Clemmie Read Free Page B

his side, trying to compose himself for sleep. He knew he did not want Alice Burney. She was not a type to appeal to him. Rather, he felt the need of anonymous flesh, of an unknown and uncaring warmthbeside him, of an episode where there would be no remorse, regret, guilt or responsibility.
    This, he thought, is entirely too trite. My wife has gone to the country, hooray. So I am nervous, restless, jumpy, and perhaps itching for trouble. The Burneys try to be nice, so I find them unspeakably dull.
    As he thought of them there came another heavy surge of the curiously uncontrollable desire. It exasperated him, and he decided that the best way to short-circuit the nerve impulse was to think of some dreary problem. Money was easy to think about.
    He could remember the bull sessions back in 1938, in the fraternity house on Woodland Avenue. What was the name of the little blond guy? Langer. Bucky Langer. “All you Wharton hotshots aiming for the big buck give me the cramps. Me, I’ll settle for five-thousand bucks a year forever. A nice clean hundred a week.”
    There had been many who had agreed with him. It was a nice clean sum. You could see living on it and having a family and getting alone all right. Fifteen thousand would have been gaudy riches. Genuine luxury.
    And here I am, he thought. Fourteen-thousand, five-hundred dollars a year. And there’s nothing very gaudy about it. Taxes bring it down to twelve five. Then take out mortgage payments, food, car, insurance, clothes, medical, and there is astonishingly little left. Look how long it took us to save the money for Maura’s trip with the kids. We thought we could make it the summer before last, and then we were positive we could do it last summer, and the only way we could handle it this summer was by cutting corners wherever we could.
    They had decided that Maura should visit her people and take the kids. Since their marriage it had become increasingly obvious that her parents would not be able to visit the states. Her father, George Thatcher, had to stop work in 1948 after a heart attack. He had owned and operated a repair garage and automobile agency in Long Melford. The business had been sold. There was a small government pension, plus the income from the proceeds of the sale. Neither George Thatcher nor Maura’s mother felt that he should risk the strain of travel. They had a comfortable home, a garden, a quiet and apparently satisfyinglife. Maura’s two sisters were both married and both living in London.
    It seemed right that Penny and Puss should see England while they were at the age when they would absorb impressions and remember vividly. At first it had been planned that Craig would fly over for his three-week vacation, but it had not been financially feasible. He would wait out the long, hot summer and they would come back to him, and she would write often.
    In the very beginning it seemed to them a miracle that they had found each other, because the very fact of their meeting had depended on so many coincidences, so many variables. Of course the meeting of any two persons who fall in love could be described in the same way, but in their case the coincidences seemed to have a curious drama of their own. But in 1944, of course, drama was not in short supply.
    Craig had been a production chaser in the Camden Drop Forge Division of U.S. Automotive on December 6th, 1941. He enlisted on Monday, December 8th, thinking himself both quixotic and noble, refusing to admit that one major aspect in the decision was a boss with whom it seemed impossible for anybody to get along—a man of vile humor and unpredictable rages.
    After basic training, because he was rangy, rugged, eager and reasonably well-educated, he had been selected for infantry O.C.S. After graduation he was sent to the Tank School, then assigned to an armored division that was shipped west to train in the California desert.
    During those days he sensed that the uniform suited him well. He was baked