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By Root 2548 0

for me to take my gloves off. “Cut the fingertips off them, man,” said Leo, unperturbed. These occasional collarings in the front hall were as far as my contact with him went. It eventually became evident to me that Leo, for all his professed love for mandolins, never actually set foot in the workshop and had apparently not done so for months before I came to live there. I began to wonder if perhaps he was even unaware of the hole in the roof; one day I made so bold as to mention it to him. “I thought that was one of the things you could fix around the place,” he said. It stands as a testimony to my misery that one Sunday I actually attempted to do this, with a few odd scraps of mandolin wood that I found around, and nearly lost my life in the attempt; the grade of the roof was wickedly sharp and I lost my balance and nearly fell into the dam, catching myself only at the last moment on a length of tin drainpipe which, mercifully, held. I managed with effort to save myself—my hands were cut on the rusted tin, and I had to get a tetanus shot—but Leo’s hammer and saw and the pieces of mandolin wood tumbled into the dam. The tools all sank and Leo probably does not know to this day that they are missing, but unfortunately the mandolin pieces floated and managed to lodge themselves in a cluster at the top of the spillway, right outside Leo’s bedroom window. Of course he had plenty to say about this, and about college kids who didn’t care about other people’s things, and everybody trying to rip him off all the time.

Christmas came and went without notice, except that with no work and everything closed there was no place to go to get warm except, for a few hours, to church. I came home afterwards and wrapped myself in my blanket and rocked back and forth, ice in my very bones, and thought of all the sunny Christmases of my childhood—oranges, bikes and hula-hoops, green tinsel sparkling in the heat.

Mail arrived occasionally, in care of Hampden College. Francis sent me a six-page letter about how bored he felt, and how sick he was, and virtually everything he’d had to eat since I’d seen him last. The twins, bless them, sent boxes of cookies their grandmother had made and letters written in alternating inks-black for Charles, red for Camilla. Around the second week of January I got a postcard from Rome, no return address. It was a photograph of the Primaporta Augustus; beside it, Bunny had drawn a surprisingly deft cartoon of himself and Henry in Roman dress (togas, little round eyeglasses) squinting off curiously in the direction indicated by the statue’s outstretched arm. (Caesar Augustus was Bunny’s hero; he had embarrassed us all by cheering loudly at the mention of his name during the reading of the Bethlehem story from Luke 2 at the literature division’s Christmas party. “Well, what of it,” he said, when we tried to shush him. “All the world shoulda been taxed.”)

I still have this postcard. Characteristically, the writing is in pencil; over the years it’s become a bit smudged but it’s still quite legible. There is no signature, but there is no mistaking the authorship:

Richard old Man

are you Frozen? it is quite

warm here. We live in a Penscione

(sp.) I ordered Conche by mistake

yesterday in a restaurant it was awful

but Henry ate it. Everybody here is a

damn Catholic. Arrivaderci see you soon.

Francis and the twins had asked me, rather insistently, my address in Hampden. “Where are you living?” said Charles in black ink. “Yes, where?” echoed Camilla in red. (She used a particular morocco shade of ink that to me, missing her terribly, brought back in a rush of color all the thin, cheerful hoarseness of her voice.) As I had no address to give them, I ignored their questions and padded my replies with broad references to snow, and beauty, and solitude. I often thought how peculiar my life must look to someone reading those letters, far away. The existence they described was detached and impersonal, all-embracing yet indefinite, with large blanks that rose to halt the reader at every turn; with a few changes of