Tad had brought everything he’d ever purchased just in case he ever lost the weight. Today and today precisely, he’d got down to the very size he’d always imagined being (is this too much? He always told me there was no such thing as too much entertaining truth). He carried many armsful into my front parlor. I set up a chair in the foyer, between those big flanking Victorian pier glasses, 15 feet of beveled mirrors admiring mostly each other. I built a fire in either adjoining parlor, I put on a stack of Bix and Billie and turned them way up. I even let poor Circa in, despite the half-idolatrous way I love my rugs. Needless to say, we treated ourselves to a few stiff drinks. Then he came out in one ensemble after another. First it was very funny, then it got unbearable, finally so sad it turned hilarious. He was no stranger to overdoing, as he’d told me that first day.

Tad wore every outfit, in high dudgeon with that comic-brave business he did so much during the last four years (a little Dark Victory in there, as he admitted). Tad staged the privatest of fashion shows for me. All the clean good clothes he’d never once squeezed into. “I’ve kept these in a separate closet forever called ‘Someday My Prints Will Come, in Handy….’” He lugged even more from his green Ford pickup. Heaped were all horizontal stripes, the pleated pants and tartan plaids. Circa was almost comically underfoot, yapping, entering into the spirit, running up to the mirror, considering herself, playing tag with her own reflection. She seemed weirdly smart today and almost charming.

Tad had visibly become exactly the splendid-looking person we’d all always seen, the one that Tad himself had never quite believed was under there. Perfect finally, and startled by it, Tad kept changing outfits; he was soon looping up and down my staircase, cutting through my good steep rooms in this house he’d saved, doing dips and turns, and by the end, and after several more than our usual drier-than-the-Sahara martinis, we were both laughing and crying at once. Soon I was putting on every tweed overcoat left over from my George, and all the houseguests’ forgotten raingear and whatever clothes my missing children yet stashed upstairs. Hysterical, we were. Ah, but it was wonderful.

It felt like a perfect weekend house-party, but it lasted only six hours. Just the two of us, taking all the parts. We were playing the way hard-disciplined schoolkids will when given, by accident, the run of the big house. It was a time as fine as ones I recalled from the mid to late ’30s. For me, the very pinnacle of fun. House parties at Nags Head just before the second war with all my girlfriends from Saint Catherine’s and many of the freckled, courteous, lovesick boys whose planes would soon have to get shot down.