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"That's news to me," said the Senator. "I never saw any of it."

"He used to write me poems sometimes."

"He's probably happiest when writing on the walls of public lavatories. I often wondered who did it. Now I know. It's my poetic son."

"Does he write on lavatory walls?" McAllister asked.

"I heard that he did," said Sylvia. "It was innocent—it wasn't obscene. During the New York days, people told me Eliot was writing the same message in men's rooms all over town."

"Do you remember what it was?"

"Yes. 'If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable.' As far as I know, that was original with him."

At that moment Eliot was trying to read himself back to sleep with the manuscript of a novel by none other than Arthur Garvey Ulm

The name of the book was Get With Child a Mandrake Root, a line from a poem by John Donne. The dedication read, "For Eliot Rosewater, my compassionate turquoise." And under that was another quotation from Donne:

A compassionate turquoise which doth tell By looking pale, the wearer is not well.

A covering letter from Ulm explained that the book was going to be published by Palindrome Press in time for Christmas, and was going to be a joint selection, along with The Cradle of Erotica, of a major book club.

You have no doubt forgotten me, Compassionate Turquoise, the letter said in part. The Arthur Garvey Ulm you knew was a man well worth forgetting. What a coward he was, and what a fool he was to think he was a poet! And what a long, long time it took him to understand exactly how generous and kind your cruelty was! How much you managed to tell me about what was wrong with me, and what I should do about it, and how few words you used! Here then (fourteen years later) are eight hundred pages of prose by me. They could not have been created by me without you, and I do not mean your money. (Money is shit, which is one of the things I have tried to say in the book.) I mean your insistence that the truth be told about this sick, sick society of ours, and that the words for the telling could be found on the walls of restrooms.

Eliot couldn't remember who Arthur Garvey Ulm was, and so was even further from knowing what advice he might have given the man. The clues Ulm offered were so nebulous. Eliot was pleased that he had given someone useful advice, was thrilled even, when Ulm declared:

"Let them shoot me, let them hang me, but I have told the truth. The gnashing of the teeth of the Pharisees, Madison Avenue phonies and Philistines will be music to my ears. With your divine assistance, I have let the Djin of truth about them out of the bottle, and they will never, never, never ever get it back in!"

Eliot began to read avidly the truths Ulm expected to get killed for telling:

"CHAPTER ONE

"I twisted her arm until she opened her legs, and she gave a little scream, half joy, half pain (how do you figure a woman?), as I rammed the old avenger home."

Eliot found himself possessed of an erection. "Oh, for heaven's sakes," he said to his procreative organ, "how irrelevant can you be?"

"If only there had been a child," said the Senator again. And then the density of his regret was penetrated by this thought: That it was cruel of him to speak so to the woman who had failed to bear the magic child. "Excuse an old fool, Sylvia. I can understand why you might thank God there is no child."

Sylvia, returning from her cry in the bathroom, experimented with small gestures, all indicating that she would have loved such a baby, but that she might have pitied it, too. "I would never thank God for a thing like that."

"May I ask you a highly personal question?"

"It's what life does all the time."

"Do you think it is remotely possible that he will ever reproduce?"

"I haven't seen him for three years."

"I'm asking you to make an extrapolation."

"I can only tell you," she said, "that, toward the end of our marriage, love-making was something less than a mania with us both. He was once a sweet fanatic for love-making, but not for making children of his own."

The Senator clucked