I am not a lawyer, and I will not pretend the arrangement was any simpler or any more certain than the lawyers later made it out to be; I only tell it as he told it to me that night.

What mattered, in that office, was the plain human center of it.

His children were racing to reach his death before his new plans could take hold.

And a marriage, a real and legal and public marriage, was the one wall he could build across their path that they could not tear down in time.

“So that is what the wedding was,” I said slowly, the enormous roses and the reporters and the staring children all rearranging themselves in my mind into something colder and more deliberate than I had understood.

“A wall.” “A wall,” Arthur agreed.