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Even so, when I brought Dan Rosenthal into the house and upstairs that afternoon, I found I was doing my best to slouch and mumble and squint for him. And Eileen couldn’t have been more helpful if she’d tried: we discovered her reclining on the big studio couch, wearing her black turtleneck sweater…

And it was whatever he wished for the rest of that rapidly darkening afternoon, even after her husband had come home—a drained-looking man in middle age whose hat left a neat ridge around the crown of his flat, well-combed hair, and who ventured almost no conversational openings—and their little bo…

Late in the day he discovered white wine. It salved and dispelled his hangover; it softened the rasp of his anger into an almost pleasant melancholy. It was very nice and dry and mild and he drank a great deal of it, slowly, in one quietly obliging café after another. He found various ways to compo…

And the next thing, they decided, was to get rid of the cigarettes. It was easy. A few blocks away they met a small, tight-faced boy of about fourteen who led them upstairs to a triple-locked room that was packed to the ceiling with American cigarettes. He was so intimidating in his silence and so …

If it came through there might be ten days of excessive politeness and artificial laughter and awkward silences, while they all tried to pretend he wasn’t a stranger. There might be slow sight-seeing tours of London in order to kill whole afternoons; they might want to show him “typically English” …