“Where would I go?” I repeated.

The question that I heard was Where would Pat go?

Mr. Anderson tells me that I was two tens and one that year. Pat was two tens and five. Pat’s heart still wasn’t fully grown, but it would be by that summer’s end.

When the days were still long and the windows were opened wide to lure in the breeze, I heard a knock at the front door as I was setting the supper table. I found Pat slumped against a corner of the porch. He was snoring quietly, and I could smell whiskey on his breath. I called him by his name, tugged on his sleeves, and then I dragged him inside the house.

No, I’d never seen him that way before, Miss.

I couldn’t bring him up the stairs on my own, so I brought down a pillow for his head and left him in the entryway to sleep it off. When Bill came home, I told him that Mr. Pat was feeling under the weather. Best not to wake him, I said.

Pat woke up on his own.

Deplorable moral habits, Pat said to me. He repeated the words, the second time slower, and he explained what “deplorable” meant. Worse than terrible, Mattie.

I knew the meaning of “moral” and “habit,” but I couldn’t understand what these words could mean when spoken together.

“Start from the beginning, Pat,” I said, sweeping his hair, which he was wearing longer in those days, off his forehead.

The beginning, he said, was when one Patrick Lafcadio Hearn met one Alethea “Mattie” Foley. He professed his love for her, and she agreed to be his wife.

“Pat, please. Start from the beginning of this day.”

The beginning of this day, he said, was when his editor marched over to his desk in the newsroom and told him to leave the premises immediately. When asked why, the editor replied that it had come to the Enquirer’s attention that young Mr. Hearn here—the editor was addressing the other reporters who were now gathered around—has been cohabitating with a woman of color. We cannot have a man of deplorable moral habits employed here, Mr. Hearn.

Pat laughed out loud. He thought it was a queer joke being played on him by his fellow reporters. He looked around at the stance of their bodies—you and I would have looked at their faces, Miss, but Pat would have seen only smudges there—and he understood that these men, with their arms crossed and their legs planted wide, no longer meant him well. Pat claimed that at that moment his ears failed him. The editor continued with his speech, his mouth opening and closing, but Pat heard none of his words.

“As if someone has swaddled a scarf around your head,” I said.

Pat nodded, saying that what he did next—collecting his notebooks, his files, his half-written articles, his pipes, his pens—were all acts that were done as if by another being.