Clarkton Read Free Page A

leave at home, they flew to New York together, and he said to the boy:
    â€œIf you have a date with a girl or if you are going to make a date with a girl or if you want to, or if you want to call some: one up, or if you want to walk around Central Park until you see one you like, then just say so, and I’ll find my way back——”
    No, the boy was genuinely glad to be with him. There was no mistaking it then. They were of a height and of a build, and they looked more like older brother and younger brother than like father and son. So they left the airport building together, walked up Fifth Avenue in the warm summer afternoon, and spent two lazy hours at the Zoo before lunch. And all the time, Lowell was so proud to be next to the handsome youngster in uniform that he glowed, as if he himself were in love and out with his girl in the sunshine.
    That afternoon, his pride was frankly possessive, and he indulged it. When people turned to look again at his son, Clark, he found the corners of his lips twitching. At lunch, he noticed a girl across the restaurant from them staring boldly, and when Clark looked up at him, their eyes met with knowing guilt.
    But now that he had come to think of that afternoon, he sank into it, like a frightened and pursued man who takes thoughtless refuge in a bog and then finds himself entrapped there. The conductor helped him to break out; and after his ticket was punched, he asked where the club car was.
    â€œThree ahead,” the conductor said.
    He clung to the conductor. “I don’t remember trains like this a year ago.”
    â€œTravel’s light today,” the conductor agreed. “You’ll see it pick up with the holidays.”
    Then Lowell was able to leave. He walked ahead to the club car, found an empty chair, and ordered a scotch and soda, reflecting that these cars, at least, were a permanent factor in the life he knew and the society he inhabited. They never changed; the faces in them were always the same. He forced himself to look for security in the vacuous middle-aged countenances of traveling men, minor executives, lawyers, and commission men, gray sharkskin and brown worsted, women badly painted or not painted. He drew comfort from them, and when his drink came he was able to open a copy of Life bound in the black jacket of New York, New Haven & Hartford, look at the pictures and sip at his drink, as normally as anyone else in the car.

6. L ois was waitng for him with the car at Northampton, and Lowell was genuinely pleased to see her, even eager for the forty-five-mile ride ahead of them. His first glimpse of his wife, standing beside the car, was reassuring; she was only two years younger than he, but she had kept her figure; it was the flesh that had held, not brassieres and girdles; and the sight of her—always the first sight, even if, as this time, he had seen her only a day and a half before—was youthful, surprisingly so. She was a long-limbed woman, with gray eyes, light-brown hair, and a very good complexion. The unusual width of her face, the long, straight line of her brows was a little disturbing at first; she was not pretty in any formal sense, and sometimes she appeared quite plain, but men looked at her again and again—and when the calm, almost bovine face lit up, became animated, she was a charming-woman in the fullest way. It was that intermittently regal quality that Lowell recalled from the first time he had ever seen-her, and it was the same quality which satisfied so urgent a need in him now.
    They were on their way before either of them spoke more than a word or two. She liked to drive, drove fast without speeding, and was by the tacit admission of both of them a better driver than he. “Fern took the convertible,” she said, in the way of explaining the big four-door Buick, but he was glad for it, the size and warmth of it. “I thought it would snow,” she said. “It kept feeling like