Two Men

"SOCRATES quaffed the 'Bitter Hemlock'." A quiet man in reading glasses read these words aloud to me, a thirteen-year-old girl. At the age of forty-seven this same man stood in a Tulsa hotel room and drank his last toast. Because I knew this man so well, I think he thought to himself, "I will show you how a gentleman drinks carbolic acid." It was in a whiskey glass, and it was his last drink. He died almost instantly, with acid-burned lips which had read aloud to me from books. He was a solitary drinker, a periodic drinker--the loneliest, most tragic kind of drinker, alone with his God or his personal "devil." I was too young then to understand why. I am sorry, because I might have helped. This man introduced me to the world of books. "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. . . . And one man in his time plays many parts. . . ."