Cold Spring Harbor Read Free

possibility a moment’s thought until after they were married. It was a marriage that might have occurred much later, when they were both a few years older, if Mary hadn’t found she was pregnant in the very early months of their romance. Then their parents had to be told, and plans had to be made in something of a hurry. Amodest wedding was arranged, a small two-room apartment was found and rented in the adjacent commercial town of Huntington, and a friend of Mary’s father was able to secure a job for Evan at a machine-tool factory twenty miles away. It was unskilled work, at apprentice wages, but there was reason to hope that Evan’s mechanical ability might soon be recognized there; and it was certainly better than no job at all.
    The baby was a girl, named Kathleen after Mary’s grandmother. A conscientious number of family snapshots were taken, and in all but one the camera caught Evan and Mary wearing smiles of theatrical intensity. The single exception, soon thrown away, showed both of them looking as scared and desperate as if they’d rather be anywhere else, doing anything else than having to pose for that photograph.
    By now the adults of both families could subside into their own concerns again; but they must all have known, though nobody put it into words, that adolescent marriages aren’t likely to last.
    Evan began taking long, aimless drives alone at night, so he could frown in the darkness and think. It was an excellent thing to have a pretty girl being crazy about you all the time—there was no denying that. Still, it could leave you wondering. Was this all there was ever going to be? And he would sock the steering wheel with the soft part of his fist, again and again, because he couldn’t believe his life had become so fixed and settled before he’d even turned nineteen.
    Mary wasn’t happy either. There had to be high school, of course, so you could learn about boys and love and all that; but then there was supposed to be college too, for four years, and after college there was supposed to be a time of living in New York and having a job and buying nice clothes and going to parties and meeting a few—well, meetinga few interesting people. Wasn’t that so? And didn’t everybody know it?
    Oh, if it weren’t for the burden of knowing Evan adored her, that he’d be terribly lost without her—if it weren’t for that, she knew she would now be putting her mind to finding some way out of all this.
    Sometimes, confronting her daughter’s round, lovely eyes while lifting her out of the crib, or out of the bath, Mary would find she had to will her own face into an expression of kindness because she was afraid even an infant might recognize the looks of resentment and blame.
    When the quarrels began they were long and harsh and self-renewing.
    “Are you ever going to let me be a person, Evan?”
    “How do you mean, ‘a person?’ ”
    “Oh, you know. Or if you don’t know there’s no point in my trying to explain it.”
    “Well, but I mean how do you mean ‘let’ you? Seems to me you can be any kind of a person you want, any time.”
    “Oh, God; never mind. You’d know perfectly well what I’m trying to say if you could ever picture me away from this stove, or away from this sink, or out of that bed.”
    “Oh. So is this going to be the kind of talk where we stay up half the night until our lips are all dry and cracked and we can’t even get laid? Because if that’s the deal one more time you’d better count me out. I’m tired, is all. You can’t even imagine how tired I am.”
    “
You’re
tired.
You’re
tired. Listen, mister factory apprentice, I’m so tired I could scream.”
    “Well, but what the hell else do you
want
, Mary? You want to get out and meet other guys? Is that it? You want to open your
legs
for other guys? Because I’ve got news for you, sweetheart: I’m dumb; I’m dumb; but I’m not
that
fucking dumb.”
    “Oh, if only you knew, Evan. If only you had an