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By Root 2702 0

but my room was a wreck, I hadn’t done laundry in weeks; it was too hot to do anything more taxing than lie on my tangled bed, and sweat, and try to ignore the bass of my neighbor’s stereo thumping through the wall. Jud and Frank were building some enormous, ramshackle, modernistic structure out on Commons lawn, and the hammers and the power drills had started early in the morning. I didn’t know what it was—I had heard, variously, that it was a stage set, a sculpture, a Stonehenge-type monument to the Grateful Dead—but the first time I had looked out my window, dazed with Fiorinal, and seen the upright support posts rising stark from the lawn, I was flooded with black, irrational terror: gibbets, I thought, they’re putting up gibbets, they’re having a hanging on Commons lawn.… The hallucination was over in a moment, but in a strange way it had persisted, manifesting itself in different lights like one of those pictures on the cover of horror paperbacks in the supermarket: turned one way, a smiling blond-haired child; turned the other, a skull in flames. Sometimes the structure was mundane, silly, perfectly harmless; though early in the morning, say, or around twilight, the world would drop away and there loomed a gallows, medieval and black, birds wheeling low in the skies overhead. At night, it cast its long shadow over what fitful sleep I was able to get.

The problem, basically, was that I had been taking too many pills; the ups now, periodically, mixed with the downs, because though the latter had ceased to put me effectively to sleep, they hung me over in the daytime, so that I wandered in a perpetual twilight. Unmedicated sleep was impossible, a fairy tale, some remote childhood dream. But I was running low on the downs; and though I knew I could probably get some more, from Cloke, or Bram, or somebody, I’d decided to cut them out for a couple of days—a good idea, in the abstract, but it was excruciating to emerge from my eerie submarine existence into this harsh stampede of noise and light. The world jangled with a sharp, discordant clarity; green everywhere, sweat and sap, weeds pushing through the spattered cracks of the old marble sidewalk; veined white slabs, heaved and buckled by a century’s worth of hard January freezes. A millionaire had put them down, those marble walks, a man who summered in North Hampden and threw himself from a window on Park Avenue in the 1920s. Behind the mountains the sky was overcast, dark as slate. There was pressure in the air; rain coming, sometime soon. Geraniums blazed from the white housefronts, the red of them, against the chalky clapboard, fierce and harrowing.

I turned down Water Street, which ran north past Henry’s house, and as I approached I saw a dark shadow in the back of his garden. No, I thought.

But it was. He was on his knees with a pail of water, and a cloth, and as I drew nearer I saw that he was washing not the flagstones, as I’d thought at first, but a rosebush. He was bent over it, polishing the leaves with meticulous care, like some crazed gardener from Alice in Wonderland.

I thought that any moment he must stop, but he didn’t, and finally I let myself in through the back gate. “Henry,” I said. “What are you doing?”

He glanced up, calmly, not at all surprised to see me. “Spider mites,” he said. “We’ve had a damp spring. I’ve sprayed them twice, but to get the eggs off it’s best to wash them by hand.” He dropped the cloth in the pail. I noted, not for the first time lately, how well he looked, how his stiff sad manner had relaxed into a more natural one. I had never thought Henry handsome—indeed, I’d always thought that only the formality of his bearing saved him from mediocrity, as far as looks went—but now, less rigid, and locked-up in his movements, he had a sure, tigerish grace the swiftness and ease of which surprised me. A lock of hair blew upon his forehead. “This is a Reine des Violettes,” he said, indicating the rosebush. “A lovely old rose. Introduced in 1860. And that is a Madame Isaac Pereire. The flowers smell of raspberries.”

I said: “Is Camilla