"But how did Terry get involved in it, and Dora?"

"Pure fluke. Or destiny. Who knows? Went home to New Or-leans to see my mother, brushed up against Terry and got her pregnant. Damned fool.

"I was twenty-two, my mother was really dying this time. My mother said, 'Roger, please come home.' That stupid boyfriend with die cracked face had died. She was all alone. I'd been sending her plenty of money all along.

"The boardinghouse was now her private home, she had two maids and a driver to take her around town in a Cadillac whenever she felt the desire. She'd enjoyed it immensely, never asking any questions about the money, and of course I'd been collecting Wynken. I had two more books of Wynken by that time and my treasure storehouse in New York already, but we can get to that later on.

Just keep Wynken in the back of your mind.

"My mother had never really asked me for anything. She had the big bedroom upstairs now to herself. She said she talked to all the others who had gone on ahead, her poor old sweet dead brother Mickey, and her dead sister, Alice, and her mother, the Irish maid—the founder of our family, you might say—to whom the house had been willed by the crazy lady who lived there. My mother was also talking a lot to Little Richard.

That was a brother that died when he was four. Lockjaw- Little Richard. She said Little Richard was walking around with her, telling her it was time to come.

"But she wanted me to come home. She wanted me there in that room. I knew all this.

I understood. She had sat with boarders that were dying. I had sat with others than Old Captain. So I went home.

"Nobody knew where I was headed, or what my real name was, or where I came from. So it was easy to slip out of New York. I went to the house on St. Charles Avenue and sat in the sickroom with her, holding the little vomit cup to her chin, wiping her spittle, and trying to get her on the bedpan when the agency didn't have a nurse to send. We had help, yes, but she didn't want the help, you know. She didn't want the colored girl, as she called her. Or that horrible nurse. And I made the amazing discovery that these things didn't disgust me much. I washed so many sheets.

Of course there was a machine to put them in, but I changed them over and over for her. I didn't mind. Maybe I was never normal. In any event, I simply did what had to be done. I rinsed out that bedpan a thousand times, wiped it off, sprinkled powder on it, and set it by the bed. There is no foul smell which lasts forever after all."

"Not on this earth at least," I murmured. But he didn't hear me, thank God.