A Special Providence Read Free Page A

campus eccentric and was even beginning to win recognition as a kind of campus intellectual – but in the middle of that second year George Prentice dropped dead in his office.
    It was a stunning event. Riding home on the train for the funeral, he couldn’t get over the surprise of hearing his mother weep uncontrollably into the telephone. She had sounded as bereaved as a real widow, and he’d almost wanted to say,“What the hell, Mother – you mean we’re supposed to
cry
when he dies?”
    And he was appalled at her behavior in the funeral parlor. Moaning, she collapsed into the heaped flowers and planted a long and passionate kiss on the dead man’s waxen face. Recorded organ music was droning somewhere in the background, and there was a long solemn line of men from Amalgamated Tool and Die waiting to pay their respects (he had an awful suspicion that her histrionics were being conducted for
their
benefit). And although his first impulse was to get the hell out of there as fast as possible, he lingered at the coffin for a little while after the conclusion of her scene. He stared down into the plain, still face of George Prentice and tried to study every detail of it, to atone for all the times he had never quite looked the man in the eye. He dredged his memory for the slightest trace of real affection for this man (birthday presents? trips to the circus?), and for the faintest glimmer of a time when the man might have known anything but uneasiness and disappointment in the presence of his only child; but it was no use. Turning away from the corpse at last and taking her arm, he looked down at her weeping head with revulsion. It was
her
fault. She had robbed him of a father and robbed his father of a son, and now it was too late.
    But he began to wonder, darkly, if it mightn’t be his own fault too, even more than hers. He almost felt as if he’d killed the man himself with his terrible inhuman indifference all these years. All he wanted then was to get away from this sobbing, shuddering old woman and get back to school, where he could think things out.
    And his father’s death brought another, more practical kind of loss: there was no more money. This was something he wasn’t fully aware of until he came home the following summer, notlong after he’d turned seventeen, to find her living in a cheap hotel room for which the rent was already in arrears. She had put all her sculpture and what was left of her furniture into storage, and the storage payments were in arrears too. For months, with a total lack of success, she had been trying to re-establish herself as a fashion illustrator after a twenty-year absence from the field. Even he could see how stiff and labored and hopelessly unsaleable-looking her drawings were, though she explained that it was all a question of making the right contacts; and he’d been with her for less than a day before discovering that she didn’t have enough to eat. She had been living for weeks on canned soup and sardines.
    “Look,” he said, only dimly aware of sounding like a ghost of George Prentice. “This isn’t very sensible. Hell,
I’ll
get some kind of a job.”
    And he went to work in an automobile-parts warehouse. On the strength of that they moved into the furnished apartment in the West Fifties, and the “wonderful companionship” entered a strange new phase.
    Feeling manly and pleasurably proletarian as he clumped home every night in his work clothes, he saw himself as the hero of some inspiring movie about the struggles of the poor. “Hell, I started out as a warehouseman,” he would be able to say for the rest of his life. “Had to quit school and support my mother, after my dad died. Those were pretty tough times.”
    The trouble was that his mother refused to play her role in the movie. It couldn’t be denied that he was supporting her – she sometimes had to meet him outside the warehouse at noon on payday, in fact, in order to buy her lunch – but nobody