He came back from a trip to New York, in his words, enfeebled and coughing. He went to the doctor, who told him he had pneumonia, and he retreated into one of the boys’ old rooms in his seaside home in Massachusetts and worried about being a burden to his wife, Martha. He wrote to his friend Ted Hoagland that he remembered convalescing as a child as being pleasurable, with his mother bringing him strips of cinnamon toast while he was in bed listening to the radio and reading, but that this time it wasn’t like that. Now it was just empty, anxious time. One of the problems with this convalescence was that he wasn’t convalescing: The trouble in his lungs persisted. He was still getting up to go to the drafty room to write on his “word processor.” He was working on a draft of a new novel about the epistles of Saint Paul and was about a hundred pages in. He was also putting together a collection of poems, called Endpoint. But he was still feeling rotten. He nonetheless went through with a planned book tour for The Widows of Eastwick.
