An American Dream Read Online Free PDF

that child for so long, and now you give her no attention.”
    “It’s too painful,” I said.
    “God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you. It must have been quite a sight. You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.”
    Never had she gone quite so far before. “How do you tell that story these days?” Deborah went on.
    “I don’t tell it.”
    “Except when you’re too drunk to remember.”
    “I’m never too drunk to remember.”
    “I can’t get over the way you look,” Deborah exclaimed. “I mean you really look like some poor peddler from the Lower East Side.”
    “I’m descended from peddlers.”
    “Don’t I know it, honey-one,” said Deborah. “All those poor materialistic grabby little people.”
    “Well, they never hurt anyone particularly.” This was a reference to her father.
    “No, they didn’t, and they didn’t have the guts to do anything else either. Except to make your father brainy enough to make your mother and then make you.” She said this with such a stir of fury that I moved uneasily. Deborah was violent. I had a bad scar on my ear. People thought it came from the ring, but the truth was lesspresentable—Deborah had once bitten it half-through in a fight.
    “Go easy,” I said.
    “You’re fragile tonight, aren’t you?” She nodded, her face almost gentle, almost attentive, as if she were listening to the echo of an event. “I know something happened to you.”
    “I don’t want to talk about it.” Which was in effect a counterattack. Deborah could not bear not to know.
    “I thought you were dead,” said Deborah. “Isn’t that funny. I was certain you were dead.”
    “Were you sorry?”
    “Oh, I felt a great woe.” She smiled. “I thought you were dead and you’d left a will that you wished to be cremated. I was going to keep your ashes in an urn. There—right by the window table. Each morning I was going to take a handful of your dust and drop it on the East River Drive. In time, who knows, you might have been
strewn
all over New York.”
    “I would have done my best to haunt you.”
    “Can’t, pet. Not when you’re cremated. That atomizes the soul. Didn’t you know?” Her green eyes had a particularly bad light. “Come here, darling, and give a kiss.”
    “I’d rather not.”
    “Tell me why not.”
    “Because I threw up a while ago and my breath is foul.”
    “Bad smells never bother me.”
    “Well, they bother me. And you’ve been drinking rum. You smell Godawful.” It was true. When she drank too much, a stench of sweet rot lifted from her. “The Irish were never meant to go near rum,” I said, “it brings out the odor of their fat.”
    “Do you talk this way to all your little girls?”
    She did not know what I did with the days and weeks I spent away from her. This was forever agitating her rage. Once, years ago, she uncovered an affair I had been keeping in a corner. It had been with a rather ordinary young lady who (for compensation,no doubt) had been a burning wizard in bed. Otherwise, the girl was undeniably plain. Somehow, Deborah learned about her. The subsequent details are vicious, private detectives, so forth, but the indigestible issue was that Deborah had gone with the private detective to a restaurant where the girl always had lunch and studied her through a meal, all through a long meal the poor girl ate by herself. What a scene followed!
    “I don’t think I’ve been quite so marooned in all my beloved life,” Deborah had said. “I mean,
figure-toi
, pet, I had to keep up a conversation with the detective, a
horrible
man, and he was laughing at me. All that money spent on fees, and for what, a poor wet little mouse. She was even afraid of the
waitresses
, and this was a tea-room. What a big boy you must be to take up with a