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at the affair, taken by Mrs. Vincent Astor, a remarkable elderly woman, very wealthy, who spends her days in volunteer service to the library. He said it had made him realize that if the robber barons had once been both rapacious and charitable, their descendants are often extraordinarily generous with their time and their money. ‘Remember all those music halls and the 2,800 libraries that old Andrew Carnegie put up in every state of the union? Well, Brooke Astor is in that tradition,’ he wrote.
    I remembered the host at my table some years ago, an elderly, chatty man named Milton Petrie, who is a large donor to the library. For much of the time, while we ate an elegant dinner, he proceeded to tell me why.
    He was born to Jewish parents in Salt Lake City, where his father, a policeman, was killed in the line of duty. As a teenager he had to leave home to make his living. In Detroit he worked for the Hudson Department Store, having changed his name to Petrie to avoid the company’s well-known anti-Semitic hiring practices. But when he discovered he was the only Jew working there, he departed for New York to start his own business, a tiny store on 42nd Street in which he sold women’s hosiery and gloves. Aware of his need for further education, he crossed the street in the evenings to the New York Public Library, sat in the general reading room, and called for books on every subject.
    From a modest beginning he became owner of a string of department stores throughout the country. Now an extremely wealthy man, he takes a table each year for sixteen thousand dollars and invites eight of his friends to share the evening with him. He regards this as paying the library for his tuition.
    Someone seated at his table told me that Petrie provides funds for families of slain police persons in the five boroughs of New York City. Someone else said he was fine bridge player and every afternoon met with three other elderly men to play at a bridge club. Across the table from me sat Jerzy Kosinski, Petrie’s Lion of last year, looking very fit, handsome, elegant, and full of good humor. I recall this only because two years later, Kosinski was dead by his own hand, having become ill and unable to write.
    The last time I saw Milton Petrie he was being wheeled in a chair into the great hall at the library for the ten-year reunion banquet of Literary Lions. I think of him often, of his justifiable pride in his Horatio Alger—like business success. Like other Americans who made the same great progress, he was moved to give back to American society a thousand times what he received from it.
    Lovely oxymoron on a sign over a furniture store in Bangor, Maine: AUTHENTIC REPRODUCTIONS
    Autumn comes early to central Maine. Sitting on the deck facing the water as I work is possible only in the hours around noon, when the sun has warmed the chairs and the wooden boards of the floor, and the wind from the water has died down. By three o’clock I have to move, resenting the cold air that has chased me inside. For a person who likes to write outdoors, this is an unwelcome expulsion.
    But today I come in early to answer the door. The UPS man delivers a large box from Norton, my publisher, containing copies of my new book. Seeing all these clones is a jolt, a multiple reminder that all my worries about word choice, sentence direction and structure, exclusions and inclusions, are now immutably settled, set in concrete print, unalterable. Nothing can be done about any of it, no improvement is possible.
    The only pleasure I feel now is in looking at the jacket, which contains a photograph, taken by Jim Holdsworth, an acquaintance in nearby Sedgwick. It is of an old car, belonging to another Sedgwick resident, Bill Petry, the agent who sold us our house and later our friend. It sits in a field in Blue Hill that now houses the Episcopal church moved recently from Penobscot. Tall, yellow grass almost obscures its wheels. It looks worn but