On the night of his first suicide attempt, Good Friday, Dorris spoke with Foster, the former editor of Mother Jones magazine, who'd struck up a friendship with Dorris in the 1980s and had published his work. Foster recalled the lengthy, long-distance conversation between them, which ended when Dorris collapsed after overdosing on vodka and prescription pills at the New Hampshire farmhouse he'd once shared with Erdrich. "I was trying to buck him up. I told him that all his friends would stand by him during the legal battle," Foster recalled. But Dorris told him, "It's too late for that -- I've decided to take another option." Foster said that Dorris then "lapsed into unconsciousness while I was still talking to him and he dropped the phone. I immediately called the New Hampshire State Police and they broke into his house, rushed him to the hospital and they pumped his stomach.

"Michael said he was completely innocent of the (molesting) charges he feared were coming," continued Foster, who is now director of school affairs at UC-Berkeley's school of journalism. "He died so that the feeding frenzy which has taken place the last week wouldn't happen to him and his family. He was mystified and bewildered in his final months. He was in and out of suicidal thoughts. He had just started to come to terms with life after divorce when the second blow fell" -- that of the possible allegations in Minnesota -- "and it was far more devastating. He called me the day he learned that some type of allegation would be filed against him and he told me, 'My life is over.'

"He felt helpless to defend himself against these charges without paying an enormous price. He was worried that the public revelations of the charges and his fight against them would destroy his family and his reputation -- everything that he had done and built up for the past 30 years. Everything would be destroyed in the feeding frenzy he knew was coming. He thought that no matter how much he fought, people would still believe that where there's smoke there's fire."

Foster added that the experience Dorris and Erdrich had with the legal system when they filed suit against their son in Denver convinced the author that he would never find absolution in the courts. "He had no faith after losing the extortion trial in Denver that the criminal justice system could deal with an intensely personal matter. After his son won the case, Michael ended up feeling that he and Louise had been put on trial."

For his part, Foster finds the child abuse charges against Dorris "inconceivable -- though I know this is what friends often say under these circumstances. The person I knew wouldn't do anything to harm anyone. At age 52, there was a boyish, gentle quality about him. I mean, here was a man who in his suicide note apologizes to the hotel maid for the inconvenience he's causing her. That such a person who was so magnanimous, gentle, ebullient and caring would have a dark side ... well, maybe. But I just consider it highly unlikely."

A few months ago, Dorris wrote an essay for the Minneapolis Star Tribune about his family's wrenching battle with fetal alcohol syndrome, which afflicted all three of his adopted children. He ended with the following lines, which he said would be the beginning of his forthcoming memoir, "A Matter of Conscience," a kind of follow-up to "The Broken Cord." It's an odd, haunting bit of prose, particularly in light of the events of the last several days:

"I am society, and my life is in threat. I believed I could alter fate. I tried and failed, in process with lapses of patience and with anger, and ultimately because I had no choice but not to give up. I intended nothing but good, though I expected to be rewarded with gratitude and love, and I wound up the center of a target ... I was driven temporarily mad and may never fully recover enough to completely recall the person I think I used to be. I tried to save three lives: Maybe I didn't try hard enough. Maybe they were unsaveable. One is gone. One is lost. One is a danger to anyone within his line of sight. I wish I had reconciled earlier to the impossibility of my goal...I want my life back. I want my peaceful sleep. I want to fear once again only those natural human fears. I wish my adopted children to achieve amnesia, or better, to remember the entirety of their lives with me. I want them to be well."

Following the publication of "The Broken Cord" in 1989, Dorris won great respect for his role as the father -- first single, then married -- of three Native American kids suffering from FAS. Abel, the book's subject, had been adopted at age 3 from a Sioux reservation in South Dakota. Not much was known, medically or anecdotally, at that time about the condition, or what to expect when parenting a FAS child. Dorris' work put FAS on the map. It also won him a coveted National Book Critics Circle Award and was subsequently made into an ABC-TV movie that aired in 1992. The book was dedicated to Erdrich "who shares this story, who joined me in its living and telling, who made us whole" and to their "brave son." After Abel's death, friends describe Dorris' grief as being nearly unbearable.

Some friends say that Dorris went to New Hampshire last month not only for solitude but to be closer to his son's grave. "That would make sense," said Mark Anthony Rolo, editor of the Minneapolis-based Native American newspaper The Circle and a friend of the family. "Whenever Michael talked about that boy, he nearly came to tears. He told me that Abel came to him in dreams. That he visited." Rolo also suggested that for Dorris, the trip back may have been laced with a desire to return to a time less volatile, less chaotic -- a period when the author's marriage to Erdrich was widely characterized as "the literary love story of the decade." A time, Rolo theorized, when Dorris was still in control, and could still measure up to his idealized likeness in public.

"One crucial thing to understand about Michael is that image was, if not everything, then of utmost importance. He carried a great deal of anxiety with him always -- that he be seen as a nearly sainted father, that his literary reputation be above tarnish. In the last year, Michael was terrified that news of his marriage breaking up, of the case in Denver, of the ugliness around his depression, would ruin his good standing. He was very disappointed that his new book, 'Cloud Chamber,' didn't do as well as 'Yellow Raft'; he'd wanted that badly and -- given his immense ego -- expected that. Add to that these abuse charges.

"He spent an inordinate amount of energy -- you could see it as an obsession -- on keeping up what some have called his facade. Near the end, as he was going down his dark road, he may not have had the strength or the will to do it anymore. Michael started falling apart, I believe, when the chasm between his public persona -- which was in a sense fictional -- and his self in private life just couldn't be reconciled."

That public persona was built over the course of three decades. Dorris seemed to be a success at nearly everything he attempted: He graduated cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and Alpha Sigma Nu in 1967 from Georgetown University, and in 1971 he earned a master's degree in philosophy from Yale. He won multiple literary awards, and served on the U.S. Advisory Committee on Infant Mortality in 1992. He published 14 books beginning in 1977, including two that were co-authored with Erdrich, and over 100 magazine articles and essays. He taught as a full professor in the Native American Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth between 1972 and 1989, and as an adjunct professor there ever since.

It was at Dartmouth that Dorris and Erdrich first met in the mid-1970s. She, the oldest of seven children and a registered member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe, was one of the first women admitted to the college. She was also his student, though the couple didn't become romantically involved until three years later. Dorris was instrumental in getting Erdrich's first book, "Love Medicine" (1984), published; it too won a National Book Critics Circle Award. As anyone who's followed their dual careers knows, the two shared an extraordinarily complex and prolific working relationship. Over the years, they co-wrote the novel "The Crown of Columbus," several magazine pieces, and a screen treatment for director Sidney Pollack. In all, their reputation for literary collaboration -- to the point of it resembling what they called a Vulcan "mind-meld" -- was of nearly mythic measure.

In January 1986, while on Rockefeller and Guggenheim grants at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, Dorris gave a local reporter an inside look at their partnership. "We sit in different rooms" he said -- his in front on the second floor, hers in back with room for then 2-year old Persia and a playpen for 8-month old Pallas in the corner -- "and put down words on paper, and then after a couple days we exchange manuscripts and the other person goes to work, suggesting changes and rewordings. And even before that process we talk out the characters ... Whichever of us is going to have their name on the book puts down the words."

Foster described the two as being "thoroughly entwined. Every page each one of them wrote went through the other's computer." It was a working style both Dorris and Erdrich celebrated, even bragged about, publicly -- one that was romanticized by more than one critic and disparaged by others who claimed that he wrote her books and vice versa. More to the point, Foster went on, "It was a uniquely intimate connection, so the breakup was uniquely painful. It was not only the end of a long-time marriage with three young children, it was the end of a richly creative relationship." Even after their separation, the couple continued to read, edit, and critique each other's work.

While the couple's literary lives were intertwined almost until the end, their marriage was not the idyllic match presented to the public. Erdrich told the New York Times last week that "Michael was suicidal from the second year of our marriage." She finally left Dorris, Erdrich said, in part because of the emotional burden he placed on her.

There are indications that Erdrich too has been plagued by suicidal thoughts. In a 1993 Harper's magazine essay titled "A Woman's Work," she wrote about how motherhood and depression can often be entangled: "Most days, I can't get enough distance on myself to define what I am feeling," she wrote. "I walk through a tunnel from one house to the other. It is dark, scraped out of the emotional mess of life, as gray and ridged as an esophagus. I'm being swallowed alive. On those days suicide is an idea too persistent for comfort. 'There isn't a self to kill,' I think, filled with melodramatic pity for who I used to be. That person is gone. Yet once I've established that I have no personal self, killing whatever remains seems hardly worth the effort. For those dark and stupid days I have developed a mantra to ward off the radical lack of perspective that is also called depression."

There were other rifts in the marriage, according to some friends. "Keep in mind," Rolo said, "that Michael really hated living in Minnesota, out here in what he called the sticks, away from the literary hub. Louise, on the other hand, felt like settling here was a way of coming home. She wanted out of the limelight, out of that East Coast, high-brow lifestyle. He went for the glamour, she wanted the privacy. His depression was escalating, and her desire to move on made a break not only in their marriage but in their ability to work together. It was almost inconceivable to Michael that the great public love affair of contemporary literature was going to ruin. He loved the pure idea of it, and I'm certain that when it started coming apart, so did his identity."

And now, in the days after his suicide, the struggle to define Dorris' legacy has begun. "What a shame," said one of Dorris' Native American friends, who asked not to be identified. "Michael's whole life was evidence that the legacy of oppression, agony, and heartbreak within the Native American community wasn't enough to silence their stories. And now, the story he himself was living is silent."

Erdrich has voiced hope that her late husband will be remembered, despite the abuse allegations, with dignity. "I think that by the time a year goes by, I think a great deal of healing will have taken place in all of our lives," she told the New York Times. "All of Michael's children will be able to embrace one another."

Even those who had bitterly opposed Dorris have tried to view him with charity in recent days. "You know, we're all so human in this," said Lisa Wayne, Jeffrey Sava Dorris' attorney, measuring her intense personal dislike for Dorris against his sad ending. "Those of us watching it unfold from the outside have a need to live with order. Things must make sense. My client has told me that, for him, the house he grew up in was a house from hell and the Dorris of literary fame -- the one he himself created in his books -- was pure fiction. Still, he had many dimensions, some of which I'm sure were truly compassionate, some of which may have been shameful. We all must make peace with this death in our own way, and I hope each in the days and months to come will be as honest about doing that as possible."

Wayne added that Erdrich left an extensive message on her voice-mail Friday morning, asking for the lawyer's help in "being a mother to each of my children, in making amends to our son, and trying to cure the family's terrible pain."

Over the weekend, rumors have been circulating among those close to Erdrich that another bombshell about Dorris' private life is about to drop, though no one will comment on its nature. If there is indeed another such damaging revelation, Dorris' fears that his legacy would be irreparably tarnished might turn out to be well-founded. But his friends pray this is not the case.