Of course Florence's major complaint had been bis drinking, which led to full-blown arguments, like the time she found he was keeping a carton of liquor under the bed, for easy access. She claimed he was "drank" every night, and-worst of all-she said her children were afraid of him, that he was "taking it out" on them. This he greatly resented. He loved her two kids as if they were his own, nine-year-old Caryl especially, the little charmer. It was true he was harder on eleven-year-old Lee, trying to urge the boy to be more athletic. Florence claimed Lee was afraid of him-though he'd never laid a hand on the child-and that he was showing his irritation to both kids, "acting up," she called it.

When she packed up, gathering the two children, and announced she was leaving-when was it… eight months ago? — he could scarcely believe it. He had thought Florence's threats were empty, but-as they'd had a premarital understanding that should things not work out, either could "call it off' without objection from the other-he merely escorted mem, numbly, to the Lurline at the dock, a shell-shocked zombie among the Boat Day festivities.

Nothing had ever hit him so hard. He found it bitterly, ironically amusing that Florence had left him because he was an obese drunk…. How Emma would have relished that.

His carousing ways ceased. He developed a routine of going to a movie and then to bed early, declining all invitations for poker and parties. He went for days without speaking to anyone, taking his meals in his bungalow, burrowed behind drawn blackout curtains. Despite this deep despondency, he did manage to keep writing, a historical yarn about the Romans, and he finished his Venus tale.

His only break from this self-imposed incarceration was a painful stay at Queen's Hospital, due to the flaring up of an old bladder condition. For three weeks he was shot full of derivatives of the poppy flower, fed an anesthetic that burned from his lips down his throat into his lungs, got filled full of sulfathiazole until he thought it would run out of his ears, and had a wire inserted in his favorite organ.