The Summer Soldier Read Online Free PDF Page B

while she brushed out her
hair, staring glumly at the lump his feet made under the blanket.
When she mentioned it, all he said was that he couldn’t be
responsible for every middle aged Lothario who had a little too
much to drink. It seemed to make him angry.
    “What would you have done if he’d called you
out, Ray?” It was only a playful question. “Would you have gone out
back in the alley with him and hammered away until one of you said
uncle?”
    Ray apparently didn’t think it was funny and
indicated by that impenetrable reticence of his that he wished the
subject dropped.
    “He didn’t call me out.”
    So that was it. He was simply that way
sometimes. Men were whimsical creatures, Ray no more than most; but
when he did not choose to discuss a subject he did not discuss
it.
    Had that man in the restaurant upset him? Was
he afraid of death, or a black eye, or the prospect of turning
forty? When it suited him he was as silent and as fast as a stone
wall. It did no good to pry.
    Perhaps he had painful thoughts. Or perhaps
it was the vagabond in him, she couldn’t tell. She had lived her
whole life within a few hundred miles of the hospital in Yuba City
where she had been born, but Ray had traveled, had lived in England
and had been all over Europe. Perhaps things had happened. Perhaps
it had given him a sense of being a stranger everywhere. Perhaps
that was it.
    Sometimes he would talk about such and such a
place in London, or what the train ride was like between Munich and
Amsterdam, but he would only talk about the place or the thing, as
if he were merely a pair of impersonal eyes.
    As fast as a stone wall. The past, she had
the feeling, was served up in carefully edited versions.
    But if the past did not, the present belonged
to her.
    Their life together was to her taste; Ray was
a good man and seemed to love her. She didn’t mind housework,
especially in a small house, and Ray made her feel that he was
pleased with her, that she was to his taste too and that their
relationship was enough for him.
    At least he wasn’t clamoring after her to
have babies. Why should he? After all, he had been married already
once and had had a daughter, aged about nine now, whom he never
mentioned or visited but whose picture, she happened to know, he
carried around with him in an inside flap of his wallet. She didn’t
think he owned a picture of Kathleen.
    Aside from one brief mention of her existence
once when they were still Living in Sin, he never talked about his
first wife. Things hadn’t worked out, was the way he had phrased
it. She had apparently left him, but nothing was said about what
her motives might have been. It had all happened while he was
abroad.
    Did he think about her? Had he loved her with
more of himself than he gave to his poor little Louise? Another
area that wouldn’t bear probing.
    Well, let him have his past and his memories
in quiet. She didn’t mind. She had him now and would keep him as
long as there was breath in her. And, after all, everyone was
entitled to his little secrets.
    . . . . .
    With Peterson still tactfully leading the
way, the two men came out a side door, directly up a little
stairwell from the basement into the parking lot, where the dead
sunlight was bouncing off of cars and the pavement and tier upon
tier of hospital windows. It made you flinch away, as if some great
hand were closing painfully over your eyes.
    Guinness hoped she had been happy, that he
had been able to make her happy. He hoped five years could somehow
be counted as an atonement in advance for the way she had died. He
was responsible for her death, just as surely as if he had murdered
her himself. The how and why were still uncertain, but they were
only details. He had killed her—or rather his past had, which came
to the same thing. Something had come up out of that silence he had
imposed on it and her, and had killed her. That much it was
pointless to try evading.
    Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima