“I wrote Reg Thorpe and his wife a couple of letters each during that three-week period. I remember doing hers, but not his — like the letter from Bellis, I wrote those letters in blackout periods. But I hewed to my old work habits when I was blotto, just as I hewed to my old misspellings. I never failed to use a carbon… and when I came to the next morning, the carbons were lying around. It was like reading letters from a stranger.
“Not that the letters were crazy. Not at all. The one where I finished up with the P.S. about the blender was a lot worse. These letters seemed… almost reasonable.”
He stopped and shook his head, slowly and wearily.
“Poor Jane Thorpe. Not that things appeared to be all that bad at their end. It must have seemed to her that her husband’s editor was doing a very skillful — and humane — job of humoring him out of his deepening depression. The question of whether or not it’s a good idea to humor a person who has been entertaining all sorts of paranoid fantasies — fantasies which almost led in one case to an actual assault on a little girl —
probably occurred to her, if so, she chose to ignore the negative aspects, because she was humoring him, too.
Nor have I ever blamed her for it — he wasn’t just a meal ticket, some nag that was to be worked and humored, humored and worked until he was ready for the knacker’s shop; she loved the guy. In her own special way, Jane Thorpe was a great lady. And after living with Reg from the Early Times to the High Times and finally to the Crazy Times, I think she would have agreed with Bellis about blessing the slack and not wasting your breath cursing the drop. Of course, the more slack you get, the harder you snap when you finally fetch up at the end…
but even that quick snap can be a blessing, I reckon — who wants to strangle?
“I had return letters from both of them in that short period — remarkably sunny letters… although there was a strange, almost final quality to that sunlight. It seemed as if… well, never mind the cheap philosophy. If I can think of what I mean, I’ll say it. Let it go for now.
“He was playing hearts with the kids next door every night, and by the time the leaves started to fall, they thought Reg Thorpe was just about God come down to earth. When they weren’t playing cards or tossing a Frisbee they were talking literature, with Reg gently rallying them through their paces. He’d gotten a puppy from the local animal shelter and walked it every morning and night, meeting other people on the block the way you do when you walk your mutt. People who’d decided the Thorpes were really very peculiar people now began to change their minds. When Jane suggested that, without electrical appliances, she could really use a little house help, Reg agreed at once. She was flabbergasted by his cheery acceptance of the idea. It wasn’t a question of money — after Underworld Figures they were rolling in dough — it was a question, Jane figured, of they. They were everywhere, that was Reg’s scripture, and what better agent for they than a cleaning woman that went everywhere in your house, looked under beds and in closets and probably in desk drawers as well, if they weren’t locked and then nailed shut for good measure.
“But he told her to go right ahead, told her he felt like an insensitive clod not to’ve thought of it earlier, even though — she made a point of telling me this — he was doing most of the heavy chores, such as the hand-
washing, himself. He only made one small request: that the woman not be allowed to come into his study.
“Best of all, most encouraging of all from Jane’s standpoint, was the fact that Reg had gone back to work, this time on a new novel. She had read the first three chapters and thought they were marvelous. All of this, she said, had begun when I had accepted ‘The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet’ for Logan’s — the period before that had been dead low ebb. And she blessed me for it.