OPUS 21 Read Online Free PDF Page B

some ways."

    She had shown a certain economy of speech--owing possibly to the fact that I had given her little opportunity to show anything else. But her biography was fairly terse:

    "I was born in Boston--and the family moved here when I was a baby. My dad graduated from Princeton in 1921. He's a very intelligent, strong-willed, wonderful guy.
    My mother's a chronic invalid--of her own making. I have one sister--older--and no brothers. I'm very fond of my sister--but I was always jealous of her when I was young.
    Dad tried to make her a substitute for a son--took her everywhere, taught her sports and games-and I wanted to be the one. She's married and lives in Chicago. I went to school in Westchester--Rosehall--and came out here. At a mass debut. Dad's in real estate. After I came out, I fiddled around awhile--Junior League, and Red Cross, and Bar Harbor in the summers--and then I met Rol."

    She took a breath that quavered like a musical saw. "He's handsome. He has manners--buckets and barrels of manners. And money." She looked angrily at her rings.
    "I tried to make something out of him. To put ambition in him. I got him to work for dad-
    -and he quit. He wanted to go to California because he likes flowers. My God, how he likes flowers! We had greenhouses full. He thought he could become a botanist--or hybridize something--and he dawdled away his time with paintbrushes and pollen. I persuaded him to go into real estate out there--and he made a lot more money--but he gave it up. He began collecting a library of old books on botany--and writing a history of botany--and I was bottled up in botany. It got so he would hardly even dress up. Or shave. Overalls all day. I'd want to go places and see people and do things--and we'd be home, instead, with some French professor, maybe, for dinner, complete with beard, accent, ribboned glasses, and knee-patting under the table. Half the time, these professors and Rol--for Roland--talked Latin. I flunked it, three straight semesters, myself. Well--I took to going out alone--and he didn't care. I even tried to make him jealous--and he positively seemed to approve. He told me I needed outside interests and that he was a dull fellow for me! I--" She bit her lip.

    "--love the guy."

    "Not now. I did. What finally happened was--"

    "Should I get that beer ready?"

    She shook her head. For a while she was silent. Then she touched the book. "I heard--I knew--I suppose I shouldn't even have been surprised--let alone driven out of my mind--but there's so much that's nice about him. Used to be, anyhow. Too nice--and that should have prepared me--"

    I got it, then. "Not--other women, Yvonne. Men, huh?"

    She shuddered. You don't see people shudder very often--in restaurants, anyway.
    She shuddered because that was how it made her feel. She couldn't help it. And when the spasm passed, her hands went on trembling--like glassware vibrating after a certain right note has been struck. "He hired an assistant--a young college graduate--that I liked, at first. Then--one day--I got so bored and lonely I went into the greenhouses, which I hated, looking for them. And I found them, all right."

    She began to cry again--and to talk through the tears. "It was only--two weeks ago. Rol was dreadfully upset. He promised--everything on earth he could think of. And I stayed a week more--but it was simply too awful. I finally bought tickets. I--I don't like living at home--mother's such a sobby mess all the time. I wanted to see dad--and of course he was about ready to go out and kill Rol. Somebody--somebody--" her voice sank--"told me that if I read the Kinsey Report I'd see that what happened to Rol happened to maybe a third of the men like Rol. I guess it does. What difference does that make?"

    Children, I thought. No. Not even children. Children is just what they weren't--
    just what they'd never been--or just what, if they'd ever been, they refused to let themselves remember. These angel--pusses, growing up