Neither a borrower nor a lender be;

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

I didn’t discuss this with old Adletsky. He would have had no use for such asides. What he wanted was my comment on what happened when Frances picked up her camera from the sideboard.

‘You were watching. You saw. She lined all the guests up for a photo,’ Adletsky said.

‘Cressy wasn’t going to have his picture taken. Not with Rourke,’ I said.

‘So you picked up on that,’ said Adletsky.

He was pleased with me. ‘Who, besides you and me, saw that a battle was developing, Cressy turning his head aside just as she was pressing the camera button? And three times she got the back of his head.’

‘It was the sole, the only purpose of her dinner. She came up to Cressy and took him by the wrist – forced him to look her in the face.’

‘There aren’t too many observant people around, are there?’ said Adletsky. ‘Although everybody knew about Rourke and the girl studying to be a midwife. It was in the Sun-Times. Frances was furious about the coverage. She despises types like Cressy. I thought she was going to deck him. She’s almost big enough. Well, he isn’t much, is he?’ Adletsky went on. ‘He’s got a condom over his heart. There’s nothing human about bank officers.’

‘That’s it,’ I said, ‘her one and only motive was to rehabilitate her children’s father.’

‘No. She loves that clumsy Rourke prick. Any worthwhile man would be proud to tap into the loyalty of a fine broad like Frances. And it had to be Cressy, with Rourke, smiling into the camera. What social credentials have I got, an old Jew – or even the guy from Sears? I could make a better man than him out of a piece of wood … What kind of name is Cressy?’

‘Could be from Crécy, a French battlefield.’

Adletsky had no use for informational sidebars.

‘She didn’t get her way, poor girl,’ he said.

All signs were that Frances was headed downward. The food was inferior; the table linen was not up to standards, nor was the ‘staff’; the doggy was wetting the skirts of the sofas. Her color when Cressy enraged her was a murky sort of rust.

‘I kept an eye on you as you watched that scene,’ said Adletsky. ‘I haven’t had much time for social life or psychology items. But now I’m out of planning, acquisitions – I’m out of business action. I go around with my wife on her circuit. Anyway, I thought I’d like to become acquainted with somebody like you – a first-class noticer, obviously.’

There was nothing I could say to this. Should I tell him that I was sorry his active life had ended – that he was in humanly reduced circumstances?

‘I like the way you put things together,’ Adletsky resumed. ‘In my business life, I tried to imitate Franklin D. Roosevelt in one respect. I saw that it was a good idea to have a brain trust. Back in ’33, he gathered his professors around him. The country had to innovate, or it would go down …’