As he finally walked past me, exhausted and practically croupy from the serious laughs we’d had and how it tested his failing lungs, I noticed something. Tad was by then wearing only a wool vest and Bermuda shorts; he was barefoot. I saw how thin his legs had got. How brown, how beautiful they were at that scale. If his frontal padding always made him seem a Victorian edifice with furbelows and curly notches and overgenerous ornamentation, that joyful bulk had now changed. He was reverting, in period at least. He’d slid back down from a too-prosperous 1870, to severer, civic 1840, back to strict, pure, personal 1810. Today, Tad was exactly 1810!

I saw, being a beneficiary of his own architectural-discussion group, that Tad had shrunk down to exactly his own favorite moment in American domestic design. His former happy corpulence had, in ending, finally achieved what he’d once called “the chaste, Greek proportions of the Federal.” Tad had always explained to us: The Federal period was the last moment when, believing Mankind (at least of the American sort) to be perfectible, Architecture proved that possible. Proved that perfection, too, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I just wanted to say something nice to him, is all. But, stupidly, I chose to talk about his weight, which also meant of course how much he’d lost. I said, “Your legs …” and stopped, just hating myself, you know.

“Why? Are they finally fairly ‘good’? Think so, M.E.? Well, then, back kick, shuffle ball-change. All they needed was one serious pencil-sharpener apiece. Quit while you’re ahead, hmmm? I seem to have gotten everything I wanted, for the wrong reasons. Too Much Too Soon. But, can you imagine me one day actually walking up onto the portico at Shadow-lawn, when most of it is done, and me feeling great for one whole week, with a northwest breeze and no mosquitoes and just to be up on that porch, and me wearing khaki Bermudas with hardly any paint on them, and upright at last on legs this thin? Ooh, all I need is a couple more bronzer sticks and another NEH grant, gir’friend. Can I grate some extra horseradish for your ersters, honey? I’m right here at it. I am up.”

“Your legs are Federal now.”

At last, I managed to say it.

He glanced down, studied them, and looked right back at me. “My God, they are. Quelle achievement!” Then oh how he smiled at me. It was almost worth it, just for that one smile.

I cannot explain the look of happiness Tad gave me then. I cannot explain how I go on seeing all the bricks through him. Can’t start to tell you the joy he yet gives me, day by day, room to room.

If—(here, I am going to go ahead and do this)—if, as we are promised, “In my Father’s house are many mansions …” then there is a little justice, after all.