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of the trees turning as the October weeks went by, and when the surgeon came around he said to him, "When am I going to get out of here? I'm missing the fall of 1967." The surgeon listened soberly, and then, with a smile, he said, "Don't you get it yet? You almost missed everything."

    Twenty-two years passed. Twenty-two years of excellent health and the boundless self-assurance that flows from being fit—twenty-two years spared the adversary that is illness and the calamity that waits in the wings. As he'd reassured himself while walking under the stars on the Vineyard with Phoebe, he would worry about oblivion when he was seventy-five.

    He had been driving to New Jersey after work nearly every day for over a month to see his dying father when he wound up badly short of breath in the City Athletic Club swimming pool one August evening in 1989. He had gotten back from Jersey about half an hour earlier and decided to recover his equilibrium by taking a quick swim before heading home. Ordinarily he swam a mile at the club early each morning. He barely drank, had never smoked, and weighed precisely what he'd weighed when he got home from the navy in '57 and started his first job in advertising. He knew from the ordeal with appendicitis and peritonitis that he was as liable as anyone else to falling seriously ill, but that he, with a lifelong regimen of healthful living, would end up as a candidate for cardiac surgery seemed preposterous. It was simply not how things were going to turn out.
    Yet he couldn't finish the first lap without pulling over to the side and hanging there completely breathless. He got out of the pool and sat with his legs in the water trying to calm down. He was sure that the breathlessness was the result of having seen how far his father's condition had deteriorated in just the past few days. But in fact it was his that had deteriorated, and when he went to the doctor the next morning, his EKG showed radical changes that indicated severe occlusion of his major coronary arteries. Before the day was out he was in a bed in the coronary care unit of a Manhattan hospital, having been given an angiogram that determined that surgery was essential. There were oxygen prongs in his nose and he was attached by numerous leads to a cardiac monitoring machine behind his bed. The only question was whether the surgery should take place immediately or the following morning. It was by then almost eight in the evening, and so the decision was made to wait. Sometime in the night, however, he was awakened to discover his bed surrounded by doctors and nurses, just as the bed of the boy in his room had been back when he was nine. All these years he had been alive while that boy was dead—and now he was that boy.
    Some sort of medication was being administered through the IV and he vaguely understood that they were trying to avert a crisis. He could not make out what they were mumbling to one another and then he must have fallen asleep, because the next he knew it was morning and he was being rolled onto a gurney to take him to the operating room.
    His wife at this time—his third and his last—bore no resemblance to Phoebe and was nothing short of a hazard in an emergency. She certainly didn't inspire confidence on the morning of the surgery, when she followed beside the gurney weeping and wringing her hands and finally, uncontrollably, cried out, "What about me?"
    She was young and untried and maybe she had intended to say something different, but he took it that she meant what would happen to her should he fail to survive. "One thing at a time," he told her. "First let me die. Then I'll come help you bear up."
    The operation went on for seven hours. Much of that time he was connected to a heart-lung machine that pumped his blood and breathed for him. The doctors gave him five grafts, and he emerged from the surgery with a long wound down the center of his chest and another extending from his groin to his right