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that she wept—or, as perhaps he might have said it in his unlikely James-Proustian prose, “wept copiously.” Along with her pain, however, she was aware of the pleasure and drama of weeping as drop after drop crept slowly to her chin, gathered, trembled, and fell to the paper below.
    What, what was his name?—and she brushed impatiently at the tears under her eyeglasses, finally making out: Bruno David Carlson-Wade (goodness! almost as complicated as her own) in a large, wavering, hairline script, followed by his address. No telephone. Probably his means could not provide one.

    Bruno.
    Bruno David Carlson-Wade.
    Possibly she could have resisted the letter, everything he had written, including the “wax” that grew too long, together with the “metal maw,” but one word was devastating, as exquisite, almost, as “fine me.”
    That word: “Waiting . . .”

    The final letter, a patch of whiteness glowing on the desk was, in its way, perhaps the strangest of all: virtually a telegram!—so brief, succinct.
    It was from a “young actor” who extended his “profound sympathy,” revealing that he had in his own grief some years ago after his mother’s death made a suicide attempt. He was certain he could “ease the burden” of her “‘son’s’ loss.” The quotes around “son” suggested something quite as unpleasant as Mr. Passannante’s implication. In any event, she was informed that the young man was “with a show” out of town that was closing in a few days and that after he had returned to Manhattan he would, chez vous (no less) come by and see her. He named the day and time! Tuesday, October 15th at 4 P.M. And it was signed, with considerable vigor, Martin Dzierlatka.
    No return address on letter or envelope; only, astonishingly (what turned out to be) a three-by-five photograph torn roughly into eight pieces! She stared at the puzzle, then, unable to resist, carefully fitted it together like the jigsaw it was.
    What she saw was a beautiful young man; no other word would do: dark-haired, brilliant-eyed, strong-jawed, masculine, half-smiling: expending—if she was any judge at all—an aura of frankness, warmth, and generosity.
    But, as her mother used to say of any eccentric neighbor: “he’s one of the mad ones all right,” quite believing that a cabala, a secret society of functional psychotics truly existed, charter and all.
    If handsome Martin—what was it now?— Dzierlatka (Russian? Polish?) was to chez vous anyone, he’d be taking tea with Box 89 at the Village station post office come October 15th at four.
    She looked a final fatal look at his beautiful face, a glory of a young man if there ever was one, considerably older than Jamie, much different, and one of the maddest of the “mad ones” to be sure, before he joined Messrs. Fabrizzi and Passannante on the floor, his letter as much a jigsaw as his photograph.

    Only MEMOREX 60 remained.
    She listened the following afternoon, to just a few minutes of it, before tossing it away.
    It was nothing more than an elaborate expression of sympathy and a bid for reciprocity from a woman, no less, who tearfully confessed that she had lost, not a son but, a beloved father from a series of small strokes over a period of fourteen bed-confined years. For that reason (the death) she equated in sisterhood her deprivation and suffering with all those who had also sustained a loss.
    The woman, shrill and breathless, was clearly a compulsive talker seeking to embrace the fullest range and expression of her neurosis via cassette tape decks addressed to the recently bereaved whom she found, no doubt, in obituary columns and sundry reports concerning fatal accidents and deaths in local newspapers.

    So.
    Two only.
    Bruno David Carlson-Wade.
    And sweet Angel, about whom her fantasies were particularly hopeful and bizarre.
    But there would also be, to her staggered surprise, Martin Dzierlatka; actor, ex-suicide, two weeks hence, quite at his