Malcolm lived in Manchester-by-the-Sea, next to our less fashionable Essex. He was a friend of a slight New York acquaintance, and thus far our only cultural companion in this briny fastness. We had both taken to him, my wife more readily than I. To me he seemed a little fey. He had enough money, evidently, to avoid regular employment. He painted watercolors of marsh and dune, played a harpsichord he had made, listened to records of classical music and Forties jazz, read several books a week. He was dying, he said, to write a novel about his awful parents, but they were still alive, in their giant summer house on Coolidge Point. Somewhat older than we, with soft muscles and very white skin, a keen cook and domestic decorator, Malcolm made my wife laugh and even purr, as he sat there in our living room, slowly soaking up bourbon and letting his hair down, so to speak. His hair was romantically black but thinning, with a bald spot in the back. As with the late Doc Humes, there was nothing he didn’t know or at least wasn’t willing to talk about. Bubbly, smooth-tempered Malcolm made me uneasy, a little, but he was all we had, and my wife needed company. He and she half sincerely discussed opening, together, an antique shop on the Essex strip, which already held several. “Malcolm says allow forty minutes, it’s all back roads,” she said. “He’s being a saint, I think. Haverhill, really, darling—nobody goes to Haverhill!”

Maryland was full of places nobody went to; I wasn’t bothered. I had a Coke and doughnut at the drugstore, which was closing up, and walked back through the cold to the railroad station. I suppose it’s gone now, long torn down; I have never been back to see. It was a piece of the nineteenth century marooned in mid-twentieth, scaled, like the city’s churches, to disappointed expectations. Inside, vandalized telephone booths and coin-operated lockers blocked out sections of the beaded wainscoting and flourishes of carpenter Gothic. Above the lovingly wrought grille of the ticket windows a rough sign was nailed: CLOSES 6 P.M. I was alone with pews of ghosts, travellers that would not return. From far off, somebody was complaining, in the carrying tones of a railroad conductor. Two men passed through the waiting room’s great space and went into the lavatory together. Beneath the stained-glass windows brown radiators clunked and sang, warming the varnished boards behind them. Settling to enjoy the stretch of privacy ahead of me, I sat in the center of an empty pew, placed my suitcase at my feet, and opened up the Mungo Park. I was near the end, in the journal of his fatal second trip: