Ice Brothers Read Online Free PDF Page A

the world were open to her, Paul sensed. Perhaps she had her first real love affair and was severely hurt by it. She never mentioned such a thing, but there were weeks when she didn’t see Paul, pleading that she was ill or had other engagements. His brother, Bill, as usual had something hurtful to say.
    â€œI hear Ted Barrington is taking her out. He’s a real cocksman. I bet he’s breaking her in.”
    Ted Barrington was a varsity football player at Harvard and the son of a famous Boston lawyer.
    â€œTed took me out just once and we didn’t do anything but go to the movies,” Sylvia said when Paul asked her about him. “He’s a bore and a snob. I hope I never see him again.”
    Paul was already learning that one either believed Sylvia or one did not, but there was no point in questioning her. One either loved her or not, and he did, although he often wondered whether he really liked her. And there was one result of the mysterious loss of confidence she suffered which delighted him; more and more she began to depend on him and to spend more time with him.
    In the summertime she often went as cook on short cruises aboard the yawl, and in the fall when no more paying passengers could be found, they often spent their evenings alone together on the boat. Paul did not find it easy to seduce her, but impossible not to. When he first took her to bed he felt he was claiming her for himself forever. No matter what precautions they took, she was terrified of getting pregnant, and she admitted that it was that continuing terror more than anything else which finally made her want to get married.
    Everyone Paul knew tried to talk him out of marrying Sylvia. He himself realized that they were of course too young, and that maybe they were almost as crazy as Bill said they both were, but his obsession with her continued and was strengthened by other feelings. He was afraid he would lose her. Now that she had graduated from high school and had more or less dropped out of the round of parties which had sustained her so long, Sylvia had begun to think of marriage as a salvation. He suspected that if he didn’t marry her, she would soon take up with somebody else, almost anyone who would marry her. There was something pathetically vulnerable about her. Bill said it looked as though she was having a nervous breakdown, and maybe she was coming close to that. Paul wanted to protect her. He realized that a desire to protect a pretty girl must be regarded somewhat sardonically, but it was true that she obviously needed someone to take care of her.
    Paul was aware that the circumstances of his wedding were not auspicious. Her family was almost as much against it as his own, except that they possibly understood her better, and were glad to see her get settled, even though they didn’t approve of her penniless choice. Almost all their friends assumed that she was pregnant. The whole little ceremony in her father’s living room was subdued, almost shame-faced, with nothing like the excitement which followed the news of Pearl Harbor.
    Yet Paul was happy and Sylvia seemed happy for about six months, before she was overtaken by a terrible restlessness. She couldn’t get used to the fact that Paul had to work much of the time. Once more she wanted to go to parties—as a young matron, the wife of a man who came from an old Boston family, even if he had no money, she regained some of her self-confidence. Her brothers, who had seen her moping about the house, encouraged her. She just went out with old friends and relatives, or that’s the way it started.
    Where it was ending, Paul was not at all sure. The truth was that his entire past became more and more confusing the more he thought about it, and until now his future had been even more bewildering. But this new thing, war, made at least the immediate future clear. He would be a Coast Guard officer. Whatever else the war did to him, it would get him