I received the usual blue envelope from my mom. (The exact color of that thank-you-note supply she’d sent with me to New York.) Mother explained that, without Dad, many of their favorite Florida couples could no longer ask her over; not even the Albertsons! “On group things, I can see their cars leaving without me as I now seem to throw their numbers off!”

Therefore, she was considering, shock of shocks, moving back to North Carolina. She had begun asking my brothers, the two who lived there, how crowded this might make them feel. Then she added, in her schoolgirl handwriting,

“I have been picturing buying an old fixer-upper type of home. Two stories. A back garden, private. Is this too trite of me? Big repairs would drive Dick crazy. But I personally like the idea of improving such a place. I want lots of rooms for you all to come visit whenever. And listen, you. Should you or any of your friends ever need to come down and get better from anything at all, or stay as long as you like forever, you know that I have had a lot of experience in this line. Nothing would make me happier. I am buying the house in order to get ready to entertain in a manner I would like to grow accustomed to giving away! Best to Angie. Nuf said, I remain, with love, Mother.”

On one of Robert’s last two good days, he barked, needing me to come closer. I dreaded hearing his next assault on my, what, what next? My remaining looks? But I could see my friend had been fretting, sad at having put a hex on my work, and last thing before I left that evening. I would lie if I told you I hadn’t felt it, to the quick. (Not that all he said was inaccurate, and not that, in replaying it a thousand times, I have not really tried to learn from it. Because I swear I have.)

Returning from the corner newsstand, I’d just bustled back into room 282, my face burning rosy from that stinging cold wind off the East River.

I was wearing something tweed and something silk and both were colorful. Saint Robert the Gaunt appeared oddly like Quixote now; he beckoned me nearer. “Today, m’Hartley, you look fabulous. Health itself. A Dutch still life. So pink a fine boy. You always were a table full of such good things, ready.”

“What you’re really saying, Robert, is—your Hick Hartley here is getting just a li’l bit fat.”

“Call this fat?” The ivory hand came out. It pinched up two sample inches of my sudden middle.

“That ain’t fat, kid. It’s luxury. Just more of your potential.”