And so Burton and I stayed and ordered single-malt Scotch and settled in beside each other in two soft chairs. My plump companion in a dress and slippers excited no interest from the waiter, who served us in a polite, bored way that made it clear he had better things to worry about, probably his acting career. It was then that Burton told me about the many hours he had spent in the streets as Dorothy, his second self, a homeless woman he had named after the girl from Kansas who travels to Oz. He had considered naming his alter ego after another Baum character, the princess he first introduced to his readers as the boy Tip, later revealed to be Ozma, princess of Oz, who has been enchanted into the other sex. While we talked together, I understood that my friend had whole territories within him I had never known about. He didn’t think of Dorothy as a disguise anymore, he told me, but as aspects of himself come to light, both mad and feminine. “There is a delectable, yes, positively chewy pleasure to be derived from raving, Erik, from a lunatic discourse that swells up from God-knows-where, my manic features, I suppose, once suppressed, have been released into oratory of preposterous grandeur, delivered to any and to all. I reveled, Erik, in my false bosoms and preponderant behind, in my big, fat, uninhibited woman-ness roving the city streets. And even in the sorrow of it. Oh yes, in the lugubrious, doleful invisibility of my station, yes, that’s it, the Nobody effect, I call it. So few people look at you,” Burton said. “Blind and deaf public hordes with shopping bags and briefcases and backpacks pass you by—that is the lot, my friend, of the unseen, the unknown, the un-signified, and the forgotten.”

When I asked why Henry had called him by name, or rather by his other name, Burton told me that while he was staking out the professor’s apartment building, Henry had stopped Dorothy on the street a couple of times and asked if she needed help. Burton confessed to some guilt about those incidents. He had turned down Henry’s change, he said, but was touched by his generosity. As for Edie, he thought her life was hard, an ongoing penance for her wild days. Her son had struck him as a delicate, sullen, difficult boy, and after making the deal with her, he felt confident the cash would help Joel, too. It may have been my Lutheran queasiness about money, but I refrained from asking how much the letters had cost him. All in all, his vigils had made him kinder toward those two, but he reserved his wrath for the journalist and admitted that Dorothy (he did not say “I”) had once “weakly tapped” the redhead with her umbrella.