Rich Man, Poor Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

had on an old bathrobe. The worn flannel was warm against her skin and gave her some of the same feeling of coziness she used to have when she came in out of the cold and put it on before bedtime as a young girl. She needed what comfort she could find tonight.
    She scrubbed the cold cream off her face with a piece of Kleenex. Her skin was very white, a heritage from her mother, like her blue shading-to-violet eyes. Her straight, black hair was like her father’s. Gretchen was beautiful, her mother said, just as she had been when she was Gretchen’s age. Her mother was constantly imploring her not to allow herself to decay, as she had done. Decay was the word her mother used. With marriage, her mother intimated, decay set in immediately. Corruption lay in the touch of a man. Her mother did not lecture her about men; she was sure of what she called Gre’t-chen’s virtue (that was another word she used freely), but she [wed her influence to get Gretchen to wear loose clothes that did not show off her figure. There’s no sense in seeking out trouble,’ her mother said. ‘It comes finding you out soon enough. You have an old-fashioned figure, but your troubles will be I strictly up-to-date.’
    Her mother once confided to Gretcheh that she had wanted to be a nun. There was a bluntness of sensiblity there that disturbed Gretchen when she thought about it. Nuns had no daughters. She existed, aged nineteen, seated in front of the mirror on a March night in the middle of the century because her mother had failed to live up to her destiny.
    After what had happened to her tonight, Gretchen thought litterly, she herself would be tempted to enter a nunnery. If only she believed in God.
    She had gone to the hospital as usual after work. The hospital was a military one on the outskirst of town, full of soldiers convalescing from wounds received in Europe. Gretchen was a volunteer worker five nights a week, distributing books and
    wounds and writing letters for soldiers with hand and arm injuries. She wasn’t paid anything, but she felt it was the least she could do. Actually, she enjoyed the work. The soldiers were grateful and docile, made almost childlike by their wounds, and there was none of the tense sexual parading and reconnoitring that she had to endure in the office all day. Of course, many of the nurses and some of the other volunteers slipped off with the doctors and the more active officer-wounded, but Gretchen had quickly shown that she wasn’t having any of that. So many girls were available and willing, that very few of the men persisted. To make it all easier, she had arranged to be assigned to the crowded enlisted men’s wards, where it was almost impossible for a soldier to be alone with her for more than a few seconds at a time. She was friendly and easy with men conversationally, but she couldn’t bear the thought of any man touching her. She had been kissed by boys from time to time, of course, at parties and in cars after dances, but their clumsy gropings had seemed meaningless to her, unsanitary and vaguely comic.
    She was never interested in any of the boys who surrounded her in school and she scorned the girls who had crushes on football heroes or boys with cars. It all seemed so pointless. The only man she had ever speculated about in that way was Mr Pollack, the English teacher, who was an old man, maybe fifty, with tousled grey hair, and who spoke in a low, gentlemanly voice and read Shakespeare aloud in class.’ ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day … ”’ She could imagine herself in his arms, and his poetic and mournful caresses, but he was married and had daughters her age and never remembered anyone’s name. As for her dreams … She forgot her dreams.
    Something enormous was going to happen to her, she was sure, but it wasn’t going to be this year or in this town.
    As she went on her rounds in the loose, grey smock provided by the hospital,