“It’s too soon. She hasn’t lived with it. I won’t argue the point. Not now. You told me to mind my business, but I want you to know—your wife, too—that I wouldn’t participate in anything that would hurt you. If I can help you in any way—without violating your privacy—you have only to say so.”

Roberts had begun to labor over his phrasing, which Leland took as evidence of sincerity—he had had to say it; he had not thought in advance of the difficulty. Leland got up and started to rewind the tape.

“Were you listening to what I said?”

“I heard only your half, Joe. It’s obvious that I don’t know much about you or your marriage.”

“I didn’t mean that. Why did MacIver kill himself?” The tape went through the machine. He removed the reel, boxed it, and put it with the other in his jacket pocket. He went back to the chair. “You said you knew. I want to hear it.”

“He talked about it a lot more a few years ago. August twelfth was a sudden and—no, I wasn’t shocked. His death was always a possibility. As time went on I felt that the possibility was more and more remote. He led me to believe that. He believed it himself.

“I don’t know if you can understand this, Joe. You’ve said that you’ve had an easy time. It would not seem that way to some people, but I think you mean inside, with yourself. But you have had insights into the trouble that others can have. Some people don’t have the opportunity, and their minds stay closed forever. Colin was right in that. Still, there is a line of experience you have to cross, to feel it, to gain an emotional understanding. For me it happened when I had to come to the conclusion that preaching the gospel as my father had done could not fulfill the quality of my desire to serve—serve in the ecclesiastic sense. I spent years recovering from the shock and coming to an understanding of what had happened. I lost the faith I’d had. It takes a terrible honesty to face yourself no matter who you are, that much more terrible for people like Colin. Colin killed a man. In time he came to understand why, and why he had made a bad marriage, why he had made it worse, and even why he had schemed against his mother. A man doesn’t have to have a rigid moral upbringing to feel a sharp disappointment with the apparent baseness of the impulses that direct the neurotic life. Colin did have that rigid morality and his disappointment was that much harder to control. He had come to it before he met me, from what he had been able to work out for himself. He never gained complete control—no one ever does; it isn’t even wise to think about. He had fantasies—homosexual fantasies—fought them and felt them pass within a month of his death. He had dreams—nightmares, if you want—and he worried about saying and doing things in his sleep. He was a bright man. He could see into others, not exclusively homosexuals, but people in flight from themselves, unchecked sadists, others. It wasn’t hard for him to project his disappointment outside himself, to other people, to history, and life itself.