THAT SMALL DOUBLE-COLUMNED space, bottom center, front page, which the Times keeps for the deaths of those too well-known for the obits page but not international enough for the top—there they were. Twice, other friends of ours have been there, a poet, a novelist. Sherm would have made it on his own, a benign Grand Old Man going to his fathers. As it was, the story ran over to page two and a second headline: ‘Biographer and Wife Found.’

Gemma and I are to hash it over endlessly.

We have the smug preknowledge of friends.

‘They did know the Arthur Koestlers, of course. But only as acquaintances.’

‘One wouldn’t have to know them well,’ she says. ‘To be influenced.’

We have walked from the park along Central Park South, trying to get a cab. ‘Gertrude knew them best. But she would never have considered doing such a thing.’

No, she was queer for crowds, Gemma said. ‘And had nobody to double up with.’ Guilt coarsens the tongue, and this was still the first shock. Even if our only guilt was that we hadn’t liked them enough.

‘Never any cabs in this town in an emergency,’ she said when we reached Seventh Avenue, running on past me to hail and hail, and fall back.

If there was ever a day in our lives that was not an emergency, it was this one—with Gertrude’s opera just behind us and Sherm and Kit gone since yesterday. But I did feel unaccountably frail. As if all my barriers were being put to trial. Gemma has since said that with her, when she feels rickety, it’s as if all her boundaries are being nibbled, or sucked toward her core.

But this interchange was when we had finally caught a bus, plumping ourselves down on the seats marked for seniors and the handicapped, although Gemma ordinarily won’t sit there. The tears are running down her face.

‘Koestler was dying of one of those diseases,’ I said. ‘I forget which one.’ And did not plan to look it up. ‘Far as I know, Sherm wasn’t really that sick.’

‘No—it was Kit.’

‘Did she say?’

‘Only that Sherm was—hoping to put her away. She meant the hospice.’

‘And was he—going with her?’ Though I don’t know that one can.

‘Not—just that way. She said she planned to outlive him.’

‘Macy’s,’ the driver said. ‘Herald Square.’

‘I can’t see Sherm leaving the motor going. He was so careful with everything, outdoors and in.’ A man with an eyepatch, who could still wield an axe. At times it seemed as if the patch itself corrected him. ‘Remember what a hard time he gave me once, when I was on the cross-saw with him? “I have three eyes, Rupert,” he said. “You have only two.”’

‘Kit always drove the car,’ Gemma said.

‘He built that carport shed himself.’ With the aid of a local craftsman they called ‘The Lout’—and paid accordingly. They called the carport ‘The Ell,’ as they said the 1790 builder of the house would have, proud they hadn’t contaminated its design. Not so, Gemma told me on the train home. Ells were for wintering the livestock, in the larger farmhouses. You can’t tamper with a saltbox house; it sits too high.

‘All himself,’ I repeated. How quick are our tones of requiem. And he would have built it tight.

‘Plus the storm windows—finally. All over the house.’ Which Kit, after disdaining them for years, had after all campaigned for. What our austere youth refuses, I thought, our old age achieves.

‘But wouldn’t they have smelled anything?’ No, not that night-blooming plant of our era, carbon monoxide.

‘I should have listened to her harder,’ Gemma says. ‘I think she had an op. I think she wore a bag.’ The bus was slow and hot. Her tears had almost dried. Her mouth almost quirked. ‘That’s what they went to England for. She must have had the op over there, on the cheap. Didn’t they do that once before?’

‘Not quite. Not on purpose. But when they were there once, Sherm had a kidney stone.’ I shut my teeth. The worst of age is its creeping bad manners. That habit of calmly and publicly listing its organs, numbering them. And the bus was listening hard enough.

Yet I can hear Sherm’s jovial ‘I tell you, Rupe, what high-class care. If ever one really needed—And all we paid was two-pound ten for some pills.’

‘I think the National Health charges now. But of course the pound is down.’

Would that be their epitaph? Among friends who knew them well?

‘They would have heard,’ Gemma said suddenly. ‘The car motor. That old Volvo. In that small a house. Sound rises. Oh, Rupert. How could they?’ Her hand searched out mine. ‘No, it was an accident. How could they have borne to hear it?’

We rode for a while, thinking how they could have, all considered.

Then she said: ‘No—we forgot. Sherm was going deaf. But Kit—that face she turned on me in the bathroom. Could have borne it.’ She released my hand as if hers might burn it. ‘So—it was her.’

I watched the people getting out at Fourteenth Street.

I think it could have been otherwise. I think that a double venom kept so long on the simmer might find the joint will to do what love might not. I don’t forget Sherm’s face when he said that the storm windows had ruined the design of the house. He never cared for the house proper, or the windows, or woman either, except as she served. What he cared about was design—himself in the woods the way people saw him, and on the podium. What’s courage, what’s compromise, to a man whose life is losing its design? And gradually. Which may be the worst.

Maybe he struggled to get up after all, to recant. Sherm was a struggler. But he was old. Too old to rally enough muscle power to change his mind.

Grand old fakers, the two of them, always getting too much for free. I see them driving doggedly home all that day, in order to welsh on Gertrude, who maybe gave them too much. For last company, they wanted their own. I see them closing the house for good, so restoratively tight. Sherm wanted twin beds years ago but Kit wouldn’t give up the antique one. How was he persuaded? A Pennsylvania piece, he said to us. Not New England at all. But I paid for it.

That monoxide turns one a dreadful twentieth-century color. Maybe they forgot that.

I see them lying together as they had placed themselves—their faces tinged with that unearthly blue.

Their bed a sleigh.