“Augusta!” The name echoed all about them, loud and shrill through the hubbub of prayer and tourist babble.

The women turned, startled, showing pale faces, red eyes. Somewhere far off, a child was crying.

“What’s wrong?” But she felt foolish as soon as she’d said it. “Oh, no. Norman…”

“Stupid man.” Augusta rubbed at her eyes. “He kept saying he had five years to live. He said it so often that we believed him.”

“Come and sit down,” said Genevieve. But the women remained standing.

“We didn’t realize how ill he was,” Augusta continued. “It’s ridiculous. Any stranger could have seen in an instant that he was dying. You only had to look at him. But we were used to it, you see. The coughing. Even the hemorrhages. He always bounced back.” She buried her face in her friend’s shoulder.

“It happened yesterday,” said Marianne. “He’d just finished reading The Great Gatsby. He was absolutely raving about it. Kept saying Scott was a genius—that he’d turn out to be the biggest star of the century if he could only keep his wife and his drinking under control. He was so high.”

“Bob came over,” said Augusta. “Bob McAlmon, I mean. They were laughing together. And then all of a sudden Norman just folded up like an umbrella, and I tried to catch him as he fell, and there was blood everywhere. I…” She dabbed at her face with a handkerchief. “I’m sorry, I have to get out of here.” And she broke off and walked quickly away, heading out of the cathedral.

“She’s known him practically all her life,” said Marianne. “They were childhood sweethearts. He had so much poetry in his head. And now it’s all gone. It’s not real until it’s on the page, is it?”

Genevieve remembered the tiny apartment with its squirling green floor and its book-lined walls. That place was so alive…“He must have left notebooks?”

Marianne shook her head. “It would be wrong. We’d be ransacking his private world.”

She tried to think about what Betterson had said the day he’d snatched up her own poetry notebook. The day they’d visited Natalie Barney’s salon. What was it? If there was anything of worth in that book, he’d find it. Something like that. “I don’t think Norman was precious in that way,” she said. “I think he’d want you to salvage what you could.”

“I loved him too.” Marianne gazed out the door, after Augusta.

Genevieve reached across and touched her hand. “I’m so sorry. I’ll miss him. Lots of people will.”

“I should go after her.” Her voice was small.

“Telephone me,” said Genevieve. “Perhaps I can help. With the notebooks, I mean. When you’re ready. And then there’s the magazine…”

“I can’t think about this.”