The New Yorker, August 12, 1996 P. 69
Ned Maxy, having survived a period in the "awful seventies" during which he stared out the window "weeping, fasting, and praying, in his way," and watching people, now wakes and goes to his table at an early hour, sometimes looking out. Using opera glasses, he spies on a woman in uniform, a paramedic, who goes to work every morning. In the "awful seventies," Maxy had told hundreds of people in saloons that he wanted to be a paramedic. In his forties, he had overcome lust, to his gratitude, and now he can view the woman objectively. Her fiance has big white legs. Maxy "applaud[s] their love," having been that way twice before. He once told the paramedic she looked good in her uniform. She has a country voice, like the girl who had nursed his dying father. Maxy is impressed that she has "the moxie to fly in a machine that would have terrified many hillbillies" -- a helicopter. She answers in a grateful whisper. He can compliment her honestly now that lust and its deceit have left him. His friend and drinking buddy Drum, a selfless Christian depressed by pain and anxiety after a heart attack, has recently killed himself -- tidily -- shooting himself in the bathtub of his rented mobile home. He had been "the only whispering drunkard Maxy knew. Through all the thundering seventies he had never raised his voice." Maxy would keep his whisper until he died, and he adds the paramedic's whisper to it, trying not to overestimate it: "Thousands must have been given this gift. He didn't want to be only another kind of fool, a sort of Peeping Tom of charity." But this is his "contact with paradise, and he could hardly believe the lack of noise." It marks the end of his awful seventies decade. The next day, he attends the paramedic's wedding at a country church, shaking hands with the bride and groom. No one figures out who he is: "Their faces were full of baffled felicity, as if each one was whispering, Well, howdy, stranger, I guess."
