Triple Pursuit Read Online Free PDF

mystery and a maze, Father Dowling.”
    â€œHow so?”
    â€œTake the actuarial tables. They assure us that it is the female that outlives the male, yet look at the people who come to the Center. It is almost fifty-fifty. I was thinking of my own case. I did not retire at sixty-five, as I could have, but decided to teach until I was seventy. Seventy came and I still was not willing to step down. My wife and I could postpone the delights of retirement. But of course she died before that time came.”
    â€œRetirement may be oversold, Austin.”
    The former professor chuckled. “Young people now begin to talk of retirement before they’ve done any work. Do priests retire?”
    â€œWe’re given much the same leeway as professors.”
    â€œMy niece is going out with an Italian.”
    â€œThey have souls too.”
    Austin Rooney laughed aloud. Father Dowling asked him to come on to the rectory. In the study Rooney explored the books on the pastor’s shelves before taking a chair. He accepted a cup of tea and they chatted about James Joyce.
    â€œHe was an odious person, Father, no doubt of that. But it is not for his person that he is acclaimed.”
    That was all. Austin did not parade the knowledge he no doubt had.
    â€œDon’t misunderstand my remark about my niece and her Italian. I was thinking that Italians have a stronger sense of family than the Irish. If she marries him, we will lose her.”
    â€œIsn’t that the definition of marriage?”
    It was pleasant to hear Austin Rooney’s educated laughter. Among the mysteries of life he probably had not been pondering on that bench, was that he should be attracted to someone as silly as Maud Gorman.
    3
    Thirty years before, having financed his college education by joining NROTC, George Hessian was commissioned and spent two sickly years in uniform before he was given a medical discharge for the diabetes that had escaped the attention of the physicians who had given him the pro forma physicals paving the way into college and then into the Navy. He had his first attack in San Diego and was assumed to be drunk when he was discovered on the floor beside his bed in the junior officers’ quarters. The hangover remedy he was given restored him and he himself passed off the episode as due to the uneasy excitement he felt as he waited for the ship to which he had been assigned to come into port. The second attack was on shipboard where he was attended by a physician who recognized the symptoms because of the experience he had had with a diabetic younger sister. George spent his first voyage helping out in sick bay, was put ashore in Hawaii, and flown back to the mainland. Until his ultimate discharge he spent hours in the base library where he conceived the ambition of becoming a writer.
    It is the nature of such an ambition to be alluringly vague. His mind was flooded with images of himself in the flush of fame, a fame of which he quickly tired—imagination can exhaust whole lifetimes in a matter of days—and he began to see himself as a Salinger sort of recluse, fleeing from his excited readers and intrepid reporters. When he returned to Fox River, he took a job in a bank where he worked for decades, moving slowly up the lower rungs of the financial ladder. The work was boring but welcome, since he saw it as his incognito. Who, when they sat beside his desk arranging a loan, suspected that they were dealing with a writer who would become a legend?
    He wrote nothing. At first it was a matter of postponing the great effort, then his daily work proved more distracting than he would have believed. Finally, he dreaded the thought of sitting at his typewriter and trying to make words he actually wrote conform to the inflated image of himself he had devised. After retirement he took a job as gate
guard at the retirement home where his mother now lived. It was in the solitude of the guard shack that a great project