The Man Without a Face Read Online Free PDF

was hot, sweet, strong and had milk in it. On the whole it tasted good and cleared my head some. I remembered what I was here for.
    “You can leave the clothes at the grocery store,’’ he said, “I’ll pick them up when I next shop. Now I’ll drive you home.”
    “Look, about coaching,” I started desperately.
    “I said no.” He turned the lamp down again and started towards the door. What I had half taken to be a large nig in front of the fireplace got up and became Mickey. There was nothing to do. I followed them through the house and out the front door. Mickey was left sitting on the front step as McLeod and I drove down the road to the gate.
    We were going along the high cliff road, the sea far below, the lights of the village off to one side and curving around the little harbor, when I said something stupid, even for me. “I’ll pay you,” I said. “There’s money Dad left me and I’ve saved quite a lot. You can have all of it. It’s more than three thousand dollars.”
    “I don’t want your money.” He said it in a perfectly ordinary voice but I felt ashamed.
    “Did I—did I say something wrong?”
    “I don’t know. Did you? Did you intend to?”
    “No. Truly. It’s just—” My voice trailed off. Explaining Mother—let alone Gloria, the feeling that the comer I was in was getting smaller and smaller, Gloria at home all next winter, and die next, and the next—how could I explain that?
    This is where girls cry, I suppose, and for a minute, only a minute, I wished I could, if it would wash away that tight, burning feeling inside me that was getting tighter and more
    33
    burning. But I couldn’t. I rolled down the window to let the air cool my face and stared at the dark wall of trees rushing by.
    After a minute McLeod said, “What’s the exam for?” “St. Matthew’s.”
    “Why is it so important for you to go there?”
    When I had gone up to his house I had the whole thing laid out, what I would say, and so on. It would have moved Grant’s Tomb. Now, thanks to the brandy or whiskey he gave me, everything was hopelessly confused. I tried to recapture the manly, straightforward sentences I had put together. Nothing came.
    “Well?” He sounded exasperated.
    I knew I had to say something even though I didn’t think he had the slightest intention of changing his mind. He’d undoubtedly think it was a big joke, the jerk. But what choice did I have?
    I drew a long breath. “Because I’m sick of living at home with three women, my mother and two sisters, particularly since they’re both brighter than me and make nothing but A’s—my sisters, I mean. I thought Gloria, my older sister, the one who— Well, anyway, she was going away to boarding school. Now she’s not. She’s going to be home all winter and the year after that and the year after that. Messing me up. Putting me down. Making fun of everything I do. When I’m seventeen I’m going to join the Air Force. But that’s three years away and I can’t stand it.”
    “I see,” he said, “What’s your name?”
    “Charles Norstadt.”
    He put the car in gear and we drove down onto the peninsula and then turned right into the road that curled around the harbor and went past our house on the other side.
    34
    “All right. I’ll coach you. But you’ll have to do it my way, and that means the hard way. You must have sat for the exam already. St. Matthew’s doesn’t give the second exam unless it’s necessary. I take it you failed?”
    “Yes,” I whispered, terrified he would change his mind. “Did you study for it?”
    “No.”
    “If you wanted to get in so much, why not?”
    I explained again about Gloria’s change of plan.
    “That wasn’t very farsighted, was it?”
    “No.” Scared as I was that he would back out, I knew I might as well get one thing cleared up from the beginning. “I’m not terribly bright. Not like my sisters, anyway.” “Who told you that?”
    “Practically everybody—besides, they