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Robin Hood situation: the money that I made from the rich helped me help my friends, as well as sustaining my own existence.
    I was also embarked on a series of love affairs that were much more of an occupation than my work. And my love affairs were always expensive: clothes, my refrigerator stocked with delicacies, my bedroom with perfume and flowers. It frequently occurred to me that both my work and my life of love were seriously awry, but I could not see a way to change either one—or both.
    While I was thus frivolously occupied, Agatha was getting through med school, then involving herself in the social protest movements of the Sixties. She marched on Birmingham, helped to register black voters, then lived and worked for a couple of years in Tallahassee as a free pediatrician. She got into the peace movement, and spent some time in the Santa Rita jail, having been arrested in Oakland at the depot from which napalm was being shipped out.
    Meanwhile, back at his desk in Washington, the General was urging the bombers on: get Cambodia, back to the Stone Age with those yellow bastards.
    But to talk about the General in that way is to denigrate Agatha’s idealism, really. Hers was not at all a simple rebellion; of that I am absolutely certain. She believed entirely in what she did; in fact as she saw it she had no choice. When someone said that there was to be a demonstration at the Oakland depot, she had to be there, first in line.
    By 1973, she and the General were not even formally in touch, and so it is strange that he did not rewrite his will, disinheriting her. My own idea is that, like so many people, he thought he would die if he made and signed a will; he planned to live forever. Stranger still is the fact that he turned out to have so much money. He had always lived in a high-handed, affluent way, Agatha said, but if she thought of it at all, she simply assumed that he must be very well paid for whatever he did at the Pentagon, and that he was spending all he made.
    At his death, then, Agatha got over five million dollars, after taxes. And we talked endlessly, we speculated endlessly, about where he could have got all that money—both of us feeling, but not quite saying, that it must be somehow tainted. Blood money of some sort.
    In any case, that is how Agatha, an unlikely person, came to be an heiress, and finally brought herself to buy a big house that she was crazy about.
    And then she called me in New York.
    She said, “You’ll like the house. It’s big, sort of crazy. Great long windows, and a yard with some old trees. I just don’t know what to do with it.”
    I was thinking how surprised Derek would be when I left. Derek, my cruel lover. And thinking how, in a new and interesting place, I would probably not miss him at all. I might even give up having affairs altogether.
    I told Agatha that I would get there as soon as I could, and I did, within a month.

3
    There were many things to be said about my English Boston lover, Derek Churchill, and at one time or another I must have said them all: selfish, inconsiderate, self-absorbed, overweight and given to drink. But I said them silently, and only to myself. He was also bright and literate, sexually enthusiastic and, in his own dry way, a considerable wit. However, we were always antagonistic lovers, never anything like friends. Derek was not at all a “friendly” person, which could not be blamed entirely on his being English, although I tended to make that excuse for him.
    He always looked and dressed like an upper-class Englishman, a banker or a publisher: sandy hair perfectly smooth; red-faced; in well-cut not-new tweeds. However, he was not what he looked to be, not a famous Churchill, but working-class, as he rather too frequently pointed out, calculatedly: he knew that I would like that fact about him, that I would not have liked it if he had been related to the Churchills. He was a lawyer, corporation law. An American convert.
    We met, then, at a