People liked him, and The Friends of Life was apparently attracting the large membership to which Daily Bread, its political progenitor, had only been able to aspire. There were no more doll-throwing parties or other violent demonstrations, but there were plenty of marches and counter-marches, plenty of name-calling and fistshaking and angry letters to the editor. Preachers promised damnation; teachers urged moderation and education; half a dozen young women calling themselves The Gay Lesbo Babes for Jesus were arrested for parading in front of The First Baptist Church of Derry with signs which read GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY BODY. A nameless policeman was quoted in the Derry News as saying that he hoped Susan Day would come down with the flu or something and have to cancel her appearance.

Ralph received no further communications from Ed, but on September twenty-first he received a postcard from Helen with fourteen jubilant words scrawled across the back: “Hooray, aj’oh.f Derry Public Library.”

I start next month! See you soon-Helen.”

Feeling more cheered than he had since the night Helen had called him from the hospital, Ralph went downstairs to show the card to McGovern, but the door of the downstairs apartment was shut and locked.

Lois, then… except that Lois was also gone, probably off to one of her card-parties or maybe downtown shopping for yarn and plotting another afghan.

Mildly chagrined and musing on how the people you most wanted to share good news with were hardly ever around when you were all but bursting with it, Ralph wandered down to Strawford Park.

And it was there that he found Bill McGovern, sitting on a bench near the softball field and crying.

Crying was perhaps too strong a word; leaking might have been better.

McGovern sat with a handkerchief sticking out of one gnarled fist, watching a mother and her young son play roll-toss along the first-base line of the diamond where the last big softball event of the season-the Intramural City Tournament-had concluded just two days before.

Every now and then he would raise the fist with the handkerchief in it to his face and swipe at his eyes. Ralph, who had never seen McGovern weep-not even at Carolyn’s funeral-loitered near the playground for a few moments, wondering if he should approach McGovern or just go back the way he had come.

At last he gathered up his courage and walked over to the park bench.”

“Lo, Bill,” he said.

McGovern looked up with eyes that were red, watery, and a trifle embarrassed. He wiped them again and tried a smile. “Hi, Ralph. You caught me snivelling. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Ralph said, sitting down. “I’ve done my share of it. What’s wrong?” McGovern shrugged, then dabbed at his eyes again. “Nothing much. I’m suffering the effects of a paradox, that’s all.”

“What paradox is that?”

“Something good is happening to one of my oldest friends-the man who hired me for my first teaching position, in fact. He’s dying.” Ralph raised his eyebrows but said nothing. “He’s got pneumonia. His niece will probably haul him off to the hospital today or tomorrow, and they’ll put him on a ventilator, at least for awhile, but he’s almost certainly dying. I’ll celebrate his death when it comes, and I suppose it’s that more than anything else that’s depressing the shit out of me.”

McGovern paused. “You don’t understand a thing I’m saying, do you?”

“Nope,” Ralph said. “But that’s all right.” McGovern looked into his face, did a doubletake, then snorted. The sound was harsh and thick with his tears, but Ralph thought it was a real laugh just the same, and risked a small return smile. “Did I say something funny?”

“No,” McGovern said, and clapped him lightly on the shoulder. “I was just looking at your face, so earnest and sincere-you’re really an open book, Ralph-and thinking how much I like you. Sometimes I wish I could be you.”

“Not at three in the morning, you wouldn’t,” Ralph said quietly. McGovern sighed and nodded. “The insomnia.”

“That’s right. The insomnia.”

“I’m sorry I laughed, but-”

“No apology necessary, Bill.”

“-but please believe me when I say it was an admz’riing laugh.”

“Who’s your friend, and why’s it a good thing that he’s dying?”

Ralph asked. He already had a guess as to what lay at the root of McGovern’s paradox; he was not quite as goodheartedly dense as Bill sometimes seemed to think.

“His name’s Bob Polhurst, and his pneumonia is good news because he’s suffered from Alzheimer’s since the summer of ’88.”

It was what Ralph had thought… although AIDS had crossed his mind, as well. He wondered if that would shock McGovern, and felt a small ripple of amusement at the idea. Then he looked at the man and felt ashamed of his amusement. He knew that when it came to gloom McGovern was at least a semi-pro, but he didn’t believe that made his obvious grief over his old friend any less genuine.

“Bob was head of the History Department at Derry High from 1948, when he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, until 1981 or ’82. He was a great teacher, one of those fiercely bright people you sometimes find out in the sticks, hiding their lights under bushels. They usually end up heading their departments and running half a dozen extra-curricular activities on the side because they simply don’t know how to say no. Bob sure didn’t.”

The mother was now leading her little boy past them and toward the little snackbar that would be closing up for the season very soon now.

The kid’s face had an extraordinary translucence, a beauty that was enhanced by the rose-colored aura Ralph saw revolving about his head and moving across his small, lively face in calm waves.

“Can we go home, Mommy?” he asked. “I want to use my PlayDoh now. I want to make the Clay Family.”

“Let’s get something to eat first, big boy-’kay? Mommy’s hungry.

“

“Okay.”

There was a hook-shaped scar across the bridge of the boy’s nose, and here the rosy glow of his aura deepened to scarlet.

Fell out of his crib when he was eight months old, Ralph thought.

Reaching for the butterflies on the mobile his Mom hung from the ceiling. It scared her to death when she ran in and saw all the blood,she thought the poor kid was dying. Patrick, that’s his name.

She calls him Pat. He’s named after his grandfather, and-he closed his eyes tightly for a moment. His stomach was fluttering lightly just below his Adam’s apple and he was suddenly sure he was going to vomit.

“Ralph?” McGovern asked. “Are you all right?”

He opened his eyes. No aura, rose-colored or otherwise; just a mother and son heading over to the snackbar for a cold drink, and there was no way, absolutely no way that he could tell she didn’t want to take Pat home because Pat’s father was drinking again after almost six months on the wagon, and when he drank he got meanStop it, for God’s sake stop it.

“I’m okay,” he told McGovern. “Got a speck in my eye is all. Go on.

Finish telling me about your friend.”

“Not much to tell. He was a genius, but over the years I’ve become convinced that genius is a vastly overrated commodity. I think this country is full of geniuses, guys and gals so bright they make your average card-carrying MENSA member look like Fucko the Clown. And I think that most of them are teachers, living and working in small-town obscurity because that’s the way they like it. It was certainly the way Bob Polhurst liked it.

“He saw into people in a way that seemed scary to me… at first, anyway. After awhile you found out you didn’t have to be scared, because Bob was kind, but at first he inspired a sense of dread. You sometimes wondered if it was an ordinary pair of eyes he was using to look at you, or some kind of X-ray machine.”

At the snackbar, the woman was bending down with a small paper cup of soda. The kid reached up for it with both hands, grinning, and took it. He drank thirstily. The rosy glow pulsed briefly into existence around him again as he did, and Ralph knew he had been right: the kid’s name was Patrick, and his mother didn’t want to take him home. There was no way he could know such things, but he did just the same.