Departure Read Online Free PDF Page B

there. Maybe you can help them.” He walked with her to his house, leading the team. At the house, he stood a moment, looking at her.
    â€œGood night,” he said. “Your husband will be all right.” He hesitated, holding her hand. “Funny place, this town. I’d like to see it ten, fifteen years from now. Sometimes, I wish I was younger, sometimes, I don’t.” Then he turned away, and she looked after him until he had vanished in the night.
    She entered the house. As she closed the door behind her, she heard the first shot—after that, many others. That was the beginning of a long, hot tense night—a night that seemed to last forever.
    It was early morning. On the seat of the wagon, as it drove out of the little town, were a man and a woman, and a child of six. The man, one arm bandaged to his side, drove two jaded horses; the child, sitting between them, twisted his head from left to right with never flagging interest. The woman, who was small, sat primly in the seat, as if she knew what a poor impression the wagon made, and desired to counteract it.
    Almost at the end of the long single street of the town, they passed a fat man standing in front of a print shop. He waved to them. The child stared, wide-eyed, curious. The woman moved slightly, and it seemed that she would wave back; then her folded hands relaxed in her lap, as if she realized that her prim, motionless figure was the only way she could tell the world that the tattered wagon was not the beginning and the end of their life.
    The fat man watched the wagon until it became a speck on the brown and yellow plain, until it disappeared.

The Shore Route
    W HEN G AXTON GOT himself seated in chair twelve, car one-o-six on the two o’clock train to Boston, he experienced the lighthearted and pleasurable anticipation of someone who is going away on a vacation long overdue. He would get into Boston in four hours and forty-five minutes, all of it on a pleasant, air-conditioned train, and Dick Haley would be waiting for him there, and they would drive out to the Cape together. The Haleys had a comfortable place at Eastham, and for two weeks he would have nothing to do but swim, lie on the sand and get sunburned, and play a little golf if he wanted to.
    Even the awkward device of going all the way to Boston to meet Dick Haley, who had some business there, could be construed as an advantage; for the two of them would be in the car for a few hours, and it would enable them to get acquainted again. He had not seen Dick Haley since 1942, and in that time Haley had married and had two children, which makes a difference in any man. Gaxton himself had been married and divorced in that time, except that in between the marriage and divorce were three and a half years in the army. This was his first vacation since he was back, unless you could consider as a vacation those seven weeks after his separation, weeks of getting up the courage to leave his wife and to go back to his old job at Sandrow and Jackson, as a copy writer at six thousand a year.
    As a matter of fact, he had looked forward to this vacation all during the latter part of the winter. It wasn’t that he was tired or overworked, but rather always expectant of some change that never came. He would have denied that he was lonely or depressed and pointed out, truthfully enough, that he was both optimistic and expectant. Only he was never quite certain about what he was optimistic. After the divorce, he went along from day to day, working—if you called it that—drinking a little, averaging two or three dates with girls during a week, reading a good deal in his little apartment, and dividing the rest of the time between the theater and the movies.
    It was a commonplace enough New York existence, and he had often said to himself that he was a commonplace enough New York person, thirty-three years old, rather slim, and not too different from hundreds of others you would see