5

ROLLINS USUALLY ATE AT Strand’s table, but this evening he did not appear for dinner. Even though he had the day off, the school rule was that the boy had to be back by seven o’clock. But Strand wasn’t going to put him on report as he was supposed to do. Rollins had enough on his mind without being called into the headmaster’s office to explain his absence.

Strand didn’t like to speculate on what Rollins might be doing in Waterbury in his attempt to get Romero out of jail. The manner in which he had spoken of the people he might see who knew how to handle matters like that had made it plain that Rollins was not intending to apply for a loan at a bank or sell stock to make up the amount of the bail. Strand had a confused notion that Rollins was speaking of people who were not quite within the law or were frankly outside it, people who in return for a favor given to Rollins would certainly demand a greater favor in return. Scenarios of bribery, numbers running, arson, all the categories of ghetto crime with which readers of newspapers and watchers of television had become sadly familiar, ran through Strand’s mind as he sat decorously at the dinner table with the scrubbed and politely dressed boys who, at least at table, remembered the manners their nurses and mothers had drummed into them. The black boys who had been in his classes in high school had not been conducive to making him believe in the absolute probity of what the newspapers called ethnic teenagers, when they didn’t call them hoodlums. Rollins was, he knew, absolutely honest ordinarily, but in a situation like this, with his friend abandoned as he was now by the authorities, with his fate, as Rollins believed, in his, Rollins’s, own hands, Strand had the uneasy feeling that he had made a mistake in allowing Rollins to leave the campus. The boy’s absence fed his fears and after dinner he nearly went over to speak to Babcock and tell him that he thought that it might be a good idea to telephone Rollins’s parents and warn them to keep a watchful eye on their son.

But the thought that Rollins, who trusted him, would lump him in with all the other adults in the Establishment who were leagued against people like Romero and himself made Strand hesitate and then decide against saying anything. He had been touched by what Rollins had said to him and valued Rollins’s opinion of him and he told himself, One more night won’t kill anybody.

He stayed up late, trying to read, and made two trips to the top of the house to look into Rollins’s room to see if perhaps he had come back without checking in. But both beds were empty. He kept looking at his watch. With the time difference between New York and Paris, it would be six in the morning Paris time, midnight Eastern Standard Time, before Leslie’s plane landed. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep until he could call Air France at Kennedy and find out that the plane had arrived safely.

He had another call to make before the night was over, but kept postponing it. To Russell Hazen. Hazen had been abrasive in their last conversation and Strand found it hard to forgive the accusations shouted at him over the phone, but the man after all was his friend and the debt he owed him, Strand admitted to himself, far outweighed the small and really justifiable outburst of bad temper. He knew Hazen would not welcome what he had to tell him about the interview with the FBI agents. But Hazen deserved to be warned and sooner or later the call would have to be made. I’ll wait till he gets in from dinner, Strand thought, easing his conscience, it’ll be time enough. As long as I tell him before he reads the paper in the morning.

He waited until ten thirty, then dialed Hazen’s home number. There was no answer. He let the phone ring ten times, then hung up.

He was relieved for the moment but still jittery. He picked up his book and read the same paragraph over and over again without making any sense of the words on the page. He closed the book and went into the kitchen and got out the bottle of Scotch that had been standing in the cupboard since he had bought it at the beginning of the term. He poured a generous slug into a glass, added ice and water, and was sitting in front of the fire in the living room, with the glass in his hand, listening to the wind snapping at the windows, when he heard a knock on the apartment door. He hurried over to the door and opened it. Rollins was standing there swathed in a football hood, his face rimed with frost, looking as though he had suddenly grown old and was sprouting a white beard. He was blowing on his hands, but smiling.

“Come in, come in,” Strand said.

“Thank you, sir,” Rollins said.

Strand closed the door behind him. Rollins went and stood in front of the fire, warming his hands. “I had to walk from the bus station,” he said, “and I nearly froze my bones. This fire sure is a cheerful sight.” He looked sidelong at the glass still in Strand’s hand. “There just wouldn’t happen to be any more of that stuff from where it came from, would there?”

“Well,” Strand said, “it’s a cold night…”

“You ain’t exaggerating, Mr. Strand. Any college wants me to play ball for them better be below the Mason-Dixon Line. Or in Hawaii.”

“It’s against the rules, of course. If anybody finds out…”

“I will go to my grave first,” Rollins said, with suitable solemnity.

“You stay there and warm up,” Strand said and went into the kitchen. He poured a generous dose of whiskey and added only a little water to the glass and brought it back to Rollins. Rollins held it, the glass looking tiny in his huge hand, and rolled the liquid around, gently admiring it. He lifted his glass. “To the gentleman who invented it.” He drank a great gulp, sighed contentedly. “That takes the nip out of winter, doesn’t it?” Then he became serious. “Any developments since last night, Mr. Strand?”

“No. Except that Hitz went to Washington to see a doctor.”

“Eighteen years too late,” Rollins said grimly. Then his face brightened. “I got some developments, though. Hot developments.”

The phrase was worrisome. “Just how hot?” Strand asked.

“I didn’t hold up no bank, if that’s what you’re afraid of. Legitimate. Strictly legitimate.” Rollins took out his wallet. It was bulging. “Here it is,” he said. “Ten thousand dollars. In legal tender. Tomorrow morning I’m going to go down to the jail and get Romero out of there quick as a greased pig and there’s enough left over so I’ll be able to give him the best damn lunch that poor skinny sonofabitch ever sat down in front of.”

From the slurred way Rollins was speaking, Strand guessed the whiskey in his hand was not the first drink of the boy’s evening. “Going to the jail won’t do much good,” Strand said. “I’m sure there are all sorts of legal formalities. His lawyer has to be warned to expect you. With the money. If, as you say, it’s not hot.”

“On the head of my mother.”

“He’ll do it the way it has to be done,” Strand said, pretending to a knowledge of the law that he didn’t have, but guessing that if a black boy in a football hood showed up with ten thousand dollars, the process would be slow, to say the least. “I’ll have Mr. Babcock call him. I don’t know where his office is. In fact,” he said, “I don’t even know where Romero is at the moment. They’ve probably moved him somewhere. To a proper prison.”

“There ain’t no proper prisons, Mr. Strand,” Rollins said.

“Will you answer a question?”

“Yes.” Rollins sounded reluctant.

“Where did you get the money?”

“Do you really have to know?”

“I don’t. But the authorities might be curious.”

Rollins took another big gulp of his whiskey.

“I raised it,” he said. “From friends.”

“What friends?”

“Don’t you trust me?” Rollins said plaintively.

“I trust you. But there are other people involved.”

“Well, I laid out the case—” Rollins hesitated. “To my family, if you want to know. My mother, my father, my brothers. We ain’t on the edge of poverty, exactly, Mr. Strand, we’re not starving, even though I look scrawny…” He grinned. “My father’s chief engineer at the waterworks. One of my brothers owns a garage. My mother is chief nurse at the Intensive Care Unit in the hospital. Another of my brothers is in real estate. And my oldest brother is an assistant vice president in a bank in New York and plays the market like a xylophone. The family ain’t exactly sharecroppers, Mr. Strand.”

“You amaze me, Rollins,” Strand said. “You never told me a word of all this—or anybody else in the school.”

“I didn’t want it to be held against me,” Rollins said, laughing. “I didn’t want people to be expecting me to be smarter than I am and holding my record in school up against my family’s. It’s tough enough when we all get together for dinner and they begin to get on my back for being a shiftless, no-good black jock. My biggest brother, he was offered a tryout with the New York Knicks, that’s a basketball team, and he turned it down, he said he didn’t want to earn his living running and sweating in public like a slave of the pharaohs and having his knees operated on every summer. If my family thought I was aiming at trying to play pro football, they’d kick me out like a leper. They’re bookish, Mr. Strand, fanatical bookish, and they’re so set on improving themselves—and me—it near drives me crazy.” He finished his drink. “You got any more in that bottle in the kitchen by any chance, Mr. Strand?”

“Do you mean to say that your family gave you the money?”

“Loaned, Mr. Strand,” Rollins said earnestly. “Loaned is the word.”

“And if, after you get Romero out of jail, he runs off?”

“They’d stuff me and hang me up as a trophy on the wall for ten years,” Rollins said. “But he’s not going to run away.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“He’s my friend.” It was said with the utmost quiet simplicity. “Anyway, I can’t see Romero being allowed to hang around here when he gets out on bail.”

“No,” Strand admitted. “He’s already been expelled.”

“They don’t waste no time on little things like being innocent until proven guilty around here, do they?”

“Do you blame them?”

“Sure I blame them,” Rollins said soberly. “I blame everybody, But he won’t run away. Not if he knows it’s my money. Besides, where’s he going to run to? His family? He doesn’t even know where they are. His brother wrote he was splitting, going out west, and they didn’t know where the sisters’ve gone to and his mother had to move, but he didn’t say where. Makes no difference—he doesn’t want to go near any of them. Anyway, I’m telling him he’s coming to live in my family’s house until the trial and nobody, not even Romero, could get away from my brothers if they had a mind to keep him in place. Now, can I have that drink?”

“I’ll get it for you.” As he took Rollins’s glass and went back to the kitchen, Strand was surprised to feel the tears in his eyes. He made Rollins’s drink stronger this time. His own glass was still half full. Before tonight, the last time he had had the bottle in his hand was the night Leslie had been lost on the road back from New York and had been near hysteria when she stumbled into the house to awaken him. “A certain medicinal value,” he remembered she had said. One could say that tonight, too, medicine had its uses.

If he had been asked why he had tears in his eyes, he would have been hard put to find an answer. Rollins’s unwavering adherence to the bonds of friendship? His family’s blind generosity of spirit? Their silent defiance of the capricious indifference of the white man’s world? Their quick acceptance of the needs of their youngest member, hardly more than a boy, and his estimate of what it was right and just to do? Strand remembered the phrase Rollins had quoted his brother using—“running and sweating for the pharaohs.” Strand didn’t know how often the Rollins family went to church, but their act was a Christian rebuke to the men and women sleeping in the pretty, ivied houses that night, people who went to chapel each evening to celebrate charity and the brotherhood of man. And a rebuke, too, to the vengeful, powerful man in the great duplex apartment on Fifth Avenue, surrounded by his glorious paintings.

As he went back into the living room carrying Rollins’s refilled glass, he made a decision. “Rollins,” he said, handing the boy the whiskey, “I don’t like the idea of nobody else chipping in to help. Maybe, if we had the time, we might collect a few dollars on the campus, although I doubt it. But we don’t have the time. In the morning, you come down to the bank with me and I’ll give you two thousand dollars of my own toward the ten. It’s only a token, but sometimes tokens are necessary.” He knew he had three thousand dollars in his account. His total wealth. It would have to do him for more than a month. There would be no Christmas presents this year. No matter.

Rollins looked studiously at his glass. “Amen,” he said, surprisingly. “What time you figure to be free in the morning to go to the bank?”

“After breakfast.”

“What about your classes?”

“Force majeure,” Strand said. “I’ll explain to the headmaster.”

“Force—what’s that?”

“An act of God,” Strand said. “Freely translated.”

“I wouldn’t want Romero to stay in that jail one minute longer than he has to.”

“He won’t. One condition, though. Nobody’s to know about my contribution. Especially not Romero.”

Rollins looked quizzically at Strand. “I understand your reasons,” he said.

Strand doubted that he did. He himself was not sure of his reasons. “On second thought,” he said, “I think it’d be better if we didn’t bring Mr. Babcock in on this for the time being. He might think it’s unwise, or he might insist on talking to your parents—”

“You mean you think he wouldn’t believe me,” Rollins said.

“The possibility exists. And he may be under pressure to leave Romero where he is. I think you’d better do this on your own. The lawyer’s name is Hollingsbee. He’s in the Hartford book. I’ll call him first thing in the morning to be ready for you. If you have any trouble, call me.”

“I don’t expect any trouble.” Rollins finished his drink quickly. “I’d better be getting to bed.” He started to leave.

“One more thing, please,” Strand said. His throat felt constricted and he coughed. “About those letters that Romero said were stolen. Do you know anything about them?”

“He didn’t read them to me, Mr. Strand,” Rollins said, “and I didn’t ask. He kept them locked up. Every once in a while he would take them out and read them to himself with a sort of sappy expression on his face. Then he’d put them away and lock them up again.”

“You don’t know whom they were from?”

“From the way he looked I would guess they were from a girl.” Rollins laughed. “It’s a cinch they weren’t from bill collectors. Anyway, I could tell he prized them. Do you want me to ask him who they were from?”

“No. It’s of no importance. Well, good luck. And thank your family for me.”

“That might help. They ain’t all that crazy about my getting them to fork over all that dough. And my mother and father were against my coming here on football scholarship in the first place. But they’re on Romero’s side, and that’s the main thing.” He patted the bulge in his hip pocket. “Got to make sure it’s still there,” he said, a little embarrassedly. “I’m sorry I made such a dent in your booze. See you in the morning, sir.”

He was weaving a little as he went out of the apartment.

It had been a long day. He had started out tired. He had dozed a little during the night, but had awakened at six to call Air France. Air France had told him that Paris was fogged in and no planes were landing there as yet and that the New York flight had had to put down in Geneva and was waiting there for conditions to improve. He had called after that at twenty-minute intervals, but the message was always the same. Then, just before breakfast they had told him that Leslie’s plane had been diverted to Nice. Her trip was not beginning on a fortunate note.

At breakfast, he had told Babcock that he would have to skip his first classes. He didn’t give any reason and Babcock had looked at him oddly and had been markedly cool when he said “I do hope that we can settle back into a sensible routine soon again,” and had turned away abruptly.

The long walk into town with Rollins to the bank in a biting wind had left him gasping and twice he had had to ask Rollins to stop while he regained his breath. Rollins had watched him anxiously, as though he was afraid that he would drop where he stood. “My father has heart trouble, too,” Rollins said. “My mother’s after him all the time to slow down.”

“How do you know I have heart trouble?” Strand asked.

“Romero told me. He said they were afraid you were going to die.” Rollins looked at him with childlike curiosity. “If you don’t mind my asking, what was it like—I mean, when you felt yourself…” He stopped, embarrassed. “I’ve been knocked out a few times myself and the funny thing was it didn’t hurt while it was happening—I just felt as though somehow I was floating through the air, altogether peaceful. I just wondered if maybe it’s like that. I’d feel better about my father if it was like that for him…”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” Strand said, trying to remember what he had felt as he collapsed on the beach. “Now that I look back on it, that is how I felt. It’s a comforting thought. To tell you the truth I didn’t want to come back.”

“Well,” Rollins said emphatically. “I’m real glad you did.”

Strand smiled at him. “So am I.”

At the bank, he had cashed the check and given the two thousand dollars in new hundred dollar notes to Rollins. Rollins didn’t put them in his wallet immediately, but stood there, looking uncertainly down at them in his hand. “You sure you want to do this, Mr. Strand?”

“I’m sure. Put them away.”

Rollins folded the notes carefully into his wallet. “I better be getting along,” he said. “The bus for Hartford leaves in ten minutes. Maybe you better take a taxi back to the school.”

Strand had taken a taxi from the town to the school once. It had cost five dollars. “I’ll walk. The exercise will wake me up. Good luck with Mr. Hollingsbee. I called him and he’s expecting you.”

“Be careful, please, Mr. Strand,” Rollins said. He strode quickly down the windy street as Strand pushed his wool muffler higher around his neck. At the corner Rollins stopped, turned and looked back. He waved once, then turned the corner and disappeared.

Shivering and with his ungloved hands feeling like two lumps of ice in his overcoat pockets, Strand walked in the opposite direction along the main street going out of town. There was a drugstore on the corner that sold newspapers. He went in and bought the Times. The story was on page three and was short. “Justice Department Investigates Charges of Influence Peddling in Washington” was the one-column headline. The story itself was tentative. It had been revealed to the Times through reliable sources, it ran, that a prominent New York lawyer, Russell Hazen, had had conversations with a registered lobbyist for the oil industry about the possibility of rewarding an unnamed congressman for a favorable vote in committee on an offshore drilling bill. The conversation had been taped off a tapped telephone wire in Mr. Hitz’s office. The tap had been legally obtained on a warrant from a federal judge. The Justice Department declined to say if an indictment would be sought. The investigation would continue.

Poor Russell, Strand thought. He felt guilty at having given up after one call trying to reach Hazen to warn him of the FBI’s visit. It was not the kind of story a man would want to come on unsuspectingly as he opened the paper at the breakfast table.

Strand closed the paper and dropped it back on the pile. He had paid for it, but he didn’t want to read about the murders, the executions, the invasions, the bankruptcies that seemed to make up most of each morning’s news these days.

He went out of the store into the cold, gray street, where other pedestrians were hurrying, bent over, against the wind. He had foolishly not worn a hat. He pulled the muffler away from his neck and, using it as a shawl, wound it around his head and tied it in a knot under his chin. As he started off again, his eyes tearing from the cold, he thought of all the photographs he had seen in newspapers of refugee women, their heads wrapped in shawls, shuffling along on dusty roads.

By the time he got back to the school, dragging himself along, cursing the wind, he was sure he wouldn’t be able to last through his classes till five o’clock. Somehow, though, he managed it, sitting at his desk while he lectured, instead of striding up and down as he usually did, and speaking slowly and laboriously. Then, during his last class, the headmaster’s secretary came into the room and told him that he should come over to the office as soon as possible. He cut the class short and went down to the headmaster’s office. Romero was there and Rollins and Mr. Hollingsbee.

Romero’s mouth was still split and swollen and a bruise on his forehead was lumpy and discolored. But he stood erect and defiant as he glanced once at Strand, then lowered his eyes and stared at the floor.

“Allen,” Babcock said, “we’ve all been trying to persuade Romero to cooperate with Mr. Hollingsbee. Without success. I’ve told Romero that under the circumstances I have no choice but to expel him from the school as of today. If he is willing to cooperate, I might be able to suspend him provisionally to await the outcome of the trial. Mr. Hollingsbee thinks that with luck he might have Romero put on probation. In that case, I believe I might be able to allow him to come back to the school on probation here, too, to finish his year. Perhaps you can do something with him.”

“Romero,” Strand said, “you’re playing with the rest of your life. Give yourself a chance, at least. I don’t like reminding you of what you owe to Mr. Hazen and myself, but I have to do it. Between us we have a large investment in you. And I’m not talking about money. A moral investment. It’s callous of you not to feel that you should try to protect it.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Strand,” Romero said, still staring at the floor. “Everyone knows what I did and why. I’ll take the consequences. I’m not going to weasel out. Everyone’s wasting their time arguing with me.”

Strand shrugged. “I’m afraid that’s it,” he said to Babcock.

Babcock sighed. “All right, Romero,” he said. “Pack your things and get out. Right now. You can’t stay here even one more night.”

“I’ll drive the boys back to Waterbury,” Mr. Hollingsbee said. “Rollins, maybe your parents will be able to do something with him.”

“They sure will try,” Rollins said. He took Romero’s elbow. “Come on, hero.”

Mr. Hollingsbee and Strand followed the boys out of the room and out onto the campus. They made a little cortege as they walked across to the Malson Residence. “Before you came,” Hollingsbee said to Strand, “Babcock read the riot act to Rollins, too. About not reporting the crap games in the room. He put Rollins on probation for the rest of the year. That means he can’t play on any of the teams. The track coach isn’t going to be happy when he hears about it. Rollins is the number one shot-putter of the school. It won’t help him any getting a scholarship for college, either.”

“Do you have any children?” Strand asked.

“One daughter. Thank God she’s married.” Hollingsbee laughed.

Strand couldn’t help wondering if the man had ever read any of his daughter’s letters to her husband or to any other man she knew.

“How about you?” Hollingsbee asked. “How many children do you have?”

“Three. So far they’ve managed to stay out of jail.”

“You’re ahead of the game.” The lawyer shook his head. “Kids these days.”

When they got to the house Strand was relieved to see that the common room was empty. Romero started for the stairs, but Strand stopped him. “Jesus,” he said, “one last time…”

Romero shook his head.

“All right, then,” Strand said. “Good-bye. And good luck.” He put out his hand. Romero shook it. “Don’t take it too hard,” he said. “Just one more stick on the fire.” He started toward the door, then stopped and turned. “Can I say something, Mr. Strand?”

“If you think there’s anything more to say.”

“There is. I’m leaving here, but I don’t think you’ll be here much longer, either.” He was speaking earnestly, his voice low and clear. “This place is staffed by time-servers, Mr. Strand. And I don’t think you’re a time-server.”

“Thank you,” Strand said ironically.

“The other teachers are grazing animals, Mr. Strand. They graze in peace on grass…”

Strand wondered where in his reading Romero had picked up that phrase. Unwillingly, now that he had heard it, he recognized the justice.

“You hunt on cement, Mr. Strand,” Romero went on. “That’s why you understood me. Or at least half-understood me. Everybody else here looks at me as though I belong in a zoo.”

“That’s not fair,” Strand said. “At least about the others.”

“I’m just telling you my opinion.” Romero shrugged.

“Are you finished?”

“I’m finished.”

“Go get your things,” Strand said. He was disturbed and did not want to hear any more. At least not today.

“Come on, Baby,” Romero said harshly to Rollins, “let’s clear out the ole plantation. Massa’s selling us South.”

Strand watched Hollingsbee and the two boys go up the stairs, then went down the hall to his apartment. The phone was ringing in the living room. He had almost decided not to answer it but then, thinking that it might be Leslie calling from France to reassure him that she was all right, he picked it up.

It was Hazen. “Did you read that goddamn story in the Times this morning?” He sounded drunk.

“I did.”

“Reliable sources.” Hazen’s voice was thick. “Any two bit shyster lawyer in the Justice Department leaking to a crappy newspaperman and suddenly it’s a reliable source. My God, if you tapped a conversation between Jesus Christ and John the Baptist they could make it sound like a federal offense.”

“I tried to call you last night and warn you about the Times. There was no answer.”

“I was at the fucking opera. And when I’m not home my goddamn valet is too lazy to move away from the bar where he’s drinking my liquor to pick up the phone. I’m going to fire the sonofabitch tonight. How did you know about the Times?”

“There were two FBI men here yesterday, questioning me about you. They told me to look at the Times this morning.”

“What did they want to know?”

“If I’d heard you talking to Hitz about a deal.”

“What did you tell them?”

“What could I tell them? I said I didn’t hear anything.”

“You could have sworn, for Christ’s sake, that you were with me every minute and you knew damn well I didn’t say a word about any kind of business with Hitz.”

“We went through this before, Russell,” Strand said wearily. “I told them what I knew. No more and no less.”

“Go to the head of the honor roll, Sir Galahad,” Hazen said. “When are you going to come down out of the clouds and hang your halo on the door and learn to play with the big boys on the street?”

“You’re drunk, Russell. When you’re sober, I’ll talk to you.” Strand quietly put down the receiver. He was shivering. The cold of the day seemed to be embedded in his bones. He went into the bathroom and turned on the hot water in the tub. He inhaled the steam gratefully as he started to undress. There was a ring on the doorbell. He turned the water off, put on a bathrobe and went barefooted to the door. Dr. Philips was standing there, with his little black bag in his hand.

“Do you mind if I come in, Mr. Strand?” Strand had the impression that the doctor was on the verge of putting his foot in the door for fear that it would be slammed in his face. “Please.”

Philips came in. “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” he said. “But Mr. Babcock called me a few minutes ago and said he thought I ought to take a look at you.”

“Why?”

“May I take off my coat?”

“Of course. Did Babcock explain…?”

“He said he was worried about you, he thought you didn’t look too well,” Philips said, as Strand helped him off with his coat. “He told me about your history with a heart problem and if it’s all right with you I’d like to do a little checking.” He glanced obliquely at Strand. “The truth is your color isn’t all it might be today. I know you’ve been under stress and…”

“I’ve lost a little sleep the last few nights,” Strand said curtly. “That’s all.” He was certain that no matter what happened he didn’t want to be put back in a hospital again.

Dr. Philips was taking a stethoscope out of his bag and the apparatus that Strand had become all too familiar with, to take his blood pressure. “If we can just sit over here at the desk,” Philips said, sounding, Strand thought, like a dentist assuring a patient that probing for a root canal nerve wouldn’t hurt, “and if you’ll take off your robe…” Strand threw the robe over a chair. He still had his pants on so he didn’t feel as foolish as he would have sitting naked in his own living room. “You certainly aren’t obese,” Philips said dryly as he put the cold stethoscope to Strand’s chest. The instructions were familiar, too. Cough. Hold your breath. Breathe deeply, exhale slowly. Aside from the brief commands, Philips said nothing. After the chest he put the stethoscope to Strand’s back. Then he wrapped the rubber sleeve of the blood pressure machine around Strand’s arm and pumped it up, let the air out, watching the gauge intently, then repeating the process. Your life on a bubble of air, Strand thought, as he watched the doctor’s impassive face. Or on a slender column of mercury, that unstable element.

When Philips was through he still remained silent while he put the gadgets away in his bag. Shivering, Strand put on his bathrobe again. “Mr. Strand,” Philips said, “I’m afraid Mr. Babcock is a keen diagnostician. Your breathing is very shallow and there’s a worrisome sound to your lungs. Your heartbeat is irregular, although not too bad. Your blood pressure is very high. Do you remember what it was when they released you from the hospital?”

“I don’t know the numbers, but my doctor said it was high normal.”

“It is no longer within the normal range, I’m afraid. Are you taking anything to keep it down?”

“No.”

Philips nodded. “If you’ll come by the infirmary tomorrow morning I’ll give you some pills that should work. Just one a day should do the trick.” He dug into his bag and came out with a small bottle. “Here’s something to help you sleep. Don’t worry—it’s not addictive.”

“I’m really not afraid of becoming a drug addict at my age,” Strand said.

“Addiction is not only a teenage disease, Mr. Strand,” Philips said coldly. “There’s some liquid in your lungs, too…”

“It’s a wonder I’m still walking around, isn’t it?” Strand said, trying to sound amused at the minor misfunctions of his refractory body.

“A little walking is fine. It’s even prescribed. Although I’d stay indoors until it gets a little warmer. I’ll give you a diuretic, too. I don’t want to alarm you. You’ve recovered remarkably from what Mr. Babcock has told me was a massive attack. But emotion—stress, as I mentioned before—plays a great part in conditions like this. If possible, I’d like to see you take things more calmly.”

“What should I have done when I saw one of the boys in my house chasing another with a knife—sat down and played the flute?”

“I know, I know,” Philips said, reacting to the ring of anger in Strand’s voice by talking more slowly and calmly than ever. “There are situations when what a doctor advises sounds foolish. I’m not an extravagantly healthy man myself, but there is advice I give myself that I can’t hope to follow. Still, if possible, try to put your problems into some larger perspective.”

“How do you make out when you put your problems into some larger perspective?”

Philips smiled sadly. “Badly.”

Strand knew from what Babcock had told him that Philips was a widower. His wife had been killed in an automobile accident five years before. He had had a prestigious practice in New York City and had been a professor at Cornell Medical Center. When his wife had died he had given it all up, practice, hospital, office, apartment, friends, and the rest of his family, and had gone off for a year to live alone in a cabin in the Maine woods. He had come to Dunberry, where he had frankly told Babcock that he wanted to have a practice that made minimum demands on him and where his responsibility was limited and where none of the friends and associates he had known when his wife was alive would crop up to remind him of his happier days. As he had just confessed, when he had put his problems into a larger perspective he had fared badly.

“Sprained ankles and adolescent acne,” he had told Babcock. “That’s about as deep into medicine as I want to go for the rest of my life.”

Remembering this dissipated Strand’s irritation with the man for coming over unasked to examine him and highhandedly prescribing for him, meddling, as Strand had felt when he saw the doctor at his door, with matters that were not really any concern of his. After all, Strand was not a child and he had his own doctors to whom he could appeal if he felt it necessary. He tried to imagine what Hazen’s reaction would have been on the phone if the doctor had answered it and counseled him to put Washington and the FBI into a larger perspective.

“I understand from Mr. Babcock,” the doctor was saying, “that you’re the most conscientious teacher in the school. That has to mean overwork and overworry. If I may make a suggestion, be less conscientious. Try to let things slide here and there. And don’t run after boys with knives if you can help it.” He smiled as he said it. “Rest as much as you can. Mentally even more than physically. One more question. Do you drink much?”

“Hardly at all.”

“Take a whiskey now and then. It can put things into a rosier light, aside from opening up the capillaries.” Philips struggled into his coat. Just at the door, he turned. “What do you think will happen to the Romero boy?”

Strand thought for a moment. “Rollins says that if he goes to jail he’ll wind up on the street and he won’t be carrying a knife, there’ll be a gun in his belt and dust in his pocket. I guess what he means by dust is heroin or cocaine. My feeling is that it’s either that or he’ll lead a revolution somewhere.”

Philips nodded soberly. “Mercy is the scarcest virtue on the market,” he said. “We’re all such bunglers, aren’t we? Well, sir, good night. And sleep well.”

Sprained ankles and adolescent acne, Strand thought, as the door closed behind the doctor. Romero hardly fitted into those categories.

Strand went into the bathroom and put the small bottle of pills Philips had given him on the shelf. Nepenthe by the nightly dose, he thought. Retreat to forgetfulness. Civilization’s answer to religion and ambition.

He turned the hot water on again, once more grateful for the swirling steam, taking deep breaths. Then the phone rang again. Annoyed, he turned the tap off and went back into the living room. “Hello,” he said brusquely.

“You don’t have to snap my head off.” It was Leslie, her voice amused though far away. “I know you don’t like to talk on the phone but you might as well tear it out of the wall if you answer it like that. Nobody will ever dare call you twice.”

“Hello, dearest,” he said. “God, it’s good to hear your voice. Where are you? The last I heard from Air France, you were wandering all over European air space.”

“We finally landed at Nice,” Leslie said, “and now we’re in Linda’s place in Mougins. She said as long as we were so close it would be a shame if I didn’t see it. It’s heavenly. I wish you were here with us.”

“So do I.”

“How are things on the battlefield?”

“Picking up,” he said ambiguously.

“What does that mean?”

“Romero’s out on bail and he’s staying with Rollins’s family in Waterbury.”

“Who put up the bail?”

He hesitated. “Friends,” he said.

“Was it Russell?”

“He’s not Romero’s friend.” Strand did not add that at the moment Romero didn’t think Strand was his friend, either.

“I guess it’s better all around that way, don’t you?”

“Much better.”

“Are you taking care of yourself? Are you lonely?”

“I hardly notice that you’re not here,” he said, laughing, or at least making an effort to laugh. “Mrs. Schiller is pampering me outrageously.”

“I worried about you all over the Atlantic.”

“You should have worried about the pilot. You’re lucky they didn’t put you down in Warsaw. I’m fine.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“You sound tired.”

“It’s the connection. I intend to take up skiing tomorrow. The paper promises snow.” It took an effort to be flip, but he made it. If Leslie had been there, he would have told her all, or almost all, of what he had been through that day. But worries, he knew, were multiplied by the square root of distance and Leslie was three thousand miles away.

“What are you doing now?” Leslie was saying. “I mean at this particular minute?”

“I’m about to step into a hot bath.”

“And I’m going to jump into Linda’s pool tomorrow. Imagine being able to swim in November. When we retire I think we ought to live in Mougins.”

“If you find a nice little place for around a million dollars while you’re down there, put a deposit on it.”

Leslie sighed. “It would be nice to be rich for once, wouldn’t it?”

“Thoreau never saw the Mediterranean,” Strand said, “and he was happy on a pond.”

“He wasn’t married.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“If I let myself go,” Leslie said, “I think I would turn into a frivolous, luxury-loving woman. Would you be able to bear me?”

“No.”

She laughed again. “I do like a man who knows his own mind. I’ve talked long enough. This call is costing Linda a fortune. Are you happy?”

“Never happier,” he said.

“I know you’re lying and I love you for it.” There was a sound of a kiss over the scratchy wire and Leslie hung up.

Strand put down the phone and went into the bathroom and finally sank into the warm water of the bath. My private small sea, he thought as he dozed in the steam. Like Thoreau, he would be content with a pond.