The Thanatos Syndrome

V

1. NO TROUBLE GETTING BACK to Angola in time. No trouble with Bob Comeaux.

I simply retrace my steps, drive up the Angola road, chewing Popeyes drumsticks, park at old Tunica Landing, take jeep trail to levee, climb under fence, and stroll along hands in pockets like a Guatemalan ex-President returning from his exercise period. Two horse patrols pass me and pay no attention.

Back before two o’clock! Stretched out on my cot as if I’ve been locked up all morning, when Bob Comeaux and Max Gottlieb show up. (What a pleasure to steal time, to do a thing or two while appearing to be idle, even incarcerated!) I report to Elmo Jenkins, thank him for allowing me my “exercise period.” He asks no questions, thanks me again for my long-ago treatment of his auntee. Though he does not say so, I think he is really thanking me for not flying the coop. He has already heard from Sheriff Sharp, I can tell from his voice. We’re all on the same side now, I, warden and sheriff. “Your visitors just walked in, Doc.” What if I hadn’t been there! “I’ll send them up.”

One look at Bob Comeaux and I know that he knows. He’s still dressed in his white plantation tuxedo and he must have come straight from the wedding. But he gives me an odd, white-eyed look. Gone is his old Howard Keel assurance. For the first time he is at a loss. He doesn’t even seem to notice the hundreds of blacks picking cotton on the prison plantation, stooped over their long, collapsed sacks and singing mournful spirituals. What does he know? He knows about Belle Ame. How does he know? He could have called his office or Sheriff Sharp, been beeped, used the cellular phone in his Mercedes Duck.

Max Gottlieb doesn’t know. He only knows something is up. He’s frowning, hot and bothered, shaking his head dolefully, even more dismayed than usual (what have you gone and done now?).

I sit at my little student desk, they side by side on my cot, Bob Comeaux holding his wide-brimmed hat between his knees, tuxedo somewhat worse for wear, shirt ruffles wilted. Max is very neat in his new Oxford-gray vested suit, which his wife, Sophie, must have bought for him, but his shoes are the same dried-up Thom McAns he’s worn for twenty years. They are shoes no surgeon would be caught dead in.

“Well?” I say after a while.

Bob Comeaux jumps up and begins pacing back and forth as if it were he in prison. He explains he’d like to get back to the wedding reception. “Look, guys, let’s make this short. After all, this is only a routine hearing, for the book. Let’s spring our friend, the doctor here, sign the papers, vacate his parole status, and let’s all go about our business. I got to get back—” He looks at his gold wafer of a watch. “Jesus! Let’s get this show — So he’s had a couple of violations — but what’s a little kinkiness among shrinks, ha ha — right? Say, Tom—” He pulls up in front of me. “I was just wondering. Were the hell-raisin’ and hijinks at P&S as dumb in your day as they were in mine?”

“Well, I remember we dropped water bombs on pedestrians.”

“Hot damn! We did too!” He socks himself. “Can you believe it?” he asks Max, and instantly sobering: “Okay, guys, let’s get this show on the road”—and heads for the open door.

But Max, worried as usual, likes to have everything squared away and kosher. “Yeah, right. Hold it. Let’s just hold it. I never had any use for this parole foolishness, anyway. But what’s this business about some incident this morning—‘disturbance of the peace’?—out at Belle Ame involving Dr. Van Dorn? And some arrested? What is all that about?” Max opens his hands, first to Bob Comeaux, then to me.

Bob Comeaux waves him off, speaks quickly to both of us.

In a word, Bob simply wants shut of me. He assures Max the ”incident” was not of my doing, is still willing to take me on at Fedville at consultant’s salary plus Ford grant money, is willing for me to do what I’m doing, or throw in with Max in Mandeville — whatever I want to do — but mainly move, move out from here, from him. Let’s go. He’s at the open door. “Come on, Tom, I’m signing you out, okay?”

But Max is scratching his head, one eye screwed up, trying to make head or tail of it. “Well. He sure doesn’t belong here.” Sighing, he’s pushing himself up from the cot. He can’t quite get hold of it.

Bob Comeaux, relieved, relaxes in the doorway and, gazing out at the prison plantation, shakes his head elegiacally. “God,” he says softly, “would you listen to those darkies!”

We listen.

Nobody knows the trouble I seen, Nobody knows but Jesus

“Well, Tom?” He holds out hand-with-hat to me. Let’s go.

I do not rise from my student desk.

Max gives me his quizzical eye. “Well?”

“There’re a couple of things,” I tell Max.

“What’s that?” asks Bob quickly, as if, what with the singing, he couldn’t hear.

“I think there’re a couple of things that need to be settled before we go any further.”

“Right,” says Max, still feeling unsettled.

“By all means,” says Bob, putting his hat on.

“Well?” says Max, giving me his curious eye.

“I think it would be a good idea to discontinue the Blue Boy pilot immediately, today.”

“What’s that?” asks Bob Comeaux, cupping an ear.

I repeat it.

“What do you mean?” Bob asks me. “What does he mean?” he asks Max.

“What do you mean, Tom?” Max asks me.

“I mean turn off the sodium shunt at the Ratliff intake and dismantle it, today.”

Max’s worries are back, worries now about me weighing him down. He sinks to the cot.

“Tom,” he says, screwing up an eye, “I was aware you knew about the sodium pilot. We’ve never discussed it, for obvious reasons — since it was Grade Four classified. But since you do — to tell you the truth, I’ve never been too happy with it — I prefer individual therapy, as you well know — to this sort of mass shotgun prophylaxis. But how can you argue with success? I mean, the numbers from NIH are damned impressive, Tom. I mean, it may not do much for our egos if they can reduce street crime, drug abuse, suicides, and suchlike by a simple sodium ion — but what are you going to do? We weren’t too happy with lithium either. But zero recidivism at Angola. How do you argue with success? If it ain’t broke—” He trails off.

“So I thought at first, but you don’t know, Max,” I tell him.

“I don’t know what?” he says absently, distracted. He’s worried, I know, less about Blue Boy than about me.

“Max, NIH doesn’t even know about Blue Boy, the heavy-sodium pilot program. They never heard of it. The FDA never heard of it. ACMUI never heard of it. Dr. Lipscomb even spoke to Jesse Land, the director whom she knows. He says it could only be what he calls an instance of ‘aberrant local initiative’— that is, some ambitious regional NIH people using their discretionary funding to run a pilot which might otherwise not be funded and then present them with a fait accompli which they can’t turn down. It’s been done before — and sometimes with good cause — to get around bureaucratic hassle — until the election next month.”

“Wait.” Max has risen again, this time with both hands out, palms up. “Hold it. Are you telling me that Dr. Comeaux here and Dr. Van Dorn cooked up this sodium additive without even telling—”

“Just as Dr. Fred McKay did with an equally simple ion, fluoridating water,” says Bob Comeaux from the doorway, facing us now, arms folded, eyes level and minatory. “If he’d waited for D.C. bureaucracy, children’s teeth would still be rotting out. And as both you doctors know, every kook and Kluxer in the country accused him of everything from mind control to Communist conspiracy.”

Silence. Max sighs. “Well—” He is speaking to me.

“Max, Blue Boy was not a pilot involving Angola. It covered the entire parish, in fact, all of Feliciana. Moreover, I’m afraid what we’ve got here are some side effects which in fact you are aware of and which I can show are related to the additive—”

“Such as? What do you mean, the whole parish?”

“Such as regression of some subjects, especially children, to pre-linguistic pongid levels of behavior, regression of some women from menses to estrus, the sexual abuse of children—”

Bob Comeaux has taken off his hat, placed his hand on his forehead, closed his eyes. “Dear God, do you hear?” He speaks softly. “Where have we heard this before? Do I hear echoes? Of men descended from apes? Who was accused of this? Of corrupting the youth of Athens? You know who was accused of that. But I will confess that tampering with the sexuality of women is a new one.” He’s shaking his head sorrowfully at me. “From the local yahoos I would have expected it. But from you? Et tu—” He turns to Max. “Well, I suppose it always happens in a scientific breakthrough—”

“I wasn’t speaking of science, Bob. I was speaking of you and Dr. Van Dorn. It was you who made the decision to enlarge the pilot to the entire Ratliff water district — exempting Fedville. And it was your colleague Van Dorn who used the additive on the students at Belle Ame for purposes of the sexual gratification of himself and his senior staff—”

“Hold it, Doctor!” Bob Comeaux now stands against the door, hands behind him on the knob. He has entirely recovered, not only himself and his old assurance, but his old anger. “Hear this, Doctor. In the first place, I put my money where my mouth was. I sanctioned a dosage of additive for my own son — and hear this: he is doing brilliantly. And finally, Doctor, you know damn well I’m not responsible for Van Dorn’s behavior. But apparently this is the way you want it.” From his pocket he takes a paper, slowly tears it once, and again, drops it into my student waste- basket. “That was your release. After what you pulled at Belle Ame this morning, what is going to happen is that we’re packing your ass right back to Alabama. I’m sorry, Doctor. I came up here to get you out of here. I had the door open. I did everything but pull you out bodily. Max,” he says.

I look at Max.

Max is standing over me, hands deep in his pockets, staring down at the curled-up toes of his Thorn McAns. “He can do it,” says Max softly. “Look, Tom. Here’s what’s let’s do. Why don’t you — and I’m sure Bob here would accept this — why don’t you and Ellen— Look, there’s no reason to, ah, go to Alabama — instead, why don’t you and Ellen do what I’ve been trying to get you to do, move down to Mandeville, into Beau Rivage with us — there’s a condo on 12 just below us available — and I need a partner — I’m tired of clinical work, want some time for writing. You know we always did well together, especially in group. I know you’ve had some problems, ah, at home, that is, adjusting. Tom, we could do well together, and economically too—” He breaks off suddenly, eyes widening.

While Max is talking I’m spreading the Belle Ame photos on the floor, plus Lucy’s printouts and graphics from the NIH and Public Health mainframe in Baton Rouge and the local Fedvile data bank showing not only the distribution of Louisianians dosed up on Na-24—the starry galaxy over Feliciana — but the procurement order from Fedville, signed by Dr. Comeaux, exempting Fedville from the Ratliff water district and ordering a second intake upstream from Ratliff. The photographs, I can’t help but notice again, exhibit the same Victorian propriety, the decorous expressions, every hair in place, bobbed in the women, old-fashioned 1930s high haircuts in the men, a British sort of nakedness, white-as-white skins and vulnerable backs, unlike tan-all-over U.S. California nakedness, and the children above all: simpering, prudish, but, most of all, pleased. It is the proper pleased children—

For a while both Max and Bob gaze, at first politely, heads aslant, as people will attend to other people’s photos. Max’s cheek is even propped reflectively on three fingers.

In my clinical voice — doctor showing slides at a medical conference — I explain the exemption of Fedville from treated water, the sodium-additive arrangement, the presenting behavior of Mrs. Cheney, the anal lesions of this child, her curious linguistic regression, the extraordinary I.Q. of that child — not omitting Ricky’s perfect score in Concentration.

“Ricky?” says Bob, not comprehending.

“Ricky is all right, Bob. He’s at Lucy’s house.”

“What?” says Bob. “Ricky?”

“I understood you wanted to have him in the program, Bob.”

“Yeah, but at first-level minimum dosage, to improve his — he was flunking math — Jesus, they didn’t — Is he all right?”

“He’s fine. He’s not injured. He’s with Claude at Lucy’s house. You can pick him up any time.”

“Thank God,” says Bob. “Thanks, Tom.”

“That’s okay, Bob. He’s with Claude at Lucy’s house.”

“Jesus,” says Bob.

Max seems not to be listening. His attention seems to be caught by one photograph, the one depicting Van Dorn supine, bearing the child aloft and impaled between his knees, the child’s expression, demure, as pleased as if she had just won the spelling bee, legs kicking up happily. The child is facing the camera and therefore appears to be looking at the viewer of the photograph.

As Max examines the photographs he falls into an old habit, hissing a tune between tip of tongue and teeth, which I remember him doing as house physician standing with a patient’s chart in the nurses’ station — a sinister, amiable hissing, the attending intern casting about: How did I screw up this time?

Max is also nodding in his old abstracted way. “So,” he says to no one.

Bob Comeaux has come alongside, head medically-comradely aslant, like the attending physician co-inspecting an X-ray with the chief on grand rounds. He too is nodding, hands in pockets, upper lip folded against his teeth.

“Bob,” he says in his old ominous-gentle, grand-rounds voice, head back, looking along his cheek. “Just what are we doing here?”

Bob is clucking back-of-tongue-from-teeth tck tck tck meditatively, resident considering case: it’s amazing how everything you do, even late in life, you did in school.

Silence, except for the spirituals.

“What are we doing here?” Max asks again.

“We are listening to the darkies singing,” I say.

“All I can say is this,” says Bob Comeaux. He’s squinting into the afternoon sunlight, hat in his hands, head leaning back against the jamb. “I don’t know about those, whatever they are”—he nods toward, without quite looking at, the photographs—“but I will say this, you try the best you can to help folks. And what do you get? I’ll tell you what you get. You get the same thing Lister got, Galileo got, Pasteur got. Ridicule. Did that son of a bitch use Ricky?” he asks in a different voice.

“Ricky’s okay, Bob.”

Silence, except for the singing.

I looked over Jordan and what did I see,

Coming for to carry me home.

A band of angels coming after me,

Coming for to carry me home.

“Don’t tell me that’s not beautiful,” says Bob absently.

“Right, Bob,” I say. “Now here’s what we ought to do.” I exchange glances with Max — one of our “group” glances. We understand each other. We know something movies and TV don’t know. Here’s where movies and TV go wrong. You don’t shoot X for what he did to Y, even though he deserves shooting. You allow X a way out so he can help Y. X is going to have enough trouble as it is. Max already recognizes a tone in my voice, the clinical-helper voice of the “resource person” in group therapy. He and I have run many a group. It’s like two cops playing tough cop and softy cop.

“What’s that, Doctor?” asks Max in his tough cop voice.

“This is just an idea to kick around. I was thinking: Now that Blue Boy is closed down, wouldn’t it make sense to use the NIH discretionary funds and the Ford money to help Father Smith reactivate the hospice? The good Father is a nut, as we all know, but his place can be useful as a facility for your terminal cases — for one thing, save you an awful lot of money. He’s going to need all the help we can give him. I’m thinking of giving him a couple of afternoons a week.” Group strategy: Don’t shoot Bob Comeaux, use him.

We all appear to consider.

“Well, I don’t know,” muses Max, who is just beginning to grasp what has happened, is astounded, and is not showing it.

Bob Comeaux, still martyred, eyes still closed elegiacally, is actually attending closely. He almost nods.

“I was thinking too,” I say, not to Bob, but to Max. “You know, we’ve not only got a lot of toxic-abused children, overdosed on sodium 24, thanks to Van Dorn’s hapless experiment”—blame Van Dorn for now—“who’ve been knocked back to a cortical deficit, a pre-linguistic level like a bunch of chimps and are going to need all the help Father Smith and the rest of us can give them. I think it would also be a good place to transfer the euthanasic candidates and quarantined patients from the Qualitarian Center.”

Max rolls his eyes. Things are moving too fast. It’s all right for resource persons to fall out in group, stage mock warfare. But this! For Christ’s sake, Doctor, Max is saying, eyes rolled back, you’re pushing him too far.

“I for one,” says Max, switching to his nice-cop-versus-mean cop voice, “don’t think Dr. Comeaux should take that to mean you’re suggesting the transfer of all infants who are candidates for pedeuthanasia for one reason or another — hopeless retardation, Down’s syndrome, AIDS infants, status epilepticus, gross irreparable malformations, and suchlike — who have no chance for a life of any sort of acceptable quality — you’re not suggesting that they too should be transferred from the center to the hospice?”

“That’s what I meant. The hospice will take them all.”

Bob Comeaux has recovered sufficient footing to lever himself away from the doorjamb and face us both.

“You’re talking about violating the law of the land, gentlemen,” he says quietly. “Doe v. Dade, the landmark case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court which decreed, with solid scientific evidence, that the human infant does not achieve personhood until eighteen months.”

Max’s eyes are in his eyebrows. If his junior resource person insists on screwing up, he’s on his own.

“Not only that,” I go on in the same sociable tone, non compos but not hostile either, “we want all the so-called pre-personhood infants at St. Margaret’s by next week, plus all the terminal cases of any age, including adult AIDS patients who’ve been quarantined — plus your nursing staff until we can get organized.”

Why am I saying all this? Father Smith is a loony and can’t even take care of himself.

“Shit, Max!” Bob Comeaux, now altogether himself, collected in his anger, has squared off with Max. “He’s talking about shooting down the entire Qualitarian program in this area. No way.”

Max now, dropping group voice: this is serious. “Tom, we don’t want to get into a legal hassle. It is, after all, the law of the land.”

“Max, the law of the land does not require gereuthanasia of the old or pedeuthanasia of pre-personhood infants. It only permits it under certain circumstances.

“I know, but—” says Max.

Group falls silent.

“No way,” says Bob Comeaux softly.

“Very well,” I say, picking up the photos and Lucy’s printouts from NIH’s mainframe. “I’ll be going.”

“What you got there?” asks Bob Comeaux quickly, eyes tracking the printouts like a Macintosh mouse.

“You know what these are, Bob.”

“What you going to do with them?”

“Return them to Dr. Lipscomb. They’re her property. She in turn will be obliged to notify NIH, ACMUI, and the Justice Department.”

“But we haven’t signed you out!” exclaims Bob Comeaux, actually pointing to the torn paper in my student wastebasket.

“In that case I’ll just hand them to Warden Elmo Jenkins, who is familiar with the case and will pass them along to Lucy.”

“Ah me,” muses Max.

I’m halfway to the door. “Hold it, old son,” says Bob Comeaux, uttering, in a sense, a laugh, and clapping a hand on my shoulder. “As L.B.J. and Isaiah used to say, Let us reason together.” And, to tell the truth, he looks a bit like L.B.J. back at the ranch, in his Texas hat, smiling, big-nosed, pressing the flesh.

2. ELLEN LOST OUT in Fresno. Cut off from Van Dorn and heavy sodium, she got eliminated in Mixed Doubles and came limping home.

We were all glad to see her. She wouldn’t talk to anybody but Hudeen. They exchanged a few murmured syllables which no one else could understand.

The children, out of school, stood around either picking at each other or moony and cross as children are when something is wrong. But Chandra is good with them, playing six-hour games of Monopoly. Between times they’re on the floor in front of the stereo-V, as motionless as battlefield casualties, eyes glazed: back to six hours of Scooby Doo and He-Man.

My practice is almost nil. People are either not depressed, anxious, or guilty, or if they are, they’re not seeing me.

I begin dropping by the Little Napoleon and having a friendly shooter of Early Times with Leroy Ledbetter.

Ellen is puzzled, distant, and mostly silent. At night we lie in our convent beds watching Carson without laughing and reruns of M*A*S*H and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

What to do?

Leroy makes his usual suggestion, after one of his all-but-invisible knockings-back of a shot glass as part of the motion of wiping the bar and leaning over to tell me.

“Why don’t y’all take my Bluebird and go down to Disney World? Y’all will like it. There is something for all ages.”

I thank him as usual, hardly listening, since Disney World is the last place on earth I would choose to go.

But as I look at the moony, fretful children and puzzled silent Ellen lying in the silvery glare of the tube watching cockney Robin Leach and Carson and Hawkeye between her toes with exactly the same dreamy, unfocused expression, the thought occurs to me: Why not?

As it turns out, it is a splendid idea, and Leroy is right: Disney World is for all ages.

We find ourselves in the Bluebird parked in Fort Wilderness Resort next to the Magic Kingdom. Fort Wilderness is a pleasant wooded campground with hookups for motor homes. Our campsite is on Jack Rabbit Run.

The Bluebird is a marvel. It cost Leroy over a hundred thousand dollars secondhand, and he’s spent another ten on it. He lives in a room over the Little Napoleon. It is like giving me his house.

We go spinning along the Gulf Coast in the fine October light as easily as driving a Corvette, but sitting high and silent as astronauts. The children are enchanted. They spend days exploring the shiplike craft, opening bunks, taking showers, folding out tables and dinettes, working the sound system and control panel and the map locator, which shows us as a bright dot creeping along I-75.

The four-speaker stereo picks up the Pastoral symphony. We’re a boat humming along Beethoven’s brook. I would be happy, but Ellen, in the co-pilot seat, is still abstracted, brows knitted in puzzlement. I take a nip of Early Times both in celebration and for worry.

Ellen gets better the second night out in a KOA campground in the pine barrens.

While I’m hooking up, figuring out where the plugs go, Ellen disappears.

Oh, my God. But the kids are not worried. They’ve already found the playground. Neighbors come ambling over, offering a beer, inspecting the Bluebird. They think Meg and Tom are my grandchildren. They show me pictures of theirs. The American road is designed for children and grandparents. Oh, my God, where is Ellen? Have a drink. I have a drink, three drinks. Nobody else is worried. Neighbors assure me she has gone to the commissary.

She has. She’s back with groceries. No more Big Macs and Popeyes chicken.

Now in the violet October light after sunset, the air fragrant with briquet and mesquite smoke perfumed by lighter fluid, there is Ellen at the tiny galley cooking red beans and rice, not my favorite boudin sausage but Jimmy Dean sausage and — humming!

I do not dare signify to her that anything is different, let alone approach her from the rear, as I used to. Instead, in celebration and gratitude I step outside in the violet dusk and take three nips like a country man.

We sleep aft in a kind of observation bedroom — Meg has discovered how to slide back the roof, making a bubble under the stars — the kids amidships in complex fold-out astronaut pods. The bed is king-size, bigger than Sears Best. I am having bouts of nervousness and so take a nip for each bout. To keep the key low — no grand epiphanies, thank you — I turn on the tube. Leroy’s stereo-V is a pull-down screen big as a movie. There’s Hawkeye and Trapper John back in Korea. I never did like those guys. They fancied themselves super-decent and supertolerant, but actually had no use for anyone who was not exactly like them. What they were was super-pleased with themselves. In truth, they were the real bigots, and phony at that. I always preferred Frank Burns, the stuffy, unpopular doc, a sincere bigot.

But if Ellen likes them—

But Ellen turns them off.

There we lie in the Florida barrens in a bubble of a spaceship as close to the stars as Voyager V, I not quite drunk but laid out straight as an arrow, feet sticking up, hands at my side, eyes on Orion.

She too.

Presently her hand comes down lightly on my thigh, stays there.

“Okay then,” says Ellen.

“Yes, indeed.”

“I — good.”

“Sure.”

“Soon — better.”

“Right.”

Ellen is still too stoned on sodium ions to talk right.

I am too drunk for too long to make love.

But it’s all right. Soon she’ll talk better and I won’t have to drink.

Disney World is indeed splendid — though I could not stand more than one hour of it.

After one day of the Magic Kingdom, Tomorrowland, Adventureland, Mickey and Goofy, Spaceship Earth, the World of Motion, the Living Seas, I take to the woods.

The children love it. Ellen seems to like it in an odd, dreamy way. Tommy and Margaret are the only kids around — everybody else is in school. They’re laid out, paralyzed by delight, when they shake hands with Mickey and Goofy (though they don’t really know who Mickey Mouse is).

But it is splendid. The kids run free and safe, catch the tram, launch, monorail, quasi-paddle-wheeler in a quasi-river, go where they please.

Ellen makes friends with other ladies in Jack Rabbit Run, plays some bridge, not too well, no better than they.

We’re there a week.

I am quite happy sitting in our private little copse in Fort Wilderness reading Stedmann’s History of World War I. A little vista affords a view of the great sphere of spaceship earth and the top of the minaretlike tower of Cinderella’s Castle.

It is easy to make friends. Sometimes I catch the Conestoga tram up to Trail Blaze Corral or down to the Ole Fishing Hole. Though we are hedged off from our neighbors by a brake of cypress, pine and palmetto, they are only a few feet away. A haze of perfumed briquet smoke, friendly talk, laughter enlists us in a community of back yards.

We meet on the tram or strolling about Jack Rabbit Run or Sunny Sage Way or Quail Trail.

Most of my neighbors are from Canada or Ohio. They are very pleasant fellows, mostly retirees who have done well and are cruising America in their Bluebirds and Winnebagos and Fleetwoods. The Ohioans are recognizable by their accents, not their license plates, which are mostly Florida, for they have settled down in places like Lakeland or Fort Myers or Deerfield Beach and have hopped over for a few days.

Native Floridians look down their noses at the Ohioans. The saying is: An Ohioan arrives with a shirt and a five-dollar bill and never changes either. But it isn’t true. My Ohio neighbors in Jack Rabbit Run couldn’t be nicer. It is quickly evident that I know nothing about motor homes and they spend a great deal of time demonstrating electrical and sewerage hookups and even the features of my own Bluebird, which they know better than I (they marvel at the modifications Leroy has made, especially the map locator).

The Canadians are as affable but standoffish — though not as shy as the English.

But both, Canadians and Ohioans, are amiable, gregarious, helpful — and at something of a loss. Here they are, to enjoy the rewards of a lifetime of work, to escape children and grandchildren, and they have. They stand about nodding and smiling, but looking somewhat zapped.

Ellen gets along splendidly with them too. She talks to the women by the hour, especially the Canadians, about the queen of England and Princess Di. Like many American women, she loves British royalty even more than the Brits.

Their expressions are fond and stunned.

The Ohioans looked zapped but keep busy.

The Canadians looked zapped but also wistful.

Every time I talk to a Canadian, either he will get around to asking me what I think of Canada or I will know that he wants to.

I realize that I do not have many thoughts about Canada. Reading Stedmann, who mentions the heroic role the Canadians played in World War I, I realize a curious fact about Canadians: When you hear the word Canada or Canadians, nothing much comes to mind — unlike hearing the words Frenchman or Englishman or Chinese or Spaniard—or Yankee. I realize this is an advantage. The Canadian is still free, has not yet been ossified by his word. (Why am I beginning to think like Father Smith?)

I read Stedmann about the Battles of the Somme and Verdun for a while, then step out into my tiny plantation fragrant with hot palmetto palms — it is like summer here — walk over to Quail Trail, and have a Coke with my amiable, stunned neighbors.

Like my cellmates at Fort Pelham and unlike folks at home, they want to talk about current events, politics, Communism, Democrats, Negroes (their word), terrorists, and such.

I listen attentively and with interest.

After reading Stedmann in the Bluebird and stepping out into the fragrant Florida sunshine and discussing current events with my knowledgeable, up-to-date neighbors, who even with their knowledgeability — unlike me they’re up to date — still look fond and stunned even as they speak, I experience the sensation that the world really ended in 1916 and that we’ve been living in a dream ever since. These good fellows have spent their entire lives working, raising families, fighting Nazis, worrying about Communism, yet they’ve really been zapped by something else. We haven’t been zapped by the Nazis and the Communists. On the contrary. It is a pleasure to fight one, worry about the other, and talk about both.

We stand about in the Florida sunshine of Jack Rabbit Run, under the minaret of Cinderella’s Castle, they fresh from the wonders of Tomorrowland — Tomorrowland! — We don’t even know what Todayland is! — fond, talkative, informative, and stunned, knocked in the head, like dreamwalkers in a moonscape.

Ellen wants to stay on the road, head for Wyoming and Jenny Lake in Jackson Hole. But I have to get back to testify in the trial of John Van Dorn and company. We’ll go later.

3. VAN DORN AND HIS STAFF were not convicted of child abuse, after all. The presence of heavy sodium in their bloodstreams (they’d been taking a cocktail now and then for one reason and another) compromised the case against them. In a plea-bargain agreement with the district attorney they were confined to the State Forensic Hospital in Jackson until their bizarre symptoms and behavior abated, whereupon they were paroled into the custody of Sheriff Vernon “Cooter” Sharp and sentenced to five years of community service. Sheriff Sharp, after consulting with me and Max, assigned them to St. Margaret’s Hospice.

Meanwhile, Father Smith had come down from his fire tower and the hospice was reopened.

Mr. and Mrs. Brunette were assigned to the Alzheimer’s patients, old addled folk who could not take care of themselves and in whom no one, not even the Brunettes, could take the slightest sexual interest. It was a hunch, mine and Father Smith’s, and it paid off. The Brunettes went to work willingly and in good heart. Father Smith says they are a caring couple. What he actually said was: “Paroled murderers are the most trustworthy aides but sex offenders and child abusers are also excellent, once occasions of sin are removed.”

Mrs. Cheney works as a nurse’s aide in a ward of malformed infants, formerly candidates for pedeuthanasia. An excellent babysitter for twenty years — I so testified — she was and is never otherwise than her old motherly and solicitous self toward the children. And even though she persisted for some weeks in her odd rearward presenting behavior as the effects of the sodium ions wore off, there was no one to present to on the children’s ward.

Coach also found his talents put to good use. He was assigned to the AIDS wing, which housed not only dying adult patients but also, in a separate cottage, a little colony of LAV-positive children, that is, children who harbored the virus but were not sick. Neither I nor any other physician considered them a threat, but since federal law requires quarantine, what to do with them? Coach did plenty. He is, after all, an excellent coach. His sexual preferences were no problem. The dying adults were too weak to bother him, and he was too terrified to bother them. In a word, he was good with them, didn’t have to feign sympathy, was willing to talk and listen. He organized card games, skits, and sing-alongs. But the children were the challenge. He formed a soccer team which, since soccer is not a contact sport, was eligible for Little League competition. His Jolly Rogers (smiling death’s-head insignia) are undefeated, have every prospect of winning the league and being invited to the Special Olympics in San Francisco.

Van Dorn, however, was a difficult case. He did not recover as rapidly as the others. Perhaps he ingested a more massive dose of sodium additive and suffered brain damage.

Anyhow, he had to be detained in the Forensic Hospital. When anyone approached, he would at first rattle the bars, roar, and thump his chest. Then, after this ruckus, he would knuckle over to the toilet and cower behind it. He became abject. What to do, legally or medically? No statute could be found to fit his case. Nothing in the Louisiana Civil Code seemed applicable. No medical or psychiatric diagnosis could be arrived at.

What to do with Van Dorn?

Months passed. Van Dorn gave up roaring and thumping, instead knuckled across his cell, crouched behind the toilet, and gave up eating.

I had an idea. It came to me by luck and happenstance — like most good scientific ideas.

It came to me one day while I was making my weekly visit to the Tulane Primate Center, where I earn a few needed dollars — my practice having gone to pot — by doing CORTscans on the primates housed therein. It is part of an FDA program to test for toxic side effects of new drugs on brain function.

The director, Dr. Rumsen “Rummy” Gordon, old friend and classmate, was showing me around the place, a pleasant compound of piney woods and oak groves which housed colonies of rhesus monkeys, chimps, orangutans, and a single gorilla.

The gorilla, a morose female named Eve, was a special case. She was the last of the so-called talking apes, the famous chimps and gorillas who were supposed to have learned sign language but had been given up on and so had lapsed from fame to obscurity. It was not clear whether they had learned sign language after all, or whether, if they had, they had grown weary of it, even abusive, and stopped talking, and their teachers weary of them. At any rate, in the end for lack of funding these world-famous apes were either packed off to zoos or to the wilds of Zaire, where, it was hoped, they might be accepted by their native cousins.

Only Eve remained, and only Rummy Gordon persisted in his conviction that apes could be taught sign language — not merely to signal simpleminded needs like Tickle Eve, Eve want banana, Eve want out, Rummy come play—but to learn to tell stories, crack jokes, teach language to their young, and so on.

But Eve, like the others, fell silent, no longer greeted Rummy with a happy hopping up and down and a flurry of signs, and took to her bower in the low crotch of a live oak.

“She won’t sign, not even for bananas,” sighs the disconsolate Rummy as we gaze up at Eve, supine and listless on her bed of bamboo leaves, one arm trailing down, one leg sticking straight up, for all the world like a catatonic patient on a closed ward. “In fact, she won’t eat bananas, period.”

“Rummy, I’ve got an idea.”

He thinks I’m joking at first. “Cut it out, Tom,” he says with a wan smile. “I’m serious.”

“So am I. Look. This is a lovely spot and enclosed — you’d be taking no chances.” It is a lovely spot, a half acre of live oaks and pines, and even a brooklet. If it were listed by any realtor in Feliciana, it would be called a ranchette and go for at least $300,000.

“You’ve got to be kidding—” But I see he’s taking it seriously. “How do you know they would get along. She could kill him. Eve weighs in at about 250.”

“I have a hunch, Rummy. A strong hunch. I think it would work. To be on the safe side, we’ll watch them at first.”

“My God.” But he’s thinking. “Let me look into the insurance.” He’s shaking his head. “No way.”

In the end he’s convinced by a single argument: It’s his only chance to revive Eve’s language. I know his weak spot. “Don’t you see, Rummy? As Van Dorn recovers, they can communicate.”

“How? He doesn’t know sign language, let lone Ameslan.” Ameslan is the special sign vocabulary apes are taught.

“That’s the point,” I say, watching him. I think I’ve got him.

“Oh. You mean—” He’s got it! His eyes are alight. “She teaches him!”

He’s got it: she teaches him!

“It hasn’t been done before, not even ape teaching ape, has it? Isn’t that the big breakthrough you’ve been trying for? Wouldn’t it prove your detractors wrong once and for all?”

He’s tapping his lips, casting ahead. I’ve got him. “Why not,” he says finally. “We could put a metal hut in there in case he doesn’t take to the bower. He might even get her into the hut,” he muses.

Why not?

To make a long story short, he did it. They did it. Van Dorn joined Eve in her idyllic ranchette. After a good deal of wary knuckling and circling, baring of teeth, they made friends. For of course mountain gorillas, the species Gorilla gorilla, are gentle creatures despite the chest thumping and roaring, which are mainly for sexual display by males and for scaring off predators. And Van Dorn was no predator. Eve smacked her lips, a good sign. Presenting often follows. They, Eve and Van Dorn, spent the brisk fall days playing, romping about the compound, or taking long siestas in the live oak. She gave him a hand up to the crotch. On chilly nights she allowed herself to be led into the hut, which she converted to a proper bower by weaving bamboo shoots over it. They were observed signing to each other in Ameslan, the sign language of the deaf, Eve signing first, Van Dorn watching closely, then venturing a tentative sign in return.

It lasted two months — in a word, until Van Dorn recovered. Having recovered his humanity, become his old self, his charming, grandiose, slightly phony Confederate self, he summoned Rummy Gordon in ordinary Mississippi English and expressed his desire to rejoin his own kind, was released to Sheriff Sharp, examined, found competent to stand trial, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to Angola for ten years.

As resilient as ever, however, he was soon running the prison library, giving bridge lessons, and writing a book. My Life and Love with Eve was an immediate and sensational best seller, serialized with photos in Penthouse and eventually made into a six-hour mini-series for stereo-V, the Playboy channel. It made such a hit with the Louisiana governor that he pardoned Van Dorn, who has since been busy on the talk-show circuit and making appearances on the Donahue show, often with Dr. Ruth.

Dr. Rumsen Gordon prospered as well. He wrote a landmark scientific paper, “The Interspecies Acquisition of Ameslan Small Talk by an Na-24 Intoxicated Homo sapiens sapiens from a Gorilla gorilla,” which became celebrated in academic circles and led to his appointment as Emeritus Professor of Semiotics at Yale at twice his former salary.

Eve did not fare as well. Having lapsed into silence upon Van Dorn’s departure, she was returned to Zaire, where it was hoped she would be accepted by other mountain gorillas, who, however, were members of an endangered species on the verge of extinction. She was last seen squatting alone on a riverbank, shunned by man and gorilla alike.

4. BOB COMEAUX AND MAX AND I reached a gentleman’s agreement. Instead of turning Bob over to the Justice Department for prosecution for defrauding the federal government, specifically in his misuse of both discretionary NIH funds and Ford Foundation grants, we suggested that it might be in his interest to stay long enough to dismantle the sodium shunt and to divert next year’s funds to St. Margaret’s Hospice — and then to leave town. Max, who knows everybody, made friendly telephone calls to the directors of both NIH and ACMUI and let drop not even a hint but only an intimation that even though they were not legally responsible for the Blue Boy pilot, it might be prudent — politics being politics, and we know about politicians, right, Doctors? — not only to dismantle the sodium shunt for environmental reasons but to terminate the local Qualitar?an Center at Fedville — for fiscal reasons.

The center was closed, quietly. Bob Comeaux left town even more quietly. I have not heard from him. There are rumors. Some say that he returned to Long Island City, resumed the family name Como — Huguenots being in short supply in Queens — and is running a Planned Parenthood clinic on Queens Boulevard.

He bears me no malice. In fact, the last time I saw him, in the A&P parking lot, where he’d had to park to get to the post office because his Mercedes was pulling a two-horse trailer, he greeted me in his old style, with knowing looks right and left as if he meant to share a secret. The secret was that he’d been invited to the People’s Republic of China to serve as consultant to the minister for family planning, who wanted to enlist his expertise in the humane disposal of newborn second children — Chinese families being limited, as everyone knows, to one child.

“You want to know something, old buddy,” says Bob Comeaux, hitching up his pants, hiking one foot on the bumper of the horse trailer just below the long gray tails of two splendid Arabians. He hawks and spits, adjusts his crotch, casting an eye about, Louisiana style.

“What?”

“You and I may have had our little disagreements, like Churchill and Roosevelt, but we were always after the same thing.”

“We were?”

“Sure. Helping folks. Our disagreement was in tactics, not goals.”

“It was?”

“You always did have a genius for the one-on-one doctor-patient relationship — for helping the individual — and you were right — especially about Van Dorn and that gang of fags and child abusers — for which I salute you.”

“Thanks.”

“But I was right about the long haul, the ultimate goal, as you must admit.”

“I must?”

“We were after the same thing, the greatest good, the highest quality of life for the greatest number. We were not a bad team, Tom. Between us we had it all. We each supplied the other’s defect.”

“We did?”

“Sure.” He pats the round rump of an Arabian, and his eyes go fond and unfocused. “We’ve never argued about the one great medical goal we shared. And you still can’t argue.” His eyes almost come back to mine.

“About what?”

“Argue with the proposition that in the end there is no reason to allow a single child to suffer needlessly, a single old person to linger in pain, a single retard to soil himself for fifty years, suffer humiliation, and wreck his family.”

“I—”

“You want to know the truth,” he says suddenly, giving me a sly sideways look.

“Yes.”

“You and I are more alike than most folks think.”

“We are?”

“Sure — and you damn well know it. The only difference between us is that you’re the proper Southern gent who knows how to act and I’m the low-class Yankee who does all these bad things like killing innocent babies and messing with your Southern Way of Life by putting secret stuff in the water, right? What people don’t know but what you and I know is that we’re both after the same thing — such as reducing the suffering in the world and making criminals behave themselves. And here’s the thing, old buddy”—he is smiling, coming close, but his eyes are narrow—“and you know it and I know it: You can’t give me one good reason why what I am doing is wrong. The only difference between us is that you’re in good taste and I’m not. You have style and know how to act, and I don’t. But you don’t have one good reason—” He breaks off, hawks, eyes going away in his new-found Southern style. He smiles. “You all right, Doc.”

“I—” I begin, but he’s gone.

5. TWO GREAT HAPPENINGS to Lucy Lipscomb within the month. Exxon brought in a gas well at Pantherburn and her ex-husband, Buddy Dupre, divorced his second wife and came home.

Acquitted of charges of grand theft and malfeasance in office by the Baton Rouge grand jury, mostly Cajuns, he returned to Feliciana exonerated and something of a hero. He is said to have political ambitions. Many friends, he reports, have urged him to seek higher office. What with his extended family — he’s kin to half of south Louisiana — and Lucy’s high-Protestant connections in Feliciana and his own advocacy of a “scientific creationism” law in the legislature — which helped him in Baptist north Louisiana — he has a political base broad enough to run for governor. And now Lucy has the money. Louisianians, moreover, have a fondness for politicians who beat a rap: “Didn’t I tell you that ol’ boy was too damn smart to catch up with?”

Lucy, to tell the truth, would not in the least mind being first lady of Louisiana and presiding over the great mansion in Baton Rouge. She is one of those women who can carry off being wife, doctoring, and running a plantation — doing it all well, albeit somewhat abstractedly.

It is just as well. I’d have gotten into trouble with Lucy for sure, lovely as she is in her bossy-nurturing, mothering-daughtering way, always going tch and fixing something on me, brushing off dandruff with quick rough brushes of her hand, spitting on her thumb to smooth my eyebrows. The one time she came to my bed, coming somewhat over and onto me in an odd, agreeable, early-morning incubus centering movement, I registered, along with the pleasant centered weight of her, the inkling that she was the sort who likes the upper hand.

It is just as well Ellen came home and Buddy came home. She, Lucy, gave signs of wanting to marry me, and how could I not have, lovely large splendid big-assed girl that she is, face as bruisy-ripe as a plum, with a splendid old house and Ellen having run off with Van Dorn? An unrelieved disaster it would have been, what with the uncle calling ducks night and day and what with Ellen coming home eventually. I’d have ended up for sure like our common ancestor, Lucy’s and mine, with one wife too many in a great old house, sunk in English Tory melancholy, nourishing paranoid suspicions against his neighbors, fearful of crazy Yankee Americans coming down the river (Como and company) and depraved French coming up the river (Buddy Dupre and the Cajuns) — in the end seeing no way out but to tie a sugar kettle on his head and jump into the river.

What a relief all around.

Lucy deserved her good fortune, restored Pantherburn without prettying it up, replaced rotten joists and moldings, hung her English landscapes for the first time since the War, replaced the silver stolen by the Yankees and General Benjamin F. “Silver Spoons” Butler.

Vergil Bon was toolpusher for the Exxon well, and made enough money to return to L.S.U. for his graduate degree in petroleum geology.

The uncle won the Arkansas National Duck Call for the eleventh time.

6. THE EFFECTS OF the heavy-sodium additive are gradually wearing off in Feliciana.

In the universities, for example, one sees fewer students lying about the campus grooming each other.

There are fewer complaints from parents about “human fly” professors scaling the walls of the women’s dormitories. Fewer professors complain of women students presenting rearward during tutorials.

L.S.U. football had a losing season.

Writers-in-residence, as well as local poets who for years have been writing two-word sentences like the chimp Washoe and during readings uttering exclamations, howls, and routinely exposing themselves, have begun writing understandable novels and genuine poetry in the style of Robert Penn Warren, formerly of Feliciana.

But my practice is still dormant. Still, no one complains of depression, anxiety, guilt, obsessions, or phobias. People hereabouts still suffer from physical illnesses, mainly liver damage and arterial clogging, but, mentally speaking, appear to have subsided into a pleasant funk, saying very little, drinking Dixie beer, fishing, hunting, watching sports on stereo-V, eating crawfish and sucking the heads thoughtfully.

I report this state of affairs to Leroy Ledbetter at the Little Napoleon over a drink of Early Times. Taking his invisible drink during a wipe, he replies only, “So what else is new, Doc?”

7. MY TWO OLD FRIENDS, ex-Jesuit Kev Kevin and ex Maryknoller Debbie Boudreaux, who had long since abandoned belief in God, Jesus, the Devil, the Church, and suchlike in favor of belief in community, relevance, growth, and interpersonal relations, have now abandoned these beliefs as well.

They went their separate ways.

Debbie works quietly as full-time bookkeeper at her father’s new Nissan agency in Thibodaux.

Kev has given up writing political tracts and now writes commercially successful paperback novels about nuns and ex-nuns, priests and ex-priests who engage in a variety of political and sexual activities, both heterosexual and homosexual, gay and lesbian, Marxist and Fascist.

We remain friends. They are in fact quite solicitous of me and my troubles. They call regularly. In turn I call on them to help me out at the hospice. I need them. They are good. They willingly volunteer and often spend a day with me in the AIDS wing or the Alzheimer’s pavilion. All you have to do, I discover, is ask people. They do it because they’re generous and, I think, a bit lonely. I work with them because I need their help and I’ve nothing better to do. In return, I give them couple’s counseling, no charge. They might get back together.

8. CHANDRA IS A BIG SUCCESS on local stereo-V. She didn’t make anchorperson as she had hoped, but eventually did become weatherperson, where she was an immediate hit, her pert manner and general sassiness contrasting with the bland Indiana style of the other members of “NewsTeam-7.” She became a “personality”—”Watch Chan on Channel 7” went the promo.

During the minute or so of happy talk at the end of a newscast, when other members of NewsTeam-7 are smiling and making pleasantries and semi-jokes as they stack their papers, Chandra will have none of it: no grins, no banter. Instead, she often challenges the anchorman: “What you talking about, have a nice day — what’s nice about that?”—socking the weather map with her pointer.

9. WHILE I WAS TALKING to Bob Comeaux and Max Gottlieb in my cell at Angola, I asked the former casually what drugs they used in the pedeuthanasia program at the Qualitarian Life Center. He answered as casually, without thinking about it, as one doctor to another, “Amobarbital and secobarbital, IV.”

“That’s peaceful, isn’t it?”

“They go to sleep like the babies they are.”

“How about the adults?”

“Secobarbital IV and”—he rouses, showing interest—“do you know what I hit on more or less by accident and what is now state of the art?”

“No.”

“Secobarbital plus THC.”

“THC?”

“You know, tetrahydrocannabinol, the active constituent of marijuana — and you want to know something, Tom?”

“Yes.”

“There is an exaltation, a joyousness, a sense of acceptance and affirmation you would have to see to believe.”

“I believe you.”

Max Gottlieb is frowning uneasily and moving toward the door. Bob detains him.

“I don’t mind telling you guys that for the first time we have actually achieved the full meaning of the Greek word eu in euthanasia. Eu means good. I may be simpleminded, but I think good is better than bad, serenity better than suffering. You know what you ought to do, Tom?”

“What?”

“You ought to tell Father Smith about THC.”

“I will.”

“I mean as a therapeutic agent.”

“I understand.”

He looks at me curiously. “Why is your friend Father Smith so dead set against us?”

After a pause — actually I don’t know how to answer him — I think of an answer which might also satisfy my own curiosity. “He thinks you’ll end by killing Jews.”

“What’s that?” Bob asks sharply; then, for some reason, also asks Max, “What’s that? What do you mean?”

Both Bob and Max are embarrassed, Bob for me and Father Smith — I’ve exposed his nuttiness. Max is embarrassed because he is one of those Southern Jews who are embarrassed by the word Jew.

“What does he mean?” asks Bob, opening his hands to both of us.

Max, frowning, is having none of it.

“Tom?” asks Bob Comeaux.

I shrug. “He claims it will eventually end as it did with the Germans, starting out with euthanasia for justifiable medical, psychiatric, and economic reasons. But in the end the majority always gets in trouble, needs a scapegoat, and gets rid of an unsubsumable minority.”

“Unsubsumable?” asks Max, who, I think, wouldn’t mind being subsumable.

“Unsubsumable.”

Bob Comeaux is shaking his head mournfully. “Ah me. I thought I had heard it all. Sorry I asked. Does he think I’m anti-Semitic, for God’s sake?”

“No.”

“Let me tell you something, Tom. I mean, hear this, loud and clear, Doctor!” He is standing arrow-straight, hat held over his heart, addressing me, but for Max’s benefit. “Some of my very dearest friends—”

But Max has had enough of this, of both of us. “Let’s go, Doctor,” he says wearily, holding out one hand to the door, handing along Bob Comeaux with the other.

10. ELLEN IS QUITE HERSELF.

She’s given up tournament bridge — actually she’s not much better at it than I. We play social bridge with Max and Sophie Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

It is pleasant to gaze out over Lake Pontchartrain from Max’s high-rise condo. The bright mazy sun whitens out the sky into a globe of pearly light into which the causeway disappears like a Japanese bridge into a cloud. Between hands Max goes out on the little balcony and focuses his telescope on a coot or a scaup bobbing like corks on the light, vapory water. Once, a memorable day, he put on the high-power lens and we saw a vermilion flycatcher perched on the bridge rail, pooped, taking a breather on the long voyage from Venezuela.

Later Ellen experienced a religious conversion. She became disaffected when the Southern and Northern Presbyterians, estranged since the Civil War, reunited after over a hundred years. It was not the reunion she objected to but the liberal theology of the Northern Presbyterians, who, according to her, were more interested in African revolutionaries than the divinity of Christ. She and others pulled out and formed the Independent Northlake Presbyterian Church.

Then she became an Episcopalian.

Then suddenly she joined a Pentecostal sect. She tells me straight out that she has had a personal encounter with Jesus Christ, that where once she was lost and confused, seduced by Satan and the false pleasures of this world, she has now found true happiness with her Lord and Saviour. She has also been baptized in the Holy Spirit. She speaks in tongues.

I do not know what to make of this. I do not know that she has not found Jesus Christ and been born again. Therefore I accept that she believes she has and may in fact have been. I settle for her being back with us and apparently happy and otherwise her old tart, lusty self. She is as lusty a Pentecostal as she was a Southern Presbyterian. She likes as much as ever cooking a hearty breakfast, packing the kids off to school, and making morning love on our Sears Best bed, as we used to.

She loves the Holy Spirit, says little about Jesus.

She is herself a little holy spirit hooked up to a lusty body. In her case spirit has nothing to do with body. Each goes its own way. Even when she was a Presbyterian and I was a Catholic, I remember that she was horrified by the Eucharist: Eating the body of Christ. That’s pagan and barbaric, she said. What she meant and what horrified her was the mixing up of body and spirit, Catholic trafficking in bread, wine, oil, salt, water, body, blood, spit — things. What does the Holy Spirit need with things? Body does body things. Spirit does spirit things.

She’s happy, so I’ll settle for it. But a few things bother me. She attributes her conversion to a TV evangelist to whom she contributed most of her fortune plus a hundred dollars a week to this guy, which we cannot afford, or rather to his Gospel Outreach program for the poor of Latin America. I listened to this reverend once. He’d rather convert a Catholic Hispanic than a Bantu any day in the week.

She has also enrolled Tommy and Margaret in the Feliciana Christian Academy, which teaches that the world is six thousand years old and won’t have Huckleberry Finn or The Catcher in the Rye in the library.

At least it’s better than Belle Ame, and the kids seem happy and healthy.

But I worry about them growing up as Louisiana dumbbells.

I might have held out for the parochial school, which was good, but it folded. The nuns vanished. The few priests are too overworked to bother. Catholics have become a remnant of a remnant. Louisiana, however, is more Christian than ever, not Catholic Christian, but Texas Christian. Even most Cajuns have been converted, first by Texas oil bucks, then by Texas evangelists. The shrimp fleet, mostly born again, that is, for the third time, is no longer blessed and sprinkled by a priest.

Why don’t I like these new Christians better? They’re sober, dependable, industrious, helpful. They praise God frequently, call you brother, and punctuate ordinary conversation with exclamations like Glory! Praise God! Hallelujah! I’ve nothing against them, but they give me the creeps.

Ellen often invites me to a meeting of her Pentecostals, who hug and weep and exclaim and speak in tongues. She wants to share her newfound Lord with me, especially the Holy Spirit.

“No thanks,” I say, after one visit.

“Why not?”

“I’m afraid Marva will hug me.” Marva, her mother, has converted too.

“I’m serious. Why not?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why don’t you want to?”

“I can’t really say.”

“I know why.”

“Why?”

“You’re still a Roman.” There’s nothing new in this. While she was an Episcopalian, she began calling Catholics “Romans.”

“I don’t think so.”

“At heart you are.”

“What does that mean?”

“That that priest still has his hooks in you.”

“Father Smith? Rinaldo? He doesn’t have his hooks in me.”

“He got you to do Mass with him.”

Do Mass? “That was back in June. It was my namesake’s feast day. I could hardly refuse.”

“Namesake’s feast day. What does that mean?”

“The feast of Sir Thomas More. June twenty-second.”

“And he got you again last month.”

“He didn’t get me. It was the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination. I was the only one he asked. You wouldn’t want me not to go.”

“Do you know what he does now?”

“Who, Rinaldo? What?”

“When he calls you and I answer the phone, he won’t tell me what he really wants. He’ll make up another excuse like being sick and needing a doctor.”

“He’s a sly one.”

“And how about you taking the children to Mass last week?”

“It was Christmas.”

“We don’t think much of Christmas. The word means Christ’s Mass.”

“Well, after all Meg and Tom are Catholics.”

“I don’t care what you call them as long as you admit that neither you or Tom or Meg will be saved until you are born again of the Holy Spirit and into the Lord.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“I thought I was born again when I was baptized.”

“How can a little baby be born again right after it has been born?”

“That’s a good question, Nicodemus.”

“What did you call me?”

“Nothing bad. Come over here by me.”

But she keeps standing, hands on her hips.

“Why don’t you go to the fellowship meeting with me tonight? The children are going.”

“I think I’ll stay home. But right now—”

“I know exactly what you’re going to do.”

“What?”

“Have five big drinks and watch another stupid rerun of Barnaby Jones.”

“That’s so. But for now, why not come over here by me? You’re a very good-looking piece.”

She sighs, but takes her hands off her hips, holds them palms up, looks up to heaven: what to do? Actually she’s quite content to have it so, as am I.

“Come by me.”

“All right.” She sighs again, comes by me — a wife’s duty— then smiles.

We get along well. It is my practice which is shot.

11. HUDEEN KEEPS WELL, still reigns, seated on her high stool, in her tiny kingdom bounded by sink, stove, fridge, counter, and stereo-V.

She still keeps an eye on the soaps, mumbles amiably in a semblance of conversation, making sounds of assent and demurrer. But once she made herself clear.

It was Thanksgiving. Ellen had quit her bridge tour and was home for good. The children had quit Belle Ame Academy. Chandra had landed her new job as weatherperson, and even as we watched, there she was! On TV! Slapping the black Caribbean with her stick, she as black as the Caribbean.

“Bless God!” cried Hudeen, who can’t believe it, a person, someone she knows, Chandra herself, up there on the magic screen. “Bless Jesus!”

“It’s a good Thanksgiving, Hudeen,” I said.

“And you better thank the good Lord!” cried Hudeen, clear as a bell.

“We will,” said Ellen, who says a blessing indistinctly, speaking in tongues, I think.

Hudeen is not speaking in tongues. “I say bless God!” said Hudeen, looking straight at me. “Bless his holy name!”

“All right.”

“You be all right too, Doctor,” said Hudeen straight to me.

“I will?”

“Sho now.”

“How do you know, Hudeen?”

“The good Lord will take care of you.”

“Good.”

12. THE LITTLE CEREMONY which was supposed to celebrate the reopening of the hospice turned out to be a fiasco.

Father Smith, who I had understood from Max to have come down from the fire tower in his right mind ready to take over St. Margaret’s, behaved so strangely that even I, who knew him best, could not make head or tail of what he was saying. To the others he appeared a complete loony, or, as Leroy Ledbetter put it, crazy as a betsy bug. To make matters worse, he also managed to offend everyone, even those most disposed to help him and the hospice.

It was doubtful at first that the hospice was going to succeed, after all.

Local notables gathered to welcome the staff, a civic and ecumenical occasion, not only other priests, ministers, and a rabbi, but many of my fellow physicians both federal and local — good fellows who were ready to donate their time and services — the mayor, a representative from United Way and the Lions Club. Even our Republican congressman showed up and promised his support of legislation to divert at least some of the federal funding of the Qualitarian program to the hospice movement.

Chandra had even arranged for a NewsTeam-7 remote unit to tape the highlights for the “People and Places” segment of the six o’clock newscast. It was one of those occasions, Chandra assured me, which has “viewer appeal,” like helping old folks, flying in kidneys and hearts for dying babies. Americans are very generous, especially when they can see the need in their living rooms. And NewsTeam-7 had 65 percent of the market in the viewing area.

It, the hospice, couldn’t miss.

There was to be a Mass in the little chapel at St. Margaret’s, a few words from Father Smith, followed by a televised tour of the facility, with perhaps short interviews with a malformed but attractive child, a spunky addled oldster, and a cheerful dying person.

It couldn’t miss.

But one look at Father Smith as he comes up the aisle of the crowded chapel and I know we’re in trouble.

He’s carrying the chalice, but he’s forgotten to put on his vestments! He’s still wearing the rumpled chinos and sneakers he wore in the fire tower for months, plus a new sweatshirt. It is a cold January day.

People turn to watch, as a congregation watches a bride enter church for her wedding. I am sitting in the front row with Max. There is a stir and a murmuring at Father Smith’s appearance. But it is not his clothes I notice. Something else: a certain gleam in his eye, both knowing and rapt, which I’ve seen before, in him and on closed wards.

The chalice is held in one hand, properly, the other hand pressed on the square pall covering, but there is something at once solemn and unserious about him, theatrical, like my daughter, Meg, playing priest.

Oh my.

Well, at least he is going to say Mass, where it’s hard to get in trouble. Perhaps the friendly crowd will take his old clothes as a mark of humility, albeit eccentric — but you know what a character he is! — or maybe they’ll see him as a worker-priest or a guerrilla priest.

But instead of mounting the single step to the platform of the altar, he turns around in the aisle, not two feet from me, exactly between me and Max, and faces the little crowd, which is still well disposed if somewhat puzzled.

“Jesus Christ is Lord!” he says in a new, knowledgeable, even chipper voice. Then: “Praise be to God! Blessed be his Holy Name!” A pause and then, as he looks down at the upturned faces: “I wonder if you know what you are doing here!”

Well then, I’m thinking, what he’s doing is what Catholics call pious ejaculations, which are something like the Pentecostal’s exclamations — Glory! and suchlike — that plus a bit of obscure priestly humor.

But no. They are uttered not as pious ejaculations but more like a fitful commentary, like a talkative person watching a movie.

All is not yet lost. Sometimes priests say a few words before Mass, especially on a special occasion like this, by way of welcome.

No one is as yet seriously discomfited.

Father Smith begins to make short utterances separated by pauses but otherwise not apparently connected, all the while holding chalice and covering pall in front of him. They, the utterances, remind me of the harangues delivered by solitary persons standing in a New York subway or in the ward where I was committed by Max and later served as attending physician.

But his remarks, though desultory and disconnected, are uttered in a calm, serious voice. During the pauses he seems to sink into thought.

“The Great Prince Satan, the Depriver, is here.”

Pause.

“It is not your fault that he, the Great Prince, is here. But you must resist him.”

Pause.

“I hope you know what you are doing here,” he says.

Pause.

“The fellows at Fedville know what they were doing.”

Pause.

The audience is trying to figure out whether the pauses are calculated, as some preachers will pause, even for long pauses, for purposes of emphasis. They listen intently, heads inclined, with even a tentative nod or two.

“True, they were getting rid of people, but they were people nobody wanted to bother with.”

Pause.

“Old, young. Born, unborn.”

Pause.

“But they, the doctors, were good fellows and they had their reasons.

“The reasons were quite plausible.

“I observed some of you.

“But do you know what you are doing?

“I observe a benevolent feeling here.

“There is also tenderness.

“At the bedside of some children this morning I observed you shed tears. On television.

“Do you know where tenderness leads?”

Pause.

“Tenderness leads to the gas chamber.”

Pause.

“This is the feast day of my patron saint, Simeon the Stylite.

“Simeon lived atop a pillar forty feet high and six feet in diameter for twenty years.

“He mortified himself and prayed for the forgiveness of his sins and the sins of the world below him, which was particularly wicked, being mainly occupied by the Great Prince Satan.

“I don’t see any sinners here.

“Everyone looks justified. No guilt here!

“Simeon came down to perform good works when his bishop asked him to, but when the bishop saw he was willing, he let him go back up.

“I’d rather be back up in the tower, but I do know what I’m doing here.

“Do you think it is for the love of God, like Simeon? I am sorry to say it is not.

“I like to talk to the patients here.

“Children and dying people do not lie.

“One need not lie to them.

“Everyone else lies.

“Look at you. Not a sinner in sight.

“No guilt here!

“The Great Prince has pulled off his masterpiece.

“These are strange times. There are now two kinds of people.

“This has never happened before.

“One are decent, tenderhearted, unbelieving, philanthropic people.

“The other are some preachers who tell the truth about the Lord but are themselves often rascals if not thieves.”

During one of the pauses Chandra and the NewsTeam-7 crew turn off their lights, fold their cameras, and quietly creep out.

“What a generation! Believing thieves and decent unbelievers!

“The Great Depriver’s finest hour!

“Not a guilty face here!

“Everyone here is creaming in his drawers from tenderness!”

Long pause.

“But beware, tender hearts!

“Don’t you know where tenderness leads?” Silence. “To the gas chambers.

“Never in the history of the world have there been so many civilized tenderhearted souls as have lived in this century.

“Never in the history of the world have so many people been killed.

“More people have been killed in this century by tenderhearted souls than by cruel barbarians in all other centuries put together.”

Pause.

“My brothers, let me tell you where tenderness leads.”

A longer pause.

“To the gas chambers! On with the jets!

“Listen to me, dear physicians, dear brothers, dear Qualitarians, abortionists, euthanasists! Do you know why you are going to listen to me? Because every last one of you is a better man than I and you know it! And yet you like me. Every last one of you knows me and what I am, a failed priest, an old drunk, who is only fit to do one thing and to tell you one thing. You are good, kind, hardworking doctors, but you like me nevertheless and I know that you will allow me to tell you one thing — no, ask one thing — no, beg one thing of you. Please do this one favor for me, dear doctors. If you have a patient, young or old, suffering, dying, afflicted, useless, born or unborn, whom you for the best of reasons wish to put out of his misery — I beg only one thing of you, dear doctors! Please send him to us. Don’t kill them! We’ll take them — all of them! Please send them to us! I swear to you you won’t be sorry. We will all be happy about it! I promise you, and I know that you believe me, that we will take care of him, her — we will even call on you to help us take care of them! — and you will not have to make such a decision. God will bless you for it and you will offend no one except the Great Prince Satan, who rules the world. That is all.”

Silence.

“Oh, there is something else of the utmost importance I must tell you—”

But suddenly he breaks off, frowns, touches his lip as if he has forgotten what he was going to say. Then, frowning all the harder, he appears to sink into thought. Seconds pass.

This time the pause does not end. Perhaps ten seconds pass. Already there is consternation, exchanged glances, murmurings, shifting about in the seats. Ten seconds is a long time. Then perhaps twenty seconds pass. Now there is anxiety.

When a speaker who is supposed to speak and then make an end to the speaking, stops speaking inadvertently, like an actor going up in his lines, or a young preacher who has a lapse, his audience at first grows restive, is embarrassed for him. Perhaps there are a few titters. Then the audience develops pure anxiety. The anxiety is worse than any offense the speaker may have given.

Behind me, two doctors and the representative of United Way and the Chief Leo of the Lions Club are offended. One says to the other, “Church is out.” Another replies, “For us too.”

All four leave.

Other people begin to murmur and stir about anxiously.

Only Father Smith, lost in thought, does not appear anxious.

Max and I exchange glances. There is the slightest upward movement of his eyes. We understand each other. We have exchanged such a glance in group, past a patient. I rise and hunch over toward the priest with the air of a deacon or usher who knows what he is doing.

“Father,” I say in a low but ordinary voice, “let’s get on with the Mass.” There are patients, one learns from experience, who will simply do what they are told, never mind Freud and his “non-directive” therapy, and there are times when it is better to tell them.

“Of course,” replies the priest, giving a start. “You assist me.”

“What?”

“I said, you assist me.”

“But, Father, you know very well—” I am looking around for Milton Guidry, his crewcut assistant. No sign of him.

“Sure, I know,” says the priest. “But assist me, anyhow.”

“All right. But I only remember the old Mass.”

“That will do.”

He turns and kneels on the platform step. I kneel beside him like an altar boy.

“I will go up to the altar of God,” says the priest, holding the chalice.

“To God who gives joy to my youth,” I reply.

13. ELLEN IS RIGHT AND WRONG about Father Smith. He did not “have his hooks” in me. He only asks me to assist him when he’s out of it, needs help, Milton is sick and can’t bring him the bread and wine.

The hospice opens and down he comes from the fire tower in his right mind and very much in charge. Very much his old wiry, vigorous self, he jokes with the children, listens to the endless stories of the senile, talks at great length with the dying. He calls on me only when the depression and terrors of his AIDS patients are more than he can handle. We do little more than visit with them, these haggard young men, listen, speak openly, we to them, they to us, and we to each other in front of them, about them and about our own troubles, we being two old drunks and addled besides. They advise us about alcohol, diet, and suchlike. It seems to help them and us. At least they laugh at us.

But when he invited me to serve Mass routinely, because I was visiting the hospice early every morning, I refused. It is easy to say no at the hospice, because honesty is valued above all. I told him the truth: that since I no longer was sure what I believe, didn’t think much about religion, participation in Mass would seem to be deceitful.

He nodded cheerfully, as if he already knew.

“Don’t worry,” he said, doing a few isometrics in the hall, pushing and pulling with his hands. “It is to be expected. It is only necessary to wait and to be of good heart. It is not your fault.”

“How is that, Father?” I ask him curiously.

“You have been deprived of the faith. All of us have. It is part of the times.”

“Deprived? How do you mean?”

“It is easy enough to demonstrate,” he says, shrugging first one shoulder high, then the other.

“Yes?”

“Sure. Just consider. Even if the truths of religion could be proved to you one, two, three, it wouldn’t make much difference, would it? One hundred percent of astronomers have discovered that the universe was created from nothing. The explanation is obvious but it does not avail. Who can handle it? It does not signify. It is boring to think of. Ninety-seven percent of astronomers are still atheists. Do you blame them? They are also boring. The only thing more boring would be if the ninety-seven percent all converted, right? It follows that there must be some other force at work, right?”

“Right,” I say, noting with alarm the same brightness of eye and chipper expression he used to have in the fire tower.

But before I can escape, he has taken me by the arm and drawn me aside, as if some poor dying soul might overhear.

“Do you recall what happened in Yugoslavia a few years ago?” he asks in a low confidential voice.

“Yugoslavia,” I say, wishing I had not gotten into this.

“The six little children to whom the Mother of God appeared?”

“Oh. I do recall something of the sort, yes. Now if you will excuse—”

“What she told them has been much publicized, doubtlessly exaggerated by the superpious — who knows? — but one little item has been largely overlooked.”

“Is that so?”

“Yet I think it highly significant — one of those unintentionally authentic touches which make a story credible.”

“Very interesting. Well, I—”

“I’d like your professional opinion on this,” he says in a low voice, drawing me still closer.

“Certainly,” I say, glancing at my watch.

“The story of the apparitions is well known. Of course, no one knows for certain whether the Virgin appeared to them. The Church does not know. Many pious people believe that she did. That is not what interests me. It is one small detail which they related about one of the many apparitions which seemed so outlandish that no one could make sense of it and either laid it to childish fantasy or overlooked it altogether. You recall that though she identified herself as the Mother of God, one of the children related that she appeared not as the Queen of Heaven with a serpent under one foot and a cloud under the other, crowned with stars and so on — but as an ordinary-looking young red-cheeked Jewish girl, which of course she probably was. But what she told them on this one occasion and which they related without seeming to understand what they were saying was this: Do you know why this century has seen such terrible events happen? The Turks killing two million Armenians, the Holocaust, Hitler killing most of the Jews in Europe, Stalin killing fifteen million Ukrainians, nuclear destruction unleashed, the final war apparently inevitable? It is because God agreed to let the Great Prince Satan have his way with men for a hundred years — this one hundred years, the twentieth century. And he has. How did he do it? No great evil scenes, no demons — he’s too smart for that. All he had to do was leave us alone. We did it. Reason warred with faith. Science triumphed. The upshot? One hundred million dead. Could it be a test like Job’s? Then one must not lose hope even though the final war seems inevitable as this terrible century draws to a close. Because almost everyone has lost hope. Christians speak of the end time. Jews of the hopelessness of the mounting Arab terror. Even unbelievers, atheists, humanists, TV anchormen have lost hope — you’ve heard how these commentators speak in their grave style which conceals a certain Ed Murrow delectation of doom. Do you think that there is a secret desire for it? But you must not lose hope, she told the children. Because if you keep hope and have a loving heart and do not secretly wish for the death of others, the Great Prince Satan will not succeed in destroying the world. In a few years this dread century will be over. Perhaps the world will end in fire and the Lord will come — it is not for us to say. But it is for us to say, she said, whether hope and faith will come back into the world. What do you think?”

“What? Oh. Do you mean about Yugo — about the ah predictions. Very interesting. Well, Father, I really must be—”

“So don’t worry about it,” says the priest. He has let me go and is absently doing a few calf isometrics, balancing on the ball of one foot, then the other.

“And to be specific in your case, Tom.”

“Yes?”

“Do what you are doing. You are on the right track. Continue with the analysis and treatment of your patients.”

“All right,” I reply, somewhat ironically, I fear. “But I don’t have many patients.”

“You will. You are on the right track. I have watched you. Carry on. Keep a good heart.”

“All right.”

“I will tell you a secret. You may have a thing or two to add to Dr. Freud and Dr. Jung, as great as they were.”

“Thank you.” Did he wink at me?

We shake hands. He gives me his old firm Ricardo Montalban handshake, turns, throws a punch or two and is gone.

14. SITTING ON THE FRONT PORCH of my office sailing paper P-51s at the martin house.

A fine warm Louisiana winter day, my best time: the morning sun booming in over the live oak, the air yellow and clear as light, oak leaves glossy, bottle-glass green. Pollen gone. My nose clear as a bell. The white-throated sparrows are back, kicking leaves under the bushes like chickens.

In the next few minutes I must make a decision and phone Max.

I must tell him either/or.

Either take him up on his offer, join him in Mandeville, do group work and divorce facilitation with his aging yuppies, crisis intervention with their stoned-out teenage children. It’s good work and I need the money, but I’d rather do my old-fashioned one-on-one therapy with depressed and terrified people.

Or take the directorship at the hospice. Low-paying but steady. No one else wants the job. Father Smith had had to be let go after all. In fact, he became a patient. He wanted to go back to the fire tower for good. Max diagnosed Alzheimer’s, pointing out his strange harangues, his memory loss and disconnected speech — more and more now he is given to short gnomic utterances which grow ever more gnomic and disconnected, as if he cannot remember what he said five seconds ago. I disagreed, pointing out that his CORTscans showed no loss of cerebral tissue and his PETscans no loss of cerebral function, and other tests were negative. And he is too old. Alzheimer’s dementia usually sets in in the fifties or sixties. But there was no denying his strange behavior. Perhaps it is presenile dementia. I agreed to co-sign his commitment — on one condition: that he be allowed to stay in the tower as long as he wanted. For he remains quite agile and can scramble up like an old mountain goat. He watches the horizon, mainly in the east, like a hawk, and at the first sign of a smudge he’ll line up his azimuth, call another tower, crisscross his fishing-line coordinates, report the fire as precisely as you please, talk at length and in the peculiar ham lingo to Emmy in the Waldheim tower. He did not object to being committed, seemed quite happy in fact. Max is pleased. Our treatment of Father Smith accorded well with new ideas in geriatrics — which boil down to making the elderly feel useful.

Only occasionally does he seem confused. Then it is not clear whether he is speaking of locating brushfires or God by signs and coordinates. Milton Guidry looks after him, assists at Mass. But Milton’s emphysema is worse. When he can’t make it up the tower, Father Smith calls me and I substitute — when I can.

I must make up my mind about the future. We’re in debt. Tuition at the Pentecostal school is high and Ellen has given away all her money to the Baton Rouge evangelist.

A doctor needs patients to make a living. What happened to the sort of patients I used to see, the lonely-hearts, the solitary aching consciousnesses — they were my kind of people — the fears, the phobias, the depressions? Have these symptoms been knocked out for good by the heavy sodium? Or are they being treated by GPs prescribing pills? Or by pharmacists? In any case, who needs me?

One good sign. Ellen is back as my secretary-nurse-receptionist.

She’ll be here any minute. Better go inside. Wouldn’t do to be caught out here sailing P-51s.

She’s canny, cheerful, businesslike. It’s like the old days, having her back, hearing her nimble voice in the outer office, weeding out undesirable patients, charming the desirable ones. She’s already got referrals from her bridge crowd, her Episcopalian book-review group and her big Pentecostal church. The Pentecostals are decent folk, honest and forthright, no crazier than liberal unbelievers and a good deal less neurotic, but perhaps a bit paranoid, given to suspecting godless conspiracies under every sofa. But if I keep them off the couch, don’t mention sex, wear a white coat like a TV doctor, speak to them face to face, take their blood pressure — they tend to hypertension — examine their eyegrounds, they’ll tell me their troubles.

The telephone is ringing inside. A patient? There is still no Ellen but I needn’t hurry. The answering machine clicks on during the third ring. I can hear my voice and a woman’s which I almost recognize. There is a familiar overtone of hushed urgency.

Go inside. Play the message.

It is Mickey LaFaye. She’s not asking for an appointment or even for a return call. She speaks in the hushed-mouth-in-the-phone voice of a woman hearing a prowler and calling the police.

“I’m coming in — now,” she all but whispers. Click. The silence of the machine roars.

It is as if even the machine could grasp the urgency and reach me.

Ellen arrives before Mickey. I try to tell her about Mickey, but she’s excited about something.

“That priest called you at home, said he couldn’t reach you here—” She pauses for an explanation.

“Probably hadn’t arrived. I walked.” I’m not about to tell her about sitting on the porch and flying P-518.

“For once I think he’s being helpful.”

“How’s that?”

“He’s got an important referral for you.”

“Who?”

“It may be royalty.” Ellen lowers her voice.

“Royalty.” Is Princess Di — I almost say, but decide not to joke.

“He wouldn’t give names — it’s all very hush-hush — but do you know who I think it is?” Royalty really lights her up, and her an American Pentecostal. I’ll never understand it.

“You know that the new king and queen of Spain are in New Orleans paying a state visit to commemorate Spanish rule in the Vieux Carré—which is in fact more Spanish than French.”

I am nodding, mystified, more puzzled by the change in Ellen than by the Spanish king.

“The priest wants you to meet them out there. Tomorrow.”

“I see.”

“Now get this,” says Ellen. She’s in her chair and I sitting on her desk in the outer office.

“All right.” She’s got it figured out.

“He only gave me three hints. Royalty, a visit, gifts and — a Jewish connection.”

“That’s four.”

“Right. Now get this. I happen to know that the new queen, Margarita, has Jewish blood — a noble old Sephardic family from Toledo.”

“Ohio?”

“And you know what?”

“No, what?” I don’t know what, but I’m pleased to see her so pleased.

“I happen also to know that your friend Rinaldo has a Spanish connection, is highly regarded in certain circles over there — which would account for him being called in in case of some trouble — and I also happen to know that Queen Margarita has a psychiatric history. I think she might be your patient.”

“I see.”

“Tomorrow morning at eight — why eight I don’t know.” She’s briskly writing down the appointment. “Out there.”

“Very good,” I say as briskly, frowning to keep from smiling. “Why don’t you call him and tell him I’ll be there.”

“Don’t you worry.” She’s already on the phone.

What Father Smith has told her and she me without knowing it is that he needs me tomorrow morning. Milton must be sick again. It’s a little code. Neither of us likes to upset Ellen. Tomorrow is the Feast of the Epiphany. A Jewish girl, a visit from royalty. Gifts.

“He says fine.” She’s pleased. “I think it’s a valuable connection for you.”

“You may be right.”

In blows Mickey LaFaye, brushing past me and Ellen in the outer office without a word, headed for the sofa in the inner office.

Ellen and I exchange looks, shrugs. She’s still pleased.

Mickey’s back on the couch as she used to be, facing the window. No Duchess of Alba she now. She’s almost Christina again. She’s quite beautiful actually, but beginning to be ravaged again, thin, cheeks shadowed under her French-Indian cheekbones, but not yet too thin, not yet wholly Christina. I wonder if she has stopped eating.

“Mickey, please come over here and sit where we can see each other.”

She does.

She doesn’t mind looking at me.

“Well, Mickey?”

“I—” She breaks off, nods as if nodding could finish the sentence.

“I’m—”

“Yes.”

“I’m having an—”

“You’re having an attack.”

“Yes.”

“Of—”

“I’m — Driving over I was terrified — of killing someone.”

“Well?” Well.

Her great black eyes, as rounded as a frightened child’s, are full on me. One hand is holding the other. She is actually wringing her hands, something you seldom see.

“Are you afraid, Mickey?”

“It’s — It’s not like anything I ever had before. Something is about to happen. I dread something, but I don’t know what it is—” Her eyes fall away, unconverge, as if she saw something, someone, behind me, far away but approaching. Now she’s nodding, reassuring herself. “Now isn’t that something?”

“What?”

“My life is fine. Durel is fine. My kids are fine. My horses are fine. My painting is fine. But—” She stops, eyes coming back to me, focused, seeking out. She gives a little laugh.

“Well?” Well.

“Could I talk about it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember that dream I had, about being in the cellar of my grandmother’s farmhouse in Vermont and the smell of winter apples and the stranger coming?”

“Yes.”

“Could we work on that?”

“Sure.”

“I had it again. Last night and the night before.”

“I see.” Well well.

“Did I say or did you say that perhaps the stranger might be someone trying to tell me something?”

“I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter what I said. What do you think now?”

“You know what I think?”

“No.”

“I think the stranger is trying to tell me something.”

“Yes?”

“I also think the stranger has something to do with the terror.”

“I see. How?”

“He is not someone to be terrified of, yet I am terrified.”

“I see.”

“Do you know who the stranger is?”

“Who do you think he is?”

“I think the stranger is part of myself.”

“I see.”

“I am trying to tell myself something. I mean a part of me I don’t really know, yet the deepest part of me, is trying to—”

“Yes?”

“Could I talk about it?”

“Yes.”

She falls silent, but her eyes are softer, livelier, are searching mine as if I were the mirror of her very self. She lets go of her hand. She almost smiles. She ducks her head and touches the nape of her neck as she used to.

“Well?” I say.

She opens her mouth to speak.

Well well well.