“Go on and look at him,” she says. “Because guess what? This is mybrother’s other life! The only one he has left! Get right up close and get a good look at it. They poked out his eyes, they took off one of his cheeks — you can see the teeth in there, peekaboo! The police showed me photographs. They didn’t want to, but I made them. They poked a hole in his heart, but I guess the doctors plugged that. It’s his liver that’s killing him. They poked a hole in that, too, and it’s dying.”

“Miss Magruder, I—”

“It’s Mrs. Rawlings,” she tells him, “not that it’s anything to you, one way or the other. Go on. Get a good look. See what you’ve done to him.”

“I was in California…I saw it in the paper…”

“Oh, I’m sure,” she says. “I’m sure. But you’re the only one I can get hold of, don’t you see? The only one who was close to him. His other pal died of the Queer’s Disease, and the rest aren’t here. They’re eating free food down at his flophouse, I suppose, or talking about what happened at their meetings. How it makes themfeel. Well, Reverend Callahan — or is it Father? I saw you cross yourself— let me tell you how this makesme feel. It…makes…me… FURIOUS .” She is still speaking in the pleasant voice, but when he opens his mouth to speak again she puts a finger across his lips and there is so much force pressing back against his teeth in that single finger that he gives up. Let her talk, why not? It’s been years since he’s heard a confession, but some things are like riding a bicycle.

“He graduated from NYUcum laude, ” she says. “Did you know that? He took second in the Beloit Poetry Prize Competition in 1949, did you know that ? As an undergraduate! He wrote a novel…a beautiful novel…and it’s in my attic, gathering dust.”

Callahan can feel soft warm dew settling on his face. It is coming from her mouth.

“I asked him— no, begged him— to go on with his writing and he laughed at me, said he was no good. ‘Leave that to the Mailers and O’Haras and Irwin Shaws,’ he said, ‘people who can really do it. I’ll wind up in some ivory-tower office, puffing on a meerschaum pipe and looking like Mr. Chips.’

“And that would have been all right, too,” she says, “but then he got involved in the Alcoholics Anonymous program, and from there it was an easy jump to running the flophouse. And hanging with his friends. Friends like you.”

Callahan is amazed. He has never heard the wordfriends invested with such contempt.