Throwing his arm about her shoulders to calm her, Zorn took her to his car and drove her back to the only refuge she had left, her circle of friends at the Palms. But when they reached the fortress gate and could see the handsome center dedicated to health and rehabilitation, he thought not of her confusion but of his own: How strange that because of fear of litigation medicine has fallen into this state when notable experts like Dr. Bailey are afraid to give simple recommendations as to what a patient ought to do. We shy from the great tasks and occupy ourselves with the petty. Wrong, wrong, but how can we correct it?

Later in the spring when Dr. Zorn had cause to believe that he had the Palms on a road to ultimate solvency, he launched a campaign that was to prove frustratingly futile. As he wandered through the three segments of his realm, he stopped to chat with residents, eager for them to know that he was watching out for their interests. He was increasingly greeted as 'Dr. Andy' or referred to as 'Our Dr. Andy' to whom questions of deep concern could be addressed.

He did his best to provide solutions to general problems or to help when the appeal was from an individual who needed help in his or her private concerns. Thus he lengthened the hours in which books could be taken from the library and arranged new starting hours for the films that were shown twice a week. He also helped a widow solve a bewildering problem with her taxes and found extra quarters when some couple was visited by three grandchildren instead of two. In this way he helped bind the residents into a closer-knit group while at the same time helping himself understand the complexities of a retirement center.

One afternoon when he was inspecting the savanna he passed the spot where Judge Noble sat on the bulkhead, his fishing pole out in the water and his congregation of birds standing like some Greek chorus about him and the tame pelican in the water yapping for his share of whatever fish the judge might catch that day. And the thought came to him like an epiphany: That good man is an adornment to this place. He and his birds must bring untold delights to our residents, and I must do something to show my appreciation.

Heading directly for Ken Krenek's office, he asked: 'Could I scrape up the funds to provide Judge Noble with a proper chair for his fishing? One with a wide band of wood across the back so we could have his name painted across it?'

'You'd have to check with Miss Foxworth to see how her petty cash stands.' But when he discussed the matter with her she asked, as always: 'What kind of money are we talking about here?' And he said: 'I think maybe fifty dollars would cover it, plus maybe fifteen for the lettering.'

She could not control her amazement: 'Andy! Are you out of your mind? There's a secondhand furniture shop down the road where you can find a good chair for nine dollars, and I have a great do-it-yourself lettering kit, if you provide the black paint.'

She found pleasure in driving him to the secondhand shop, and on the way she said in a conciliatory tone: 'It's a great idea, Andy. You'll make the old judge feel like an honored guest.'

They found a sturdy old chair for seven dollars and a small can of paint for one fifty. Back at the Palms, Zorn spent part of a morning sanding the chair and tightening the screws, after which Miss Foxworth did the lettering in a style as professional as she had promised.

When Zorn saw the finished chair he was enthusiastic: 'It's handsomer than I expected. That's the chair of a real fisherman,' and he and Krenek alerted some of the residents to be ready to accompany Judge Noble when he left Gateways that afternoon to go out for his fishing: 'Don't trail along with him. He'd be suspicious. But when he sees the chair, rush out and give him the big hello!'

Then, about an hour before the judge customarily went for his fishing, Zorn and Krenek carried the chair to the spot where the judge usually sat on the bulkhead and placed it in position. A score of people watched from their balconies as the white-haired judge left Gateways with his rod, walked down the path as birds clustered about him and came to the chair on which a heron was perching. There, at the feet of the great blue, stood his name in fine blue lettering: JUDGE NOBLE.

He was deeply touched, especially when the group of residents who had quietly followed him rushed out to surround and congratulate him. Watching from the channel, even Rowdy the pelican seemed to be applauding.

Two days later when the judge walked down for his fishing, the chair was gone. At first no one had any idea of who might have taken it, but later a woman on the third floor said that the previous night she had been on her balcony because she was unable to sleep and had seen two men come from the landing at the river, creep down the path and steal the chair. Why had she not reported this sooner? She said: 'I'm reporting it now, first chance I've had.'

Zorn was outraged, especially since the thieves could have bought such a chair for only a few dollars. He went back to Miss Foxworth and said: 'I can't allow hoodlums to ruin a great idea. Take me back to the furniture store. We'll get another chair. And I'll pay you five bucks for lettering it like last time.' As they drove back to the Palms he explained his strategy: 'This time we bind the four legs with wire straps to sturdy poles three feet long, and we sink those feet deep in the ground. We'll put a flange at the bottom of each leg so that when the earth is tamped back in, the leg can't be pulled out.'

This solution worked, for when the legs were well sunk into the earth, with the flanges securely anchored at the bottom, the chair with its fine lettering could not be stolen, and the various people who had helped Zorn in this adventure applauded when the chair remained in place with its festoon of birds each afternoon.

But Zorn's triumph did not last long, because on the fifth or sixth night the woman who could not sleep telephoned the main desk: 'The same people, I think it must have been, brought saws, and cut off part of the legs and carried the chair away.'

Zorn declared war: 'Ken, phone around and find a place where I can get four steel pillars. We'll sink them in concrete four feet down, and build us a chair seat between the parts that are above ground.'

'That would work, but we can't do it from petty cash.'

'I'll pay for it,' and under his direction a very solid engineering job was done, leaving no wooden parts that could be sawed away because the seat itself was made of the steel seat of an abandoned tractor, and now the judge had a seemingly indestructible chair. But not quite, because some nights later the same watchdog called again: 'They're beating it to death with hammers!' Running out with a flashlight Andy saw that the woman had reported correctly. The tractor seat had not been stolen but simply smashed to pieces as it remained bolted to the steel pillars.

Back in his office at four in the morning with hot cocoa that Krenek had made, Andy asked in deep frustration: 'Ken, what's going on out there? If the chair could be used, then I could understand stealing it, or even stealing half a chair that might be added to, but simply to destroy a chair for no good reason, that by damn I cannot fathom.'

'Andy, you're a good, kind man, but you really are nave. Time to face facts. In a top-quality place like this, there are people all around us who hate our guts. They tell one another: "The place is crowded with millionaires, let's wreck it." We've had a lot of damage around here that I haven't bothered you with.'

'But why do they do it?'

'Why did that quiet young man on Long Island murder eleven young women? Why did the guy in Sausalito murder his wife and four kids? Why do they paint ugly words over our sign, no matter how many times we clean it up? I'll tell you why. Because this world contains an irreducible minority of sick sons of bitches, and sooner or later one of them is going to impinge on your life, and mine. The chair destroyers? They're your initiation to the breed, and there's lots more like them lurking out there.'

'You have a harsh view of the human race, Ken,' and the older man replied: 'More of their horse manure has piled up in my front yard. You're just beginning to get your share.'

And four mornings later Zorn received an enormous dumpload of the stuff right in his face when he left his apartment in Gateways and walked down to his office to what sounded like a buzz saw operating close to the oval. He ran out to investigate and found a team of men in the process of cutting flush to the earth the handsome Brazilian pepper trees whose red berries formed such a lovely counterpart to the great palm trees along the entry drive. If they were cut down, half the beauty of the place would be lost.

'Hey! Hey!' he shouted, running up to the men who could not hear him because of the deafening whine of their saws. 'Stop that! Stop it now!' And he informed the man in charge that he was the director of the Palms and the trees were absolutely not to be tampered with.

The foreman asked incredulously: 'Hasn't anyone told you, Buster, that these shrubs are a pest and the Florida agricultural people have passed a law they can't be planted around a house. They run wild and destroy native plants.'

'But these aren't running wild. Look, they're in a neat line. We keep the grass trimmed around them. It's like a park.'

'It's the seeds, mister. Millions of them. Look at those birds. They eat the berries, the seeds pass right through the intestines and out onto land that hasn't been contaminated yet. Look at that wilderness out there on your doorstep. It's lousy with Brazilian pepper bushes,' and when Andy looked, he did indeed see a wealth of the green-and-red bushes.

'I forbid you to cut another shrub till I get confirmation from your head office that ours have to go. Give me the number to call.'

The man laughed: 'Mister, I am the head office. It's the law.'

'But I demand confirmation.'

The foreman pointed to one of his men: 'Claude's my assistant. Give him confirmation, Claude,' and the new man said in a persuasive manner: 'Mister, what he says is right. The law is that these pests that endanger Florida agriculture have got to go.'

Zorn insisted that they stop until he could obtain additional verification from someone, but the foreman warned him: 'I have orders to remove these bushes, and if you try to stop me you'll be fighting the entire government of Tampa, so, please, mister, stand back and let me get on with my job.'

'Krenek!' Andy shouted. 'Come out here and help me!' But when the administrator appeared he brought bad news: 'They warned me last week they'd be here to remove the Brazilians. I didn't want to bother you with the details. It's all legal because they're a menace.'

Zorn felt defeated. Since the day of his arrival in January, whenever he had driven into or out of the Palms he had felt that the glorious avenue of Washingtonias and Brazilians was one of the major assets of the center, and to think of losing the Brazilians with their bright red berries made him sick, actually uneasy in his stomach.

'I don't want to watch this desecration,' he said, turning his back on the workmen, who resumed their cutting. When he reached his office and could still hear the buzzing sound of their saws, he could hardly bear staying at his desk. So he telephoned Ambassador St. Pres to ask if he would be free to wander through the savanna, and St. Pres replied eagerly: 'Always glad to get back to my Africa!' He soon appeared in his safari costume.

'Better put on some rougher clothes than that, Doctor. We're to tramp right through the heart of it,' and off they went through the light morning mists, inland from the channel on a path that would take them to the Emerald Pool, where St. Pres could point out the interesting low shrubs interspersed with medium-height palm trees and an occasional giant palm. But as he followed where the ambassador pointed, he saw off to one side a glorious spread of Brazilian pepper bushes, laden with berries that glistened in the sunlight. They were survivors from the Christmas season, and the display they made-an impenetrable hedge of beauty-caused Zorn's heart to leap.

'Mr. Ambassador! Did you know they're right now cutting down the magnificent line of these bushes that line our entrance way? Government orders.'

'I heard they'd declared the Brazilians a menace to be eradicated. But ours on the avenue? That's incredible.'

'What's to happen to our earth, sir? Everywhere I read about or see on television they're destroying wildlife. I grew up in a city, I appreciate what we have out here, but nobody else seems to give a damn.' He studied the majestic display of the Brazilians, a wall of tangled color, green and red, and again felt nausea, but the ambassador was back in his beloved Africa: 'Now, Andy, you see that curious growth of high, matted grass, impenetrable in that direction? That's the kind of hiding place we'd be likely to find lions. That open veldt over there with the low trees, that's elephant country. And the sort of meadowland in between, little growth but grass, that's for the antelopes.'

Since the savanna stretched some miles to the south and grew ever more crowded with vegetation, including good-sized trees, the two men had many areas to explore, and at one point when they were deep within the growth, Zorn cried: 'Can you imagine? Only a few miles from Tampa, and we have this wonderland!' St. Pres said: 'It's the duty of you younger men, Andy, to ensure that places like this remain. My generation didn't do a very good job, but there are places like this hiding here and there. Africa! Africa!' and he reveled in the similarity: 'And so close to where I sleep! It's truly miraculous!' and he danced a little jig, as if he were again in the veldt of Botswana.

They continued their game of safari among the wild beasts for about an hour before St. Pres as the older explorer said: 'About time for me to head back. But let's cut right through the wildest part of all,' and soon they were ducking low to penetrate almost impassable natural barriers of intermeshed lianas, bushes and tangled branches. Zorn's face was scratched by thorny twigs and his trousers were snagged by branches as the men slowly forced their way through. At last they found themselves less than fifty yards from the Palms.

'The building looks inviting, doesn't it?' St. Pres asked, but Zorn could see only the destroyed remains of the fishing chair and the empty gash where his pepper bushes had been.

By mid-April Dr. Zorn felt that he knew and understood most of the residents at the Palms. Richard St. Pres, rigid and reserved, could only have been an ambassador, and Senator Raborn had been destined to be an energetic politician. The Duchess had been a grande dame in her middle years and Maxim Lewandowski, the tall, angular fellow with the European accent, had clearly been a child prodigy in the sciences, for he still retained that boyhood enthusiasm for his field, the unraveling of the mysteries of human genetics.

But one man eluded him. Blustery, red-haired Muley Duggan-who knew what his first name really was?-looked like a minor New York gangster, with no neck, big ape-like arms, loud rasping voice and shifty watery eyes. He was in all ways a mystery, especially his being married to one of the most gracious ladies at the Palms, Marjorie Duggan, who occupied a separate apartment in Assisted Living. In contrast to his brute strength, she must have been frail even before contracting Alzheimer's, and one could imagine her lending a delicate grace and dignity to a cotillion in her youth. Where he reveled in sports, especially professional football on television, she preferred the broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. And in their double suite in Gateways, which they occupied before she was stricken, he had listened to noisy country music, while on her private stereo system in the back room she had taken enormous pleasure in playing a selection of compact disks featuring the current opera singers like Kiri Te Kanawa, Marilyn Home, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti in their renditions of the great arias from the major works. Muley began to listen to her music and, to his own surprise, became something of an opera buff, so they came to share a common interest.

They were such an unlikely pair that Andy started asking questions about how they had managed to get together and remain happily so if reports of their earlier years in the Palms could be believed. When Krenek was interrogated, he said: 'I was bewildered when they came in eleven years ago as two of our first residents, for she was all classic beauty and he was a rough-and-tumble Bronx brawler. I put it down as a dreadful mismatch, but it quickly became evident that these two really loved each other, were happy together, and had worked out an arrangement that allowed him to continue to drink beer and her, champagne. Their secret? I never discovered what it was, but it ought to be patented and sold in a bottle. A lot of couples, including some here at the Palms, could use the elixir.'

When asked about them, the headwaiter said: 'Muley set a high standard for the other men in that he was so courteous toward her. Always holding her chair, always standing up when she returned to the table, always deferring to her in a conversation with others, and always jutting out his lower jaw as if he would tear anyone apart who bothered her in any way.'

'What happened when she had to be moved to Assisted Living?' Zorn asked, and the waiter explained: 'Each afternoon at five he takes the elevator up to Assisted, helps dress his wife in a formal gown, places her in her wheelchair and proudly brings her down to the dining room and sits her at that table, where he usually invites someone to join them for dinner, but I've seen that people refuse the invitation, if they can.'

'That seems cruel.'

'Not if you've sat with them once or twice.'

'Is it that bad?'

'Worse.'

'What do you mean?'

'It's so terrible-the way she behaves. Almost every meal she'll suddenly stop in the middle, look at him as if he was a stranger, and snarl at him. She doesn't know who he is, but she's convinced he's done her wrong in some way.'

'What does he do?'

'Sits there and takes it till she calms down. Then he resumes feeding her. She can't do it by herself, you know.'

'Then what?'

'Well, she loves yogurt, but as you know, most nights the machine's broken, and she ends the meal abusing him for having broken it.'

'Do you wait on them often?'

'I enjoy it. He's a sharp guy on sports, and I study her to see if there's any pattern in her strange behavior.'

'And your conclusion?'

'Random. Except that she despises him for something bad she imagines he did to her.'

'Any clues as to what?'

'It changes. Sometimes it's money, sometimes the conviction that he mistreated a daughter she fantasizes she had. Could be-'

'Do they have a daughter?'

'No. I checked. They married late, you know. No children.'

The mystery of Muley Duggan grew darker and more complex as Andy accumulated bits of evidence about his past life, but one thing was clear: his vulgarity was unquestionable, as the doctor observed when he was invited by the Mallorys to accompany them on a visit to Muley's apartment for afternoon cocktails. Pasted onto the wall beside the wet bar that Muley had installed at his own expense was a poster: I'm not a fast bartender And I'm not a slow bartender You could call me A half-fast bartender On the bar itself lay stacked copies of Sports Illustrated, Time and National Geographic, with four ingeniously devised puzzles that were difficult to do when sober, impossible after a few drinks. It was the apartment of a bachelor with a robust appetite for games, beer and cartoons that verged on the unacceptably offensive. Several male residents had complained to Zorn on behalf of their wives who had objected to a joke Muley delivered at the Mallorys' celebration of their return to the Palms.

It had been a gala affair, with the Mallorys in good spirits, dancing a waltz. Muley took the microphone and said: 'Last week our dear friends Chris and Esther made a sentimental journey. They flew back to Niagara Falls, found the same hotel they'd stayed at on their wedding night, got the same room with the same four-poster bed and did everything they'd done sixty years before.'

A stooge who had been coached by Muley asked in an awed voice: 'You do mean everything?' and Muley said: 'Only one difference. On the wedding night after they went to bed, she got up, went into the bathroom and cried. This time he went in and cried.'

When several widows complained that this was far too vulgar for the public recreation area, he accepted the rebuke, but continued to tell gentler jokes that illustrated aspects of life among older people in retirement. Two were widely repeated: 'This clergyman was invited to the Palms to give an inspirational talk, and he told us: "Especially as we grow older we must give thought to the hereafter," and at the conclusion of his little sermon this woman from floor four hurried up to him and said: "Reverend, I'm so glad you said what you did. I think of the hereafter almost every day of my life," and he said: "That's a worthy habit," and she said: "I find myself entering a room, stopping in the doorway and asking myself: 'Now, what did I come hereafter?' " '

But the favorite was one that touched a lot of lives, and he told it well, week after week as newcomers drifted in: 'This woman on floor three, you all know her, told her husband: "I am dying for a hot fudge sundae. Will you be a dear and run down to the corner and get me one? But take your pad and write down exactly what I want," and he said: "I can remember," and she said: "Please write it down. Vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, nuts and whipped cream. Do you have all of those things written down?" He said he had, and off he went. He was gone longer than usual, and when he returned he handed her a brown paper bag containing a hot dog in a roll. "See!" she cried. "You should've written it down. You forgot the mustard!" '

During Zorn's first visit to Muley's apartment, he was awed by the immense size of the place and the number of rooms standing more or less unused, and during drinks the doctor pressured Duggan: 'Every now and then we have a request for an oversize apartment like this. We could provide you with a neat two-bedroom affair in the Peninsula,' but Muley bluntly rejected the suggestion: 'No way. This is Marjorie's apartment, and I keep hoping she'll be returning here soon. That Alzheimer's Center at the University of Southern Florida is right at the breakthrough point in finding a cure, and I'd want her to see the rooms as they were when she left.'

Afternoon cocktails at Muley's ended at five, for then he went regularly to Assisted Living to dress his wife and escort her down to dinner. On this evening he suggested: 'Dr. Zorn, you've not gotten to know my wife. Join us for dinner in a few minutes,' and in this casual way Andy experienced dinner with the Muley Duggans. He'd often seen Marjorie in Assisted, but each time he was struck by how beautiful she was, how extraordinarily fragile, as if her head were made of some exquisite Chinese ceramic that allowed the veins to peek through. Proudly Muley walked her to their table and placed her in a chair beside the one in which he would be sitting. With this arrangement he would be able to cut her food and feed her a forkful at a time, then watch her as she slowly chewed and then took a sip from the water glass as he lifted it to her pale lips. 'She's doing better tonight,' Muley told the headwaiter whom Zorn had interviewed, but the young man looked at Andy and shrugged his shoulders as if to say: We'll see. It often starts like this.

When the tediously slow meal was at midpoint, she suddenly drew back, glared at Muley and said in a loud accusatory voice: 'You did it again, damn you. You hid the letters my daughter sent. You never let me have them.' And then she began railing about how he had stolen her money and left her destitute. She would warn her husband about the misdeeds of his faithless friend. Andy found her performance so unpleasant that he wanted to leave the table, and wished that some messenger would come to tell him he was needed in the office, but none came. Then, as he reflected silently on the ungraciousness of his desire to flee one of the great human tragedies of our time, he composed himself and concluded that here was a mystery greater than he could resolve. Muley was a man in love under circumstances so strange that ordinary words could not explain it.

When the meal ended, with Marjorie refusing the dessert, which she suspected of having been poisoned, Zorn asked Muley: 'Would it be possible for me to join you when you take her back upstairs?' Muley was so appreciative of his interest that he agreed effusively, and the three went to the elevator, ascended to Assisted and went to her room, where Muley prepared Marjorie for bed. As the men were leaving her room, they looked back at this beautiful woman and Muley said with the greatest confidence: 'I live from day to day, following reports from the team at the university, hoping that news of the breakthrough will come.'

'Do they think that a cure might be found that would reverse the disease? That would cure those already afflicted?'

'No,' Muley said with a deep sigh. 'But they believe that what they can do is stop other people from contracting it. Women like Marjorie, they're lost. Their brains have been damaged beyond repair. But even so, we continue to hope-to pray for the miracle that we know will never come.'

This episode at dinner, and Muley's reaction to it-his extraordinary patience and his love for her no matter how she behaved-made Zorn even more curious about the mystery of this strange marriage. His queries led nowhere until one day when Nora was in his office checking some filing cabinets, he asked casually: 'Nurse, what do you know about the Duggans? They seem a curious pair-fascinating.'

'Know? I know everything.'

'How?'

'I was their family nurse when they first arrived. That was before I got promoted to my present job. In the evenings after dinner they would sit on their veranda overlooking the river and tell me about the old days.'

'How did they meet? Such a bizarrely matched couple?'

'She was a society woman, married to a gentleman, graduate of Harvard, head of four big department stores in New England, I believe, but it could have been upstate New York. Muley was the owner of the trucking company that served the stores. With an exclusive contract, it was like part of the company. They told me that Muley became part of the family, completely trusted, even went on vacation cruises with them. I take it the husband was a kind of fancy-dancy fellow, they had no children and he was never well. Before he died, they told me, he called them together on the ship they were on at that time and told Muley: "When I'm gone, Muley, take care of this woman. She'll have the money, you'll have the good sense." They laughed when they told me that and Muley said: "I'll bet he never thought I'd take him seriously and marry her, but I did," and he added: "I think she was pleased to be married to a man who'd had to work. You know, Nora, she became an officer in both her stores and my trucking company, and she was smarter than any of us. That's why I'm so nice to her." '

Zorn, astounded that a couple like the Duggans would have confided such secrets to Nora, asked: 'Why would they have told you these things?' and the big woman said: 'Why does everyone open up to me? Because I listen, really listen, and I'm not afraid to tell them when they're talking like damned fools.' Later, Zorn learned from various sources that all Nora had said was accurate.

Now Andy had become a good friend of Muley's and from his frequent visits to the Duggans' apartment he learned that Muley had learned to play Marjorie's collection of operatic disks and had mastered the trick of picking a single aria from the middle of some disk and transferring it to a tape. In fact, he had become so skilled in this rather difficult maneuver-half a dozen different buttons to push and split-second timing in handling each one-that he had succeeded in making several almost flawless sixty-minute tapes of the music his wife had liked most, and from them he had assembled one master tape that played what he called the Marjorie Duggan All-Star Concert. He duplicated this master tape onto three fresh cassettes, and kept one in Marjorie's old room, one by the stereo machine in her new room, and one in safekeeping, lest the others be damaged.

Zorn, who had attended operas both as a student and as a doctor in Chicago, knew much of the music and asked to hear what Muley had recorded for his wife. Muley started the tape in the apartment and handed Andy a typewritten copy of the program: 'Marjorie is very feminine, as you've seen from those pictures I showed you of her with her first husband. Frilly gowns, fancy hairdos. Well, she loved arias in which two women singers, one with a high voice, one low, sang together. She thanked me a dozen times for making her this private concert of her music, of her women signing about their joys and sorrows.'

There in the apartment overlooking the river and the channel, Zorn sat rapt as Muley's expensive speakers poured out the rich music his wife had loved: 'She would sit here and explain what I was hearing, and in time I came to know. This is Madame Butterfly and her maid decorating the house with flowers for the American's return. He'll return, all right, but with an American wife. She'll commit suicide.

'This next one was her favorite, from an opera called Norma about Romans and Druids. She loved this so much that I often called her Norma: "Hey, Norma! Here she comes again," and we'd listen as the two women sang about the Roman soldier that neither of them was supposed to love. Forbidden because they were priestesses. But Norma died and I think the other woman died, too. Listen to those heavenly voices. Marjorie loved this recording.

'This next one is the one I grew to love best. It's in a place called Ceylon, again a priestess loving somebody she shouldn't. When I think of Marjorie I think of these voices in the jungle-so simple, so feminine.

'This next one, you've always known it, so did I, but I never knew what it was. I don't know what they call it but it's two women in a gondola in Venice.'

'Isn't it the "Barcarolle"?'

'I don't know, but I am sure about the gondola. Listen to how those voices blend. Marjorie liked it, too. This one she listened to a great deal. If you look on your paper, it'll give you the two names.' Reaching for his catalog, Muley read: 'Beatrice and Benedict by a guy named Berlioz.' He mangled the pronunciation but added: 'Two women talking on the night before the wedding. Marjorie said they spoke for all women. This next one by a German composer sort of captured both of us. Marjorie explained everything to me the first time I heard it. One of the women plays the part of a boy who has come to present a golden rose to a young girl. The idea is that he is to propose to this girl, not for himself but for an old lech. Some sort of ritual, I guess, but as he hands this beautiful girl the rose, and as she takes it from him, and he's not bad-looking either, they fall in love with each other and to hell with the old guy. Every time I hear it I think of what she told me about the record: "This must be the only musical statement of the exact moment when love begins." I really do like this song even though you can't sing along with it like some of the others.'

As the two men listened to the glorious voices of two women from some German opera company a flood of memory swept over Muley and he said softly: 'You'd laugh if there was a photo of the moment when I met Marjorie and you saw it. Because you'd see she really didn't even see me. I was working for her husband, the owner of the stores I was serving, and when he came out to give me special orders, his wife trailed along. They were headed somewhere and he had stopped off to speak with me. And when I looked at him to hear what he wanted me to do, I couldn't see him, for there she was in the frilly kind of dress you'd wear to a dance or a reception for a bigwig, maybe the prettiest woman I'd ever seen, and she wasn't sixteen, either. She was ...' He chose his next word carefully: 'Poetic, like they write about.' He shook his head in disbelief: 'I remember exactly what I thought at that moment: Some guys have all the luck! Imagine him owning all the stores and having her, too. She haunted my dreams.'

'How did you get to know her?'

'In time my trucking firm grew almost as big as his stores, and it was clear to anyone with good sense that his business was going down and mine up. It was then he suggested we become partners, in a manner of speaking. We saw a lot of one another, the three of us, but I never thought of her except as his wife. Mountains higher than me, both of them.'

Remembering those days, he said: 'One night they took me to the opera. Never been before. It was this thing we just listened to, Norma, and in the middle of the duet between the two women she trembled, gripped my arm and said to her husband and me: "Poor woman! It's so unfair!" and it was then I realized she was not just a society lady but a real woman with deep feelings.'

As Muley ended the concert with a replaying of the Norma music he said: 'When he was dying he called me in and said: "Take care of Marjorie. Lots of men will be after her money, I know some of them already. Don't let her marry some damned fool. Check him out. Be sure he's worked for a living." '

'How did you and she get together?'

'It was a miracle. I still don't believe it. At the wedding I trembled like a leaf.' As the great music from Norma filled the apartment, Muley having turned up the volume, he looked at Zorn and repeated with a smile: 'It was a miracle. Did it really happen? I pinch myself when I ask that question and get no answer, but she's in this room with me now, always will be.'