I did not feel like discussing Charles's personal business with Henry. I said: 'He asked for cigarettes, too, but I don't think he ought to have them.'

Francis had been pacing in the hall outside, prowling restlessly back and forth like a cat. During this exchange he paused in the door. Now I saw him dart a quick worried glance at Henry.

'Well, you know…?' he said hesitantly.

Henry said to me: 'If he wants it – the bottle, that is – 1 think you'd better go ahead and take it to him.'

His tone annoyed me. 'He's sick,' I said. 'You haven't even seen him. If you think you're doing him a favor by -'

'Richard, he's right,' said Francis nervously, tapping a cigarette ash into his cupped palm. 'I know about this a little bit. Sometimes, if you drink, it's dangerous to stop too suddenly. Makes you sick. People can die of it.'

I was shocked by this. Charles's drinking had never seemed so bad as all that. I did not comment on this, though, only said: 'Well, if he's that bad off, he'll do a lot better in the hospital, won't he?'

'What do you mean?' said Francis. 'Do you want them to put him in a detox? Do you know what that's like? When my mother came off drink that first time, she was out of her head. Seeing things. Wrestling with the nurse and yelling nutty stuff at the top of her lungs.'

'Hate to think of Charles having DTs in the Catamount Memorial Hospital,' said Henry. He went to the night table and got the bottle. It was a fifth, a little less than half full. 'This will be cumbersome for him to hide,' he said, holding it up by the neck.

'We could pour it into something else,' said Francis.

'It would be easier, I think, if we bought him a new one. Less chance of it leaking all over everything. And if we get him one of those flat ones he can keep it under his pillow without much trouble.'

It was a drizzly morning, overcast and gray. Henry didn't go with us to the hospital. He had us drop him off at his apartment – he had some excuse, plausible enough, I can't remember what it was and when he got out of the car he gave me a hundred-dollar bill.

'Here,' he said. 'Give Charles my love. Will you buy some flowers for him or something?'

I looked at the bill, momentarily stunned. Francis snatched it from me and pushed it back at him. 'Come on, Henry,' he said, with an anger that surprised me. 'Stop it.'

'I want you to have it.'

'Right. We're supposed to get him a hundred dollars' worth of flowers.'

'Don't forget to stop at the package store,' said Henry coldly.

'Do what you like with the rest of the money. Just give him the change, if you want. I don't care.'

He pushed the money at me again and shut the car door, with a click that was more contemptuous than if he'd slammed it. I watched his stiff square back receding up the walk.

We bought Charles's whiskey – Cutty Sark, in a flat bottle – and a basket of fruit, and a box of petit-fours, and a game of Chinese checkers, and, instead of cleaning out the day's stock of carnations at the florist's downtown, an Oncidium orchid, yellow with russet tiger-stripes, in a red clay pot.

On the way to the hospital, I asked Francis what had happened over the weekend.

'Too upsetting. I don't want to talk about it now,' he said. 'I did see her. Over at Henry's.'

'How is she?'

'Fine. A little preoccupied but fine, basically. She said she didn't want Charles to know where she was and that was all there was to it. I wish I could've talked to her alone, and of course Henry didn't leave the room for a second.' Restlessly, he felt in his pocket for a cigarette. 'This may sound crazy,' he said, 'but before I saw her I'd been a little worried, you know? That something maybe had happened to her.'

I didn't say anything. The same thought had crossed my mind, more than once.

'I mean – not that I thought Henry would kill her or anything, but you know – it was strange. Her disappearing like that, without r a word to anybody. I -' He shook his head. 'I hate to say this, but sometimes I wonder about Henry,' he said. 'Especially with things like – well, you know what I mean?'

I didn't answer. Actually 1 did know what he meant, quite well. But it was too horrible for either of us to come out and say.

Charles had a semi-private room. He was in the bed nearer the door, separated by a curtain from his roommate: the Hampden County postmaster, as we later discovered, who was in for a prostate operation. On his side there were a lot of FTD flower arrangements, and corny get-well cards taped to the wall, and he was propped up in bed talking with some noisy family members: food smells, laughter, everything cheery and snug. More of his visitors trailed in after Francis and me, stopping, for an instant, to peer curiously over the curtain at Charles: silent, alone, flat on his back with an IV in his arm. His face was puffy and his skin rough and coarse-looking, broken out in some kind of a rash. His hair was so dirty it looked brown. He was watching cartoons on television, violent ones, little animals that looked like weasels cracking up cars and bashing each other on the head.

He struggled to sit up when we stepped into his partition.

Francis drew the curtain behind us, practically in the faces of the postmaster's inquisitive visitors, a pair of middle-aged ladies, who were dying to get a good look at Charles and one of whom had craned around and cawed 'Good morning!' through the gap in the curtain, in the hopes of initiating conversation.

'Dorothy! Louise!' someone called from the other side. 'Over here!'

There were rapid footsteps on the linoleum and henlike clucks and cries of greeting.

'Damn them,' said Charles. He was very hoarse and his voice was little more than a whisper. 'He's got people there all the time. They're always coming in and out and trying to look at me.'

By way of distraction, I presented Charles with the orchid..-, 'Really? You bought that for me, Richard?' He seemed touched. – '

I was going to explain that it was from all of us – without coming out and mentioning Henry, exactly – but Francis shot me a warning look and I kept my mouth shut.

We unloaded the sack of presents. I'd half expected him to pounce on the Cutty Sark and tear it open in front of us, but he only thanked us and put the bottle in the compartment underneath his upright gray-plastic bed tray.

'Have you talked to my sister?' he said to Francis. He said it in a very cold way, as if he were saying Have you talked to my lawyer?

'Yes,' Francis said.

'She's all right?'

'Seems to be.'.«'What does she have to say for herself?'

'I don't know what you mean.'

'I hope you told her I said go to hell.'

Francis didn't answer. Charles picked up one of the books I had brought him and began to leaf through it sporadically.

'Thanks for coming,' he said. 'I'm kind of tired now.'

'He looks awful,' said Francis in the car.

'There's got to be some way they can patch this up,' I said.

'Surely we can get Henry to call him and apologize.'

'What good do you think that's going to do? As long as Camilla's at the Albemarle?'

'Well, she doesn't know he's in the hospital, does she? This is kind of an emergency.'

'I don't know.'

The windshield wipers ticked back and forth. A cop in a rain slicker was directing traffic at the intersection. It was the cop with the red moustache. Recognizing Henry's car, he smiled at us and beckoned for us to go through. We smiled and waved back, happy day, two guys on a ride – then drove for a block or two in grim, superstitious silence.

'There's got to be something we can do,' I said at last.

'I think we had better stay out of it.'

'You can't tell me that if she knew how sick he was, she wouldn't be over at the hospital in five minutes.'

'I'm not kidding,' said Francis. 'I think we both had better just stay out of it.'