“Tell him I said hello. Will you do that for me?”

“Of course I will. Call the doctor, Rhoda. Get some help.”

“I will. I promise. I’m going to. I really am.”

One morning in August I finally called him. Malcolm had gone to a seminar in Atlanta to find out new things about time studies and I had spent the week getting drunk with Robert Haverty every night. We had gotten so drunk the night before we had broken all the crystal water glasses filling them with scotch and trying to use them for a piano. Finally the card table we had them on had collapsed on the stone-floored porch.

As soon as I woke up the next morning I called the psychiatrist Derry had told me about. There was an opening that afternoon. I put on my best dress and went down to talk about myself. “I drink too much,” I said. “I do things I don’t want to do when I get drunk. I broke all the crystal water glasses. My husband’s going to kill me when he finds out.”

“If it causes you problems, you should quit.”

“It makes me fight with him. We don’t like each other very much anyway. Well, we like to sleep together, but that’s about all. So I want to quit, because I want to make our marriage work.”

“Yes.”

“Besides, I broke all those glasses.”

“Yes.”

“And I almost drowned the other night. He’s been gone for a week and I’ve been drinking with Robert Haverty. He owns the newspaper here. His father died and left it to him. He’s so rich. He has a yacht. Anyway, we went out on Speed McVee’s boat on the river and I almost drowned. I dove into the river to show off and I couldn’t swim against the current. They barely saved me. I mean, I’m a great swimmer. I meant to swim the English Channel. It’s all I thought about when I was young. I swam the two-hundred-yard freestyle in two fifty-nine point five in college once. I mean, I was really good.”

“How did you almost drown?”

“I jumped in in my bathing suit at eleven o’clock at night. Speed is Robert’s cousin. They both dove in and dragged me back. The captain was furious. He said he’d never take the boat out with me on it again. He was really mad at me and he was mad at Robert.”

“Is Robert married?”