Hamilton, Donald - Novel 02 Read Online Free PDF Page A

something wrong with
her mouth. Emmett read the column below the picture.
                  
                 ANN NICHOLSON ARRIVES ON lawson castle
     
                  
                 New York , N.Y. , March 26, AP: Still showing the strain of three years in a Nazi
concentration camp, Miss Ann Nicholson, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. R. Austen
Nicholson, 204 Poplar Ave. , Evanston , Illinois , was met by her parents today as she stepped from the gangplank of the
ex-troop transport Lawson Castle . Reported missing when the Germans overran
France, Miss Nicholson, who had remained in Paris rather than leave her fiancé,
Georges Monteux, an officer on the staff of General Gamelin, was later learned
to have been active in the French underground. Captured by the Gestapo in the
spring of 1942, Miss Nicholson’s whereabouts were unknown until the American
advance into Germany discovered her a prisoner at the infamous concentration camp of
Hofstadt a week prior to VE day.
                 Miss
Nicholson’s father is president of Barr-Giddings Steel and Foundry Co.,
Chicago.
                  
                 Emmett
looked up and saw the girl in the black dress coming down the far side of the
highway. The headlights of a passing car brought her hair and the scarlet
flowers on her dress abruptly to life, almost luminous. She waited until the
car had passed and came running across the concrete toward the lunchwagon,
silhouetted in the lights of another car approaching from the east.
                 “That
was about two years ago,” Dr. Kaufman said. “A little more than two years ago.
She spent over a year in a British hospital before they let her come home.”
                 Emmett
watched the other girl, safely across, stop to tug down her dress and then come
toward the diner with the taut short steps necessitated by the exaggerated
heels of the sandals she was wearing. She walked with her whole body. Then she
was inside, sitting down across from him. It occurred to him belatedly to
wonder what she had been doing across the road, there being a filling station
with a plainly marked restroom next door to the diner, but he did not ask.
                 The
counterman came to the booth with hamburgers and coffee, replacing Emmett’s
empty cup with a full one, and went back to the counter where he lit a
cigarette and stared moodily at a newspaper. The man to whom he had been
talking had left. The counterman found a pencil in a pocket of his apron,
folded the paper back on itself, and began to work the crossword puzzle.
                 Dr.
Kaufman said, “Excuse me. Miss Bethke, Mr. Emmett. Miss Bethke is a private
nurse.”
                 The
girl nodded her acceptance of the introduction, biting into a hamburger which
she held with both hands.
                 Dr.
Kaufman said, “You see, Mr. Emmett, her experiences left Miss Nicholson—I won’t
bother you with jargon—but it left her for a long time unable to face the
demands of ordinary society. She spent a considerable time in the hospital
after reaching this country, thinking up new symptoms with amazing ingenuity so
that she would not have to give up the security of the institutional routine.
When her parents took her home and tried, as they naively explained to me
later, to get her to take some ‘interest in life,’ she tried to kill herself.
Rather clumsily and ineffectually; Miss Bethke caught her almost in the act of
swallowing the capsules of seconal, which I have no doubt is what Miss
Nicholson intended to happen.”
                 The
nurse nodded her bright untidy head. “She made a noise like an elephant getting
back to bed. As if that wasn’t enough, she knocked over the bedside table.”
                 “She
did not want to die, you understand,” the doctor said. “She merely did not want
to have to cope with the effort of