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He shrugged. "Be that as it may, we do now have a male Rosewater who says 'No' to all the good things life would like to give him. He won't even live in the mansion any more." Eliot had moved out of the mansion and into an office when it became clear that Sylvia was never coming back to him.

"He could have been Governor of Indiana by lifting an eyebrow, could have been President of the United States, even, at the price of a few beads of sweat. And what is he? I ask you, what is he?"

The Senator coughed again, then answered his own question: "A notary public, friends and neighbors, whose commission is about to expire."

This was fairly true. The only official document that hung on the mildewed beaverboard wall of Eliot's busy office was his commission as a notary public. So many of the people who brought their troubles to him needed, among such a multitude of other things, someone to witness their signatures.

Eliot's office was on Main Street, a block north-east of the brick Parthenon, across the street from the new firehouse, which the Rosewater Foundation had built. It was a shotgun attic that spanned a lunchroom and a liquor store. There were only two windows, in doghouse dormers. Outside of one was a sign that said, EATS. Outside the other was a sign that said, BEER. Both signs were electrified and equipped with blinkers. And, as Eliot's father ranted in Washington about him, him, him, Eliot slept like a baby, and the signs blinked off and on.

Eliot made of his mouth a Cupid's bow, murmured something sweetly, turned over, snored. He was an athlete gone to lard, a big man, six-feet-three, two hundred thirty pounds, pale, balding on all sides of a wispy scalplock. He was swaddled in the elephant wrinkles of war-surplus long underwear. Written on gold letters on each of his windows, and on his street-level door, too, were these words:

ROSEWATER FOUNDATION

HOW CAN WE HELP

YOU?

5

ELIOT SLEPT SWEETLY ON, although he had troubles in droves.

It was the toilet in the foul little office lavatory that seemed to be having all the bad dreams. It sighed, it sobbed, it gurgled that it was drowning. Canned goods and tax forms and National Geographics were piled on the toilet tank. A bowl and a spoon were soaking in cold water in the washbasin. The medicine cabinet over the basin was wide open. It was crammed with vitamins and headache remedies and hemorrhoid salves and laxatives and sedatives. Eliot used them all regularly, but they weren't for him alone. They were for all the vaguely ill people who came to see him.

Love and understanding and a little money were not enough for those people. They wanted medicine besides.

Papers were stacked everywhere—tax forms, Veteran's Administration forms, pension forms, relief forms, Social Security forms, parole forms. Stacks had toppled here and there, forming dunes. And between the stacks and dunes lay paper cups and empty cans of Ambrosia and cigarette butts and empty bottles of Southern Comfort.

Thumbtacked to the walls were pictures Eliot had clipped from Life and Look, pictures that now rustled in a light cool breeze running before a thunderstorm. Eliot found that certain pictures cheered people up, particularly pictures of baby animals. His visitors also enjoyed pictures of spectacular accidents. Astronauts bored them. They liked pictures of Elizabeth Taylor because they hated her so much, felt very superior to her. Their favorite person was Abraham Lincoln. Eliot tried to popularize Thomas Jefferson and Socrates, too, but people couldn't remember from one visit to the next who they were. "Which one is which?" they'd say.

The office had once belonged to a dentist. There was no clue of this previous occupancy save for the staircase leading up from the street. The dentist had nailed tin signs to the risers, each sign praising some aspect of his services. The signs were still there, but Eliot had painted out the messages. He had written a new one, a poem by William Blake. This was it, as broken up so as to fit twelve risers:

The Angel