Then the next day came news of the former colleagues, the same men he worked with and often ate lunch alongside while they were all with the agency. One was a creative supervisor named Brad Karr, who'd been hospitalized for suicidal depression; the second was Ezra Pollock, who had terminal cancer at seventy; and the third, his boss, was a gentle, lucid bigwig who walked around with the company's most profitable accounts in his pocket, who was almost maternal toward his favorites, who had been suffering for years with heart trouble and the after-effects of a stroke, and whose picture he was stunned to see in the obituary section of the Times: "Clarence Spraco, Wartime Eisenhower Aide and Advertising Innovator, Dies at 84."

He immediately called Clarence's wife at their retirement home up in the Berkshires.

"Hello, Gwen," he said.

"Hi, dear. How are you?"

"I'm okay. How are you doing?" he asked.

"I'm doing all right. My kids came. I have a lot of company. And a lot of help. There are so many things I could tell you. In a sense, I was prepared, and in a way one never is. When I came home I found him dead on the floor, and that was a terrible shock. He had been dead for a couple of hours at that point. He seemed to have died at lunchtime. I had gone out for lunch, and so forth. You know, for him it was a good end. It was sudden, and he didn't have another stroke that would have debilitated him and put him in the hospital."

"Was it a stroke or was it a heart attack?" he asked her.

"It was a myocardial infarct."

"Had he been feeling ill?"

"Well, his blood pressure had been — well, he had a lot of trouble with his blood pressure. And then this past weekend he wasn't feeling so great. His blood pressure had gone up again."

"They couldn't control that with drugs?"

"They did. He took all kinds of drugs. But he probably had a lot of arterial damage. You know, bad old arteries, and there's a point at which the body wears out. And he was so weary at that point. He said to me just a couple of nights ago, 'I'm so weary.' He wanted to live, but there wasn't anything anybody could do to keep him alive any longer. Old age is a battle, dear, if not with this, then with that. It's an unrelenting battle, and just when you're at your weakest and least able to call up your old fight."

"That was a very nice tribute to him in the obituary today. They recognized that he was someone special. I wish I'd had a chance to tell them a few things about his wonderful ability to recognize the value of the people who worked with him. I saw his picture today," he said, "and I remembered a day years ago when a client had taken me to lunch at the Four Seasons, and we were heading down those stairs into the lobby there, and we bumped into Clarence. And my client was feeling expansive and he said, 'Clarence, how are you? Do you know this young art director?' And Clarence said, 'I do. Thank God I do. Thank God the agency does.' He did this again and again, and not just with me."

"He had the highest regard for you, dear. He meant every word of that. I remember," she said, "how he plucked you out of the bullpen when you weren't at the agency even a year. He came home and told me about you. Clarence had an eye for creative talent, and he plucked you out o............