The worst times were the nights he spent with the dialysis machine, held fast by needle fingers while the tubes turned bright red as it sucked the blood from him like a vampire and he lay unable to move from the bed through the long hours, the prisoner of the thing which now gave him life.

It was not noisy, but it splashed quietly. He knew it was an inanimate product of man’s mechanical ability, yet at times the splashing seemed like soft mocking laughter.

Whenever he was freed he fled it in relief and later that day went out on the town like a sailor on leave, a drink at the Ritz-Carlton, dinner at Locke-Ober at which he often broke the rules of his diet, feeling that the low-sodium restriction literally deprived him of some of the salt of living. Invariably he ordered lots of after-dinner brandy. He never had been close with money but now he astonished Louie, the waiter who had served him for thirty years, by the lavishness of his tips.

Wracked with desire to finish the book, he worked every night; he wrote as quickly as he dared, observing himself with the detachment of a stranger watching a horserace and wondering with ironic amusement who was going to win.

Once or twice Elizabeth left the little boy at the apartment with him and Longwood played on the floor with his great-nephew while the sun streamed in through the windows, and in his weakness he felt the same age as the boy, content to wheel the toy cars Miguel had brought with him, the blue one pushed by the small chubby hand and the red one by the long bony fingers that lately had held surgical instruments, around the rug and through the chairs and under the dining-room table. Sometimes in the afternoon he took the boy for real rides in a real car, short trips usually, but one afternoon he found himself on Rte. 128 with the accelerator held down and the speedometer needle going up, up, up and the car being hurled down the straight ribbon of road.

“You’re going too fast, dear,” Frances said mildly.

“I know,” he said, grinning.

Then he heard what he thought was an ambulance and by the time he realized his mistake the state trooper had pulled his motorcycle alongside and he stopped the car by the side of the road.

The trooper looked at his gray hair and the physician’s registration plates on the car. “Is it an emergency, Doctor?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Want me to escort you?”

“No, thank you,” he said, and the trooper nodded and saluted and went away.