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"On your lips it still has meaning."

"I loved him on sight in Paris—and I love him when I think of him now."

"You must have realized pretty early in the game that you had a nut on your hands."

"There was the drinking."

"There's the heart of the problem right there!"

"And there was that awful business with Arthur Garvey Ulm." Ulm was a poet Eliot had given ten thousand dollars to when the Foundation was still in New York.

"That poor Arthur told Eliot he wanted to be free to tell the truth, regardless of the economic consequences, and Eliot wrote him a tremendous check right then and there. It was at a cocktail party," said Sylvia. "I remember Arthur Godfrey was there—and Robert Frost—and Salvador Dali—and a lot of others, too."

" 'You go tell the truth, by God. It's about time somebody did,' Eliot said to him. 'And if you need any more money to tell more truth, you just come back to me.'"

"Poor Arthur wandered around the party in a daze, showing people the check, asking them if it could possibly be real. They all told him it was a perfectly wonderful check, and he came back to Eliot, made sure again that the check was not a joke. And then, almost hysterically, he begged Eliot to tell him what he should write about."

" 'The truth!' said Eliot."

" 'You're my patron—and I thought that as my patron you—you might—'"

" 'I'm not your patron. I'm a fellow-American who's paying you money to find out what the truth is. That's a very different sort of thing.'"

" 'Right, right,' said Arthur. 'That's the way it should be. That's the way I want it. I just thought there was maybe some special subject you—'"

" 'You pick the subject, and be good and fearless about it.'"

" 'Right.' And before he knew what he was doing, poor Arthur saluted, and I don't think he'd even been in the Army or Navy or anything. And he left Eliot, but he went around the party again, asking everybody what sorts of things Eliot was interested in. He finally came back to tell Eliot that he had once been a migratory fruit-picker, and that he wanted to write a cycle of poems about how miserable the fruit pickers were."

"Eliot drew himself up to his full height, looked down on Arthur, his eyes blazing, and he said, so that everybody could hear, 'Sir! Do you realize that the Rosewaters are the founders and the majority stockholders in the United Fruit Company?' "

"That wasn't true!" said the Senator.

"Of course it wasn't," said Sylvia.

"Did the Foundation have any United Fruit stock at all at that time?" the Senator asked McAllister.

"Oh—five thousand shares, maybe."

"Nothing."

"Nothing," McAllister agreed.

"Poor Arthur turned crimson, slunk away, came back again, asked Eliot very humbly who his favorite poet was. 'I don't know his name,' said Eliot, 'and I wish I did, because it's the only poem I ever thought enough of to commit to heart.'"

" 'Where did you see it?'"

" 'It was written on a wall, Mr. Ulm, of the men's room of a beer joint on the border between Rosewater and Brown Counties in Indiana, the Log Cabin Inn.' "

"Oh, this is weird, this is weird," said the Senator. "The Log Cabin Inn must have burned down— oh God—in 1934 or so. How weird that Eliot should remember it."

"Was he ever in it?" McAllister asked.

"Once—just once, now that I think back," said the Senator. "It was a dreadful robbers' roost, and we would never have stopped there if the car hadn't boiled over. Eliot must have been—ten?—twelve? And he probably did use the men's room, and he probably did see something written on the wall, something he never forgot." He nodded. "How weird, how weird."

"What was the poem?" said McAllister.

Sylvia apologized to the two old men for having to be coarse, and then she recited the two lines Eliot had recited loudly for Ulm:

"We don't piss in your ashtrays,

So please don't throw cigarettes in our urinals."

"The poor poet fled in tears," said Sylvia. "For months after that I was in terror of opening small packages, lest one of them contain the ear of Arthur Garvey Ulm."

"Hates the arts," said McAllister. He clucked.

"He's a poet