People Who Knock on the Door Read Online Free PDF Page A

he would squeeze that in somewhere. Maggie herself was inspiration.
    Thursday night, they were alone at Maggie’s house. It was her mother’s bridge night, and she mightn’t be back till 1 a.m., Maggie told him, because Arthur asked.
    “My cooking,” Maggie said, pulling a tray of broiled lamb chops from the grill over the stove. “Doubt if I’ll win any prizes.”
    Typical Maggie! She wasn’t fishing for compliments. She was really shy, in some situations. Arthur felt in seventh heaven, alone with Maggie in her kitchen, in the whole house! That day he had taken his biology exam (and so had Maggie taken it), looking forward to coming to her house this evening, and all the genera and phyla names had flowed from his pen with no effort on his part, and he had made a beautiful drawing.
    During dinner Arthur described Sunday morning to Maggie, his parents coming home tired after Robbie’s crisis, and his father announcing that he felt he had found God because his prayers had been answered.
    “Easy to see he could think that.—I suppose it was like a miracle to them.”
    Was Maggie making a polite comment? Arthur felt that he hadn’t made himself clear. “Yes, but—you don’t believe that Christ personally heard somebody’s prayer, do you? That’s what my father’s saying.”
    Maggie hesitated, then smiled. “No. That I don’t.—It’s a personal thing, I suppose, if someone believes that or not.”
    “Yes. And I wish my father would keep it to himself.—Now he wants to drag me to church. I hope not every Sunday. I just won’t go.”
    They were eating in the kitchen at a plain pine table.
    “Suddenly reminds me,” Maggie said. “About two years ago my father had a drinking problem. He thought he drank too much sometimes, even though my mother didn’t say anything. So a friend of my father’s gave him religious things to read. About the evils of drink. Then”—Maggie laughed—“we had college students knocking on the door trying to sell us subscriptions, and there was suddenly junk mail as if we’d been put on mailing lists. My mother hated it! So my father said, ‘If I can’t lick my problem without these people, I’m not worth much.’ Then he made a resolution and kept it. Never more than two drinks a day and never on the day he’s flying.”
    Maggie put on a cassette. Duke Ellington at Fargo, 1940. “Mood Indigo” was on it. Even the music, which Arthur knew well, sounded better in Maggie’s house. Would he and Maggie ever have a house like this together?
    “Why’d you break the date with me for Wednesday?”
    “Oh—” She looked embarrassed. “I dunno. Maybe I was scared.”
    “Of me?”
    “Yes. Maybe.”
    Arthur didn’t know what to say, because the phrases that occurred to him were either trite or too serious. “That’s silly.”
    A little later, Arthur said, “Do you think we could go up to your room again—like the other afternoon?”
    Maggie laughed. “Is that all you think about?”
    “No! Have I mentioned it?—But since you ask, yes.”
    “Suppose my mother came home early?”
    “Or your father!” Arthur laughed as if in the face of catastrophe. “But—when then?”
    “Don’t know. Have to think. Maybe you’ll want to give me up.”
    “Not yet,” Arthur said.
    That night, he walked the mile back to his house, as he had walked to Maggie’s. Maggie had said tonight that she had wanted to become a doctor or a nurse when she was about twelve. She had had a baby brother who had died around that time. And she had talked about puppets. The doll on her bed, Arthur remembered, had been a two-foot-long wooden puppet in a fireman’s uniform, and Maggie said she had made it when she was fifteen. She had more in the attic. She had used to write plays for them.
    “That lasted about a year. I’m always getting enthusiasms and then dropping them,” Maggie had said. “You’re lucky, being so sure of what you want to do.”
    Arthur began to trot down East Forster,