The rest of him is solid and muscular, and he moves lithely and fast on the balls of his feet, a tight package of coiled energy and strength. He has always reminded me, in his stature, of one of the great cinema dancers, Jimmy Cagney perhaps, or Gene Kelly. But Pom is an abysmal dancer. He is always in a hurry, and frequently stumbles and bumps into things. Oddly, he is an awesome tennis player, fast and savagely focused and powerful. He shows no mercy. I hate playing with him.

He is short, or at least not tall: five nine. My height almost exactly. He pads when he walks, like a tomcat or a street punk, and looks as disheveled as if he had been in a fist fight an hour after dressing, no matter how carefully his shirts are done by the specialty cleaners over in Vinings, or how perfectly Clifford at Ham Stockton’s fits his suits. The shirts and suits are my arsenal, my weapons against the sartorial entropy with which he flirts daily. Pom doesn’t care what he wears. He remembers the blue blazer because his father told him when he sent him off to Woodbury Forest that a man needed nothing else but a good dark suit and a tuxedo to dress like a gentleman. I think his heart leaped up when he discovered white medical coats. He would wear them everywhere if he could, not because he considers them becoming (they are), but because they are comfortable, correct, and there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of them both at home and at the office. Amy sends them home to be washed twice a week, tenderly folded in tissue paper. She would wash and iron them herself if she could, I am sure. Pom said he saw her polishing his stethoscope once.

Mommee has always insisted that the Fowlers are of old Saxon stock, but both Pom and his brother, Clay, have Celt written all over them, as did his father before him, and his oldest son Chip is the same small, powerful dark creature of the Cornish caves or the wild cliffs of Connaught.