“The borscht circuit? Is that a show?”

“It’s up in the mountains, the hotels in the Jewish section of the Catskills. He went up there to do his work—his show business. That was when I got the letter from his agent saying, ‘I never believed you’d do this thing, Johnny.’ I don’t know what happened up there. When he came back, he was more despondent than ever, and it went on this way.”

“Did you read his suicide note? I heard from Gary Schweickart that it had all the names of the people—”

“There were names of some of the people he owed money to. Not any of the Shylocks; he didn’t name them. But I knew they were there, because I’d go with him—I sat in the car when he went to pay them off—and each time it was a different place. He had to pay off gambling debts. At first I thought I was accountable for those gambling debts, but I wasn’t gonna pay them. I didn’t make the damned debts. I helped out as much as I could, but I couldn’t take it away from you kids.” “Well,” Billy snickered, “we had a can of tuna and a box of macaroni.”

“I went back to work,” Dorothy continued, “and then we had a little bit more. I bought the groceries by that time, and I kept on working and supplying the home. That was when I cut off giving him my salary. I’d give him the money for the rent, and he’d go off and pay only half of it.”

“And gambled away the other half?”

“That, or paid off the Shylocks. I don’t know what he did with it. Confronting him with it, 'I never got the straight, honest truth. One day the loan company was going to take the furniture. I told ’em, ‘Go ahead and take it.’ But the guy couldn’t do it because I was crying, and here I was pregnant with Kathy.”

“It wasn’t very nice of Johnny.”

“Hey,” Dorothy said, “that’s it.”

After two and a half months in the Athens Mental Health Center, as Billy lost less and less time, he pressed Dr. Caul to take the next promised step in his therapy—a furlough. Other patients—many showing less improvement than he—were allowed to spend weekends at home with relatives. Dr. Caul agreed that his behavior, his insight, the long period of stability, indicated that he was ready. Billy was allowed to take a series of weekends at Kathy’s house in Logan, twenty-five miles northwest of Athens. He was overjoyed.

One weekend, Billy pressed Kathy to show him a copy of Johnny Morrison’s suicide note, which he knew she had gotten from the public defender’s office. She had resisted showing it to him up to this point, afraid it would upset him, but hearing Billy talk of Dorothy’s suffering, what a rotten father Johnny Morrison had been, Kathy became annoyed. All her life Kathy had worshiped Johnny’s memory. It was time for Billy to know, the truth.