The Deer Park Read Online Free PDF Page A

lunchroom while the others looked at us. That didn’t make it easy to become friends, and I remember one term when I did without lunch. On the first day I got to know a boy who lived down the street from the school in a two-family house. Today, I couldn’t give his name, but for all those months I was sick he might discover I was from the home. Later, I realized he must have known all the time, but he was nice enough never to let me guess.
    There are enough stories I could tell of those years, but it would be a mistake. I would go on forever about the orphanage, and how none of the Sisters were like one another, for some were cruel and some were peculiar, and two or three were very good. There was a nun named Sister Rose, and when I wasa child I loved her exactly like a hungry child. She took special interest in me, and, with it all, since she came from a wealthy family, she spoke in a very clear way, and I used to have dreams at six and seven that when I grew up I would pay her family a visit and they would appreciate how good my manners were. She used to teach me Catechism in every way she could, and when I learned to read she would give me the lives of the saints and the martyrs. But I do not know how well that took, for my father gave me another catechism, and in his acquired brogue he would tell me to ask her about the life of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and he would talk for hours about the martyrdom in Boston and how religion was for women and anarchism for men. He was a philosopher, my father, and afraid of Sister Rose, but he was the only one I ever knew who was nice to the hunchbacked boy who slept next to me, and that was a poor boy. He was ugly and he had body odor, and we used to kick him. The Sisters would always have to make him take a bath. Even Sister Rose could barely tolerate him, for nuggets would drip from his nose, but my father had pity on the cripple and used to bring him presents too. The last I heard of the hunchback, he was in prison; a feeble-minded boy, trapped while shoplifting.
    It was quite a life in the orphanage, and after my father died I ran away from the home five times in three years. Once I stayed away for four months before they caught me and brought me back. Yet I would not even be telling a fact, for the fact would have to include what I learned and that would take too long. It’s a trap to spend time writing about your childhood. Self-pity comes into the voice.
    I would rather mention what I learned. I came out of the home when I was seventeen with one ambition. I had read a great many books, whichever ones I could, I read constantly when I was a boy—I would leave the lives of the martyrs and sneak away to the public library where I would read about English gentlemen, and knights, and adventure stories, and about brave men and Robin Hood. It all seemed very true tome. So I had the ambition that someday I would be a brave writer.
    I do not know if this can explain why Charles Francis Eitel was my best friend for almost all the time I stayed in Desert D’Or. But then, who can explain friendship? the explanations cover everything but the necessity. Yet one thing I believe can be said. I had the notion that there were few kind and honest men in the world, and the world always took care to put them down. For most of the time I knew Eitel, I suppose I saw him in this way.
    Days before I met him I had already heard his name with its odd pronunciation, “eye-TELL.” As I have said, he was a subject for gossip in Desert D’Or. I even had a clue to explain Dorothea’s state. It seemed that years ago she had an affair with him, and in some way it must have hurt. I gathered that the affair had meant something to her and very little to Eitel, but this isn’t definite, and they had each had so many affairs. In all the time I knew them both I never heard them mention the few weeks or the few months when they had been together, and I would guess that its history was important now to nobody but