That night I wrote a letter from a mythical New Hampshire farmer telling them that the dog was very fine and missed them a great deal because he kept trying to run off. I said that the children and all the other dogs liked him and that he was not vicious any more. I wrote that the open air was doing him a lot of good and added that they should feel absolutely free to come up to visit the dog at any time. That same night I gave him the letter.

One evening, some days later, I asked him about it.

“I tried to mail it, I really tried,” he said.

“What happened?”

“I went down to the Square and looked for cars with New Hampshire license plates. But I never found anybody.”

“That wasn’t even necessary, was it?”

“It had to have a New Hampshire postmark. You don’t know my Meg.”

“Listen,” I said. “I have a friend who goes up there. Give me the letter and I’ll have him mail it.”

He held his head down. “I’ll tell you the truth. I carried that letter in my pocket so much it got ragged and dirty and I got tired of carrying it. I finally just tore it up.”

Neither one of us said anything for a while.

“If I could have sent it off it would have helped some,” he said at last. “I know it would have helped.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have to ask anybody if I had my strength.”

“I know.”

“If I had my strength I would have mailed it myself.”

“I know,” I said.

That night we both drank from his bottle of sherry and it did not matter at all that I did not provide my own glass.

VII

IN LATE SEPTEMBER the Cambridge police finally picked up the bearded pot-pusher in the Square. He had been in a restaurant all summer, at the same table, with the same customers flocking around him; but now that summer was over, they picked him up. The leaves were changing. In the early evening students passed the building and Meg, blue-hatted and waiting on the steps, carrying sofas and chairs and coffee tables to their suites in the Houses. Down by the Charles the middle-aged men were catching the last phases of summer sensuality before the grass grew cold and damp, and before the young would be forced indoors to play. I wondered what those hungry, spying men did in the winter or at night when it was too dark to see. Perhaps, I thought, they just stood there and listened.