you sat wrapped up in like an overcoat. He refused to appear on television, saying that the medium itself, no matter how high-minded its content, was a scourge. He returned letters to their senders-even letters of praise-with corrections of grammar in the margins. His enemies included Action for Children's Television and some noted psychiatrists. They allowed that he was a good man. His wives said the same. The first two marriages had ended because each wife in turn had wearied of the causes, not of the husband. As the Gabonese doctor put it in a farewell note: Your attention, dear Lev, is forever elsewhere.

And that summer night in his apartment, Fern said, his attention was certainly elsewhere. The grooves in his face had become furrows, Jamie had noticed during the lecture he'd given earlier. His voice was raspy. His amber eyes had retreated into their lined surround. The public was demanding too much of him. In the cab afterward she asked him: "Should I go on home? You seem tired." But she didn't mean the offer-Schmidt would soon be back in town.