It’s in Maine at the old farmhouse they rent that Gould hears the poet’s in a nursing home and his wife died the past year. He asks about him, and the man who told him says, “As far as anyone knows, the old fool’s on his way out too.” The man’s wife says, “Now that’s unkind,” and the man says, “I only meant he was once a fairly good poet and critic, and two to three of his poems are among the best produced by any American in the last four decades, which is something, but he’s been an old fool for more than thirty years, the longest period of addlement I’ve witnessed in a human being. Besides, with his memory failing for years he’s become a menace to our entire cliff colony, forgetting he turned on a gas stove, leaving his suburban van parked on a steep hill with the hand brake disengaged, and things like that.” “I’m sorry to learn of it,” Gould says, and the man says, “We were too, but worse to observe it. Most of us haven’t the kind of fire insurance to cover a completely burnt house. It’s punitively expensive because of the local infatuation with arson on our peninsula; nor has anyone devised the type of body armor needed by one of us or our grandkids to withstand a ramming from a megaton van,” and Gould says, “Excuse me, but I meant I was sorry to hear about his wife and illness and confinement and so on. What a pity, for what a nice man.” “Excuse me, and Dolores will no doubt rebuke my pitilessness to this moribund old fool, whom we both like, mind you, enormously, and, as I said, admire. But to be honest, a greater egotist, braggart, social manipulator, and literary operator never walked so assuredly through the fields of poetry, and I’ve run across some lulus in my time. An example, and this also of his idiocy, since it didn’t start when he first became senile, you know—” and his wife says, “Now that’s enough,” and he says, “No, let me finish, since I never could make any sense to Bill on this score, simply because he refused to see anything he’d done as wrong, no matter how inappropriate, ill-considered, or just plain dumb it was. Once, an anthologist was putting together a book of poems by poets under forty. When our poet hears this, and he had his ears screwed into anything he thought could help his career, he contacts the anthologist and says, ‘Why haven’t you asked me for any poems?’ ‘Because you’re over forty,’ the anthologist says; ‘you’re sixty-two.’ This was a number of years ago, of course, though he never changed. And Bill’s answer? ‘So what? If you’re compiling an anthology of contemporary American poetry I’d think you’d want my work in it, because who cares what age a poet is when you read his poems?’ Does that make any sense to you? Are we talking here of a truly great self-effacing unfinagling realistic guy?” and Gould says, “He’s — well, yes, it doesn’t make much sense — but still, and maybe this’ll seem silly to you, but he once did something so wonderful for me that it’s hard to think anything bad of him.” He starts to tell the Washington story and the man says, “I know, I was at some party up here when you gushed all over him in recapitulating it, but you must know that everyone has his three to four involuntary selfless acts to his credit, and Bill probably has a few more than that, and not just because he’s survived past ninety, but listen to this”—and he reels off a number of stories showing the poet manipulating people and institutions—“and I’m only going back fifty-some years, which is how long I know him,” and Gould says, “Still, you can’t see what I’m saying? I’m sure there was this other good side to him. Not so much involuntary or momentarily magnanimous but downright selfless and bighearted and generous. Going out of his way for a stranger when most people in the same situation — a blinding snowstorm, which also meant he couldn’t have recognized me as the fellow who interviewed him months before — would have driven past. Ten inches on the ground, maybe another fifteen expected, and you’re in your warm car with your warm pipe and you want to get to your warm home fast with maybe even a fireplace going? Risking your life, you can almost say — that’s not so farfetched. The snow was piling up a couple of inches an hour and the car could skid, when if he didn’t stop for me and take all the time it took to load my equipment up and drive me to my office, he might be able to make it home safely … anyway, the chances of it would be better. But what did I start out saying? This other good side of him that I caught immediately from that one situation and which I don’t hear anything of in what you’re saying about him over fifty years. And the interview he granted me when I first met him. That’s what I meant by saying he didn’t recognize me at first. He didn’t have to give it. I was a shrimp of a reporter, and the news service I worked for was small too. And I should’ve got his press conference on tape when the other radio and TV guys did, if any other radio newsman — I forget — thought there was anything potential there to even attend it, but I asked him for an interview right after. I might even have given him some cock-and-bull story that my tape jammed. I did that then to get solo interviews — lied, finagled, cajoled, etcetera, all the things you said he did,” and the man says, “Sure he gave you an interview. For the fame, not because of your cajolery. When Bill saw a newsman’s tape recorder and mike, he saw an audience of millions and possible book buyers and poetry-reading invitations and so forth. I bet you even had him read a few of his poems for radio,” and Gould says, “I think I did; it’s what I normally would have done for an interview like that with someone in his position,” and the man says, “That’s my point. The regular press conference was what came with the turf of being introduced as the new Poetry Consultant, but your solo with him was gravy that made him giddy. You showed him individual attention that also had a good chance of being on radio for a lot more time than a news report of the pro forma press conference,” and Gould says, “But if I remember, he told me to come back anytime for a coffee and chat but not to bring my tape recorder. So if that’s the case—” and the man says, “Ah, come on, he was only trying to show he was more interested in you than in what you could do for him. But you probably would have brought your tape recorder and he would have seen it and somehow worked you around to where he ended up gladly giving you another interview,” and Gould says, “No, I’m not getting through to you and you really can’t change my initial opinion of him, though you have opened me up to him a little, mostly because I didn’t know him. Anyway, he did a wonderful thing for me, and I just wish everyone would do things like that for people in similar situations, and I also feel lousy about the condition he’s in now,” and the man says, “That’s not the question; we all do.”