Orrie's Story Read Online Free PDF

an imposture could simply not be done. But in his new life it had become routine for new possibilities to manifest themselves almost by magic. The letters to Esther need not be frequent, and the same was true of the messages, often on postcards, that he sent the gang at the Idle Hour. During the months of silence, then, he could be at the front, where the action was too heavy to permit even the scribbling on a V-mail form. In the intervals between these combat tours, he and his elite unit were flown back Stateside for a recharge of batteries. Any- body could understand that: thus his U.S. address.
    And in fact, Esther had had no questions, dropping him a line only when the allotment was a few days late. He had phoned her but twice since he left: first, not long after leaving, and having been blamed so hatefully for Gena’s disappearance on that occasion, he never called again until, four years later, he was about to return to say goodbye forever.
    As to the gang at the bar, they were not on the alert to catch out a friend in a major lie, though any of them might be skeptical of something petty, like the length of a fish that broke the line and swam away before it could be netted, or the alleged sex appeal of one of the bachelors.
    As far as Cassie was aware, Augie had never been married. Much of her value to him was in such an innocent approach to life, some of which was due to youth and lack of experience, but not all, not even most. He believed that she would be ignorant of certain things her life long, owing to a natural purity of heart, an inability to suspect the motives of another human being. For example, the supposedly blind man, with his cup of pencils, they encountered on an afternoon in the city: when Augie pointed out that after such people died, bankbooks were often found in their effects, listing sizable assets, Cassie could not begin to understand the implications thereof. How then would it have been possible to put his own history into terms that would have been intelligible to her?
    Fortunately, she displayed little curiosity about how he had lived before they met. No doubt this was because she could not picture him in another existence, for she was utterly deficient in imagination of the common sort—another difference between her and Gena: Cassie had no dreams of Hollywood or any other place or milieu than that in which she had lived and expected to live until her death, at which time she would be buried near all the relatives who had preceded her. But if in this, her great strength, she was clearsighted, levelheaded, and stanch, she was also superstitious in the extreme, and not only as to all routine phenomena shared with the herd, the number 13, black cats, cracks in the sidewalk, open umbrellas indoors, but also some things peculiar to herself, products of the vivid dreams she experienced several times per month, not of the common sort, not mere wish-fulfillment like so many of Augie’s (in which he invariably received large amounts of unearned money), nor the common nightmares he suffered once or twice a year, but rather visions of events to come in real life. Perhaps these, in the economy of existence, compensated for her lack of fancy when awake. In any event, they were not to be taken seriously as prefigurings of the future, for they always proved either at odds with what finally occurred or too vague for particular application. In a global war disasters were common enough. That Cassie claimed success in predicting a kamikaze attack on a U.S. battleship in the Philippine Sea, half a world away, because three days before, she had dreamed of fire falling from the sky, was the sort of idiosyncrasy in which she could be indulged if you loved her, as did her parents, who had heard its like ever since she entered adolescence and had survived several of her predictions of domestic doom by simply ignoring them, and of course Augie, who had taken pleasure as a boy in defying superstition, deriding