A Meaningful Life Read Free Page B

could do about it but sit and wait for someone to come and scold him about it.
    The letter frightened Judge Crosby out of his wits.
    At three-month intervals for five years, Judge Crosby had met a middle-aged traveling bandleader at Lowell’s parents’ motel and spent the night with him. The judge thought it was a very dirty, sinful thing to do, but he had yielded to his passions long ago and could no longer help himself. He lived with his aged mother in a big old house in the heart of town, where he had a book-lined study with a bust of Homer and a handsome marble fireplace. In this fireplace he burned certain letters he received on the second Monday of every month and also the various publications that came to him from New Jersey in manila envelopes marked “Educational Materials.” In the summer he scattered the ashes in the garden under the shrubs, where they would do the most good. In the winter he put them on the sidewalk with the clinkers, and nobody was the wiser.
    For years the judge had lived in constant terror of blackmail and exposure. His mind had dwelt for two decades with the turgid subtleties and intricate sharp practice of the law, until, like a doctor who sees symptoms wherever he looks, he could think no other way, and whenever he tried to imagine what a blackmail letter would look like, it always looked very much like the letter Lowell had sent him. It was the kind of letter the judge would have written if he’d been trying to blackmail someone; the threat was there, but it was nothing you could put your finger on in court. He didn’t doubt for a minute that the little son-of-a-bitch had gotten the goods on him; it was plain as a pikestaff, and the chickens had come home to roost. He always knew it would happen someday. The judge’s opponent in the next election was an unscrupulous nincompoop who would love to know his guilty secret and who would love telling people about it even more. He supposed that Lowell planned to place the information in his hands if the judge failed to meet his terms. If the judge had been in Lowell’s place, that was exactly what he would have done. In fact, he’d already done something pretty much like it, not once but a couple of times.
    The judge spent all afternoon locked in his study with Lowell’s letter and a bottle of heart pills. He was so utterly certain that he was being blackmailed that it never occurred to him for a moment that he might not be; Judge Crosby had waited so long to be blackmailed that if he hadn’t been, it was altogether possible that he would have gone to his grave a disappointed man, kind of relieved to get it all over with but feeling strangely unfulfilled. At the end of the day he put Lowell’s letter in the fireplace and burned it, crumbling the ash with the tip of a poker. Then he sat down at his desk and began a hearty, avuncular letter of reply, concerning a confidential private fund, the existence of which was not widely known.
    So it was that Lowell went to Stanford. He had a good time at the university and never gave another thought to how he came to be there; things had always had a way of working out for him, one way or another. (Two years after Lowell graduated, Judge Crosby was surprised by his political enemies with his hand in the till and arrested, whereupon he immediately—and profusely—confessed to being a homosexual too, which pretty generally amazed everyone and ended up causing quite a little rumpus.)
    At Stanford, Lowell majored in English. It had always been his best subject and it didn’t commit him to do anything specific in later life, which was just fine with Lowell. He had no idea of what he was going to do in later life and the very words lacked meaning when he tried to apply them to himself. He thought he might go ahead and get a Ph.D., but he couldn’t see much farther than that, and even it was dim. Sometimes it seemed to him that all the grown-ups