Girl on the Best Seller List Read Free

so bountifully to the poor that she starved her own household. One day her husband met her going out with her apron filled with something heavy, and he demanded to know what she was carrying. She had told him she was merely taking flowers to the poor — and God had converted the loaves of bread in her apron into flowers, to save the lie. Milo whittled out a meticulous likeness of the saint as he saw her, before the miracle. Dacky raved at his craftsmanship, and howled when he saw the tiny soap loaves in the saint’s apron. Before they reached the Aleutians, Dacky made tiny, intricate paper roses, so that one evening when Milo opened his locker he found his Elizabeth carrying flowers in her apron.
    After that, Milo made other soap sculptures, all saints. Dacky made a bet with him that before Milo could whittle out the thirty-seven saints of diseases and ills, the eighty-three saints of cities, nations and places, and the ninety-three specialist saints for tradesmen, children, wives, idiots and children, Dacky would be back in mufti, wearing his collar backward. When Dacky was killed years later in an automobile accident, he was in his second year of study for the priesthood. Milo had just finished sculpturing Saint Blaise, saint of sore throats, number thirty-two of diseases and ills…. Now, Milo was all the way to the brewers’ saint, Florian. He had one hundred thirty-one sculptures, and he knew quite a lot about sainthood.
    • • •
    At first, during their marriage, Gloria had seemed to enjoy the stories of the saints. During their courtship, too, she had given the promise of sharing Milo’s hobby with him. Gloria had always been a very insecure person, and in the beginning, when they met on the Cornell campus and began going to The Ivy for beers, they had seemed an unlikely couple, even to themselves. In those days, Milo was
it.
Track star, football hero, DKE, big, smiling, handsome — he was a catch. Gloria had never made a sorority. She pretended she had chosen to be an Independent; pretended to scorn the close-knit little coterie of Kappas, Pi Phi’s, or Tri Delts, but Milo had been told by his fraternity brothers that she had gone through rush week and hadn’t made it. Milo’s fraternity brothers were always criticizing her: her looks (she was very skinny in those days, and as sloppy as ever); her rowdy “hail-fellow-well-met” personality, which soured whatever remaining semblance of femininity she had; and her almost defiant, angry mood switches, which led her to pound you heartily on the back in one turn and snarl sullenly at you in the other.
    • • •
    Milo himself was slightly amazed at his own persistence in dating Glo. He would tell himself that he was simply going to ask her to see a movie with him “sometime next week” (maybe because he felt she needed him: he could do
that
much, couldn’t he?) and then he would find himself actually cajoling her to be his date for the DKE hop. He, Milo Wealdon, one of the most popular men on campus, begging
her
to let him take her out! He had read once something that H. L. Mencken had written, something about winking at a homely girl if you wanted to remember him. Was it Mencken’s epitaph? Whatever it was, Milo remembered that much, and when he first saw Gloria, he was compelled to pay special attention to her. She was standing off to one side, in a crowd at Willard Straight Hall. She seemed little and left over, and terribly nervous and embarrassed, and Milo had gone over to her and begun asking her questions, telling her anecdotes, making a fuss over her. Why?
    • • •
    And why, after that, had he kept on calling her, waiting outside classrooms for her,
imploring
her (yes, that was what it had been) to see him? She seemed no more flattered by his attentions than the most beautiful, popular, sought-after campus queen, and probably, Milo realized, a lot less. Over and over she complained to him about her inadequacies, and yet the fact that he said