They keep him in the hospital for five nights. Janice visits him Saturday. She is very busy on the outside; the classes she has to take to be a real?estate salesman have begun to meet, "The Laws of Real Property and Conveyancing" for three hours one night, and the other, "Procedures of Mortgages and Financing," on another. Also, she has been spending a lot of daytime hours with Pru and the grandchildren, and Charlie Stavros called her up and took her out to lunch.

Rabbit protests, "The bastard, he did? I'm not even dead yet."

"Of course not, darling, and nobody expects you to be. He said it was your idea, from when you had lunch together. Charlie's concerned about us, is all. He thinks I shouldn't just be letting things slide but should get an outside accountant and our lawyer and look at the books over at the lot, just like you wanted."

"You believe it when Charlie tells you, but not when I do."

"Honey, you're my husband, and husbands get wives all confused. Charlie's just an old friend, and he has an outsider's impartiality. Also, he loved my father, and feels protective toward the firm."

Harry has to chuckle, though he doesn't like to laugh now or do anything that might joggle his heart, that delicate web of jump-ing shadow he saw on the radiograph monitor during his opera-tion. Sometimes, when shows like Cosby or Perfect Strangers or Golden Girls begin to tickle him too much, he switches off the set, rather than stress his heart with a laugh. These shows are all idiotic but not as totally stupid as this new one everybody raves about, Roseanne, starring some fat woman whose only talent as far as he can see is talking fast without moving her mouth. "Janice," he says seriously, "I think the only person who ever loved your father was you. And maybe your mother, at the beginning. Though it's hard to picture."

"Don't be rude to the dead," she tells him, unrufed. She looks plumped up, somehow; without that steady diet of tennis and swimming Valhalla Village provides she is maybe gaining weight. They are still members up at the Flying Eagle, but haven't made it out that way as much as in past springs. They had enjoyed good friendly times up there without realizing they would end. And, with his heart, Harry doesn't quite know how much to get into golf again. Even with a cart, you can be out there on the seventh hole and keel over and by the time they bring you in, through the other foursomes, there's been no oxygen to the brain for ten min-utes. Five minutes is all it takes, and you're a vegetable.

"Well, are you going to do it? Call in another accountant."?

"I've done it already" she announces, the proud secret she's been waiting for the conversation to elicit. "Charlie had called up Mildred on his own already and we went over there to this very nice nursing home right near us, she's perfectly sensible and com-petent, just a little unsteady on her legs, and we went over to the lot and this Lyle who was so mean to you wasn't there but I was able to reach him over the phone at his home number. I said we wanted to look over the accounts since October and he said the accounts were mostly in these computer disks he keeps at his house and he was too sick to see us today, so I said maybe he was too sick to be our accountant then."

"You said that?"

"Yes I did. The first thing they teach you in this class on con-veyancing is never to pussy?foot around, you do somebody and a potential sale more harm by not being clear than by speaking right out, even if they might not like hearing it at first. I told him he was fired and he said you can't fire somebody with AIDS, it's dis-crimination, and I said he should bring in his books and disks tomorrow or a policeman would be out to get them."

"You said all that?" Her eyes are bright and her hair bushes out from her little nut of a face, getting tan again, with a touch of double chin now that she's putting on weight. Harry admires her as you admire children you have raised, whose very success pulls them away, into the world's workings, into distance and estrange-ment.

"Maybe not as smoothly as I'm saying it to you, but I got it all out. Ask Charlie, he was right there. I don't like what these queers have done to Nelson. They've corrupted him."

"Gay," Harry says wearily. "We call them gay now." He is still trying to keep up with America, as it changes styles and costumes and vocabulary, as it dances ahead ever young, ever younger. "And what did Lyle say then?"

"He said we shall see. He asked whether I'd consulted with Nelson about all this. I said no but I wasn't sure Nelson was fit to consult with these days. I said in my opinion he and his friends were milking Nelson for all he was worth and had turned him into a human wreck and a dope addict and Charlie wrote on a pad of paper for me to see, `Cool it.' Elvira and Benny were out in the showroom all ears even though the office door was closed. Oh, but that fairy got me mad," Janice explains, &qu............