Cold Spring Harbor Read Free Page A

inkling of how dumb you really are.”
    “Yeah? Yeah?”
    “Yeah.”
    But by the time they did break up, a year and a half after the wedding, there was no quarrelling at all. In the plainness of their need to get out of that Huntington apartment and away from each other, fast, they both seemed to know that any further quarrels would be as embarrassing as losing your temper at a stranger in a public place.
    Mary enrolled as a freshman at Long Island University, after arranging for her parents to take care of the baby, and within six months she was said to be engaged to a predental student from Hempstead.
    Evan moved back into his parents’ house and went on working at the machine-tool plant. He didn’t know what else to do, and nobody near him came up with any better ideas—though his father did try to offer encouraging advice of a general kind.
    “Well, Evan, this is bound to be a difficult time for you,” he said one night as they lingered at the dinner table after Grace had gone upstairs. “But I think you’ll find that sometimes things do get better of their own accord. It may be that all you can do now, apart from trying to keep your spirits up, is wait and see what’s going to happen next.”

A celebrated clinic of optometry was opened for business in 1941, in lower Manhattan, where people suffering from very poor vision could be equipped with spectacles said to bring about remarkable improvements in their daily lives.
    Charles Shepard made an appointment at the place as soon as he found out about it, in April of that year; then, rather than go into New York alone on the train, he asked his son to drive him there.
    “Well, but I’ll lose a day’s pay,” Evan said, as Charles had expected he would, and Charles had just the right answer ready, for delivery in just the right kind of quiet voice.
    “That doesn’t matter,” he told him, “and what’s more, you know it doesn’t matter.”
    Evan looked briefly puzzled, but then he seemed to understand—orseemed at least to see that this might be a trip worth taking if the old man had something on his mind.
    He was twenty-three now, still working in the factory and living in his parents’ house, and his father had long suspected he was following the course of least resistance: to break out of it would have required ambition, and there didn’t yet seem to be a trace of that quality in his character. Delinquency may once have threatened to possess the boy, but now a pure lassitude was gathering to engulf the man. He was getting more dramatically handsome all the time, too—girls gave him startled looks of helplessness wherever he went—and that was the funny part: it didn’t seem right for anyone so splendid-looking to have so little going on in his head.
    Charles had often wished they could have an unhurried, serious talk, as other fathers and sons were said to do, but there never seemed to be time for that at home: as soon as Evan cleared away his dinner dishes he’d be out in his car and gone, often for most of the night. Charles didn’t know where he went on those drives, or what he did, and he was sometimes vaguely envious, imagining easy romantic adventures all around Long Island and New York; but then he’d wonder, sadly, if Evan’s carousing might amount to nothing more than wasting time at the same roadside barroom night after night, in the drink-fuddled company of other factory employees as indolent as he was. And wouldn’t that be only natural? If you lived like a proletarian long enough, among proletarians, weren’t you almost certain to become a proletarian too?
    That was why the day of the eye clinic had become extremely important for Charles. Given an hour or two alone with Evan on the drive into lower Manhattan, and an hour or two more on the drive back, there was every reason to hope their talk might be profitable, as well as serious.
    They set out at noon, in mild and pretty spring weather,and Charles was able to get his part of