“He must have said something,” I said.

“He did, but it didn’t make a lot of sense. He said somebody had sent a book of poems to him, with a note that it was for Avrum’s service. He wondered if it was from you.”

“Poems?” I said. “No, I didn’t send him anything.”

“He said one of them was marked.”

“Did he say what it was?”

“Something about a child,” Lila answered.

“From Walt Whitman?”

“Whitman? Yes, it was. I love his writing,” Lila said.

CHAPTER

12
 

I COULD HEAR LlLA’S VOICE: “BOBO?”

I knew that she was speaking to me, but I could not answer her. I tried to inhale. My lungs felt closed, blocked by a seizure in my throat.

“Bobo?” she said again, her voice rising sharply. And then she was beside my chair. I could feel her hands on my face, massaging me with her fingers.

“Goddamn it, Bobo, what’s wrong?”

She pulled her hands from my face and rushed to the front door of the Inn and called, “Sammy! Sammy, get out here!”

Then she was back with me, again kneeling beside me. She had my hand in her hands, rubbing it.

“What is it, Bobo?” she pleaded. “Jesus, talk to me. Breathe, damn it.”

Sammy bolted through the door. I could hear him ask in a worried voice, “What’s wrong? What did you do to him?”

“Nothing, damn it,” Lila snapped. “I don’t know what’s wrong. Look at him. My God, he’s white as a sheet. Call a doctor, for Christ’s sake.”

The vise on my throat released and I sucked in a deep, quick swallow of air.

“Easy, Bobo, easy,” Lila said. “Slow and easy.”

My breathing calmed.

“I’ll get some water,” Sammy said. He rushed back into the Inn.

“Bobo, you all right?” Lila asked anxiously.

I nodded.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Hyperventilation, I guess.”

“Out of the blue?”

“I suppose so. It’s never happened before.”

“You scared the shit out of me, Bobo. I thought you were having a heart attack.”

“I’m all right,” I told her. “Sorry.”

“For what? You can’t help things like that.”

“I guess not,” I said.

Sammy returned with the water and I drank it. I apologized again to both of them. They dismissed the apology with an argument between them about the need to have a doctor examine me. Sammy insisted that I should go to Fleischmanns; he would drive me, he said. Lila told him that it was nothing, an involuntary thing. She informed him that many people hyperventilate, and it was never as serious as it seemed.

“Did you eat anything?” asked Sammy.

“No, thank God,” Lila said. “We might be looking at his corpse now if he had.”

“I’m fine,” I told Sammy. “Lila’s right. It just struck me. Besides, I don’t have time to go to a doctor.”