Manhattan Monologues Read Free Page A

evenings reading or listening to the radio. Yet my underlying mood was one of consistent if mild depression.
    Father treated me, when, as before, Ellen and I dined with him and Mother on Sunday nights, with the same gruff politeness he would have exhibited to any guest at his table. He in- quired sympathetically about his grandchildren, sought my opinion politely about the wine he offered, inquired perfunctorily about my law practice, but it was noticeable that he never discussed the war with me. I had wanted no part in it; very well, I would hear nothing of it from him. In a way I was no longer his son. When word came of Quentin Roosevelt's death, his plane shot down behind German lines, he mourned as if Quentin had been his son.
    And, of course, I hated it. I may not have been given the white feather by the world, but I knew I deserved it in Father's eyes, and was it not in Father's eyes that I had my real existence? Could I never be free of my obsession? For what reason, now that I had become, inside his mind as well as outside it, the poor creature he had long denied I was, could I not be at liberty to go my own benighted way in peace?
    Perhaps I would have, had he not died, shortly after the death of his beloved hero, the great Theodore, in 1919. Both men were worn and prematurely old at only sixty-one. The shock to me was such as to throw me into a kind of nervous breakdown, which might have necessitated my going for a time to a sanatorium, had not a stern talk with my mother formed the beginning of what looked to be a cure, or at least an alleviation.
    As I have said, Mother had left my training largely to Father, but I had always known that she still kept an eye on me. Although she never openly challenged her husband's standards, she seemed to live, resolutely if quietly, distinctly apart from them. Of course, the difference in gender explained some of this but not all. She represented to me, when I seemed to be swimming beyond my power of return, the fine, level, sandy beach to which I would be welcome if I could only get back to it.
    One evening, calling on her alone, I felt impelled to confide in her all my misery. When I had finished and she gave me a long close look, I realized that I had broken a barrier.
    "I have been waiting for you to tell me all this, my child. I haven't ventured to talk basic truths with you until I was sure you were ready to listen. I have always known that you found your father's principles hard to live up to, but I hesitated to interfere, because you acted so determined to work out your problem your own way, and how was I to know that it wasn't the right way? For a man, anyhow. And besides, you seemed to be succeeding, and your father was always so proud of you, and you appeared so devoted to him. Was it a woman's role to barge in and break this up? Mightn't you both have resented it? And rightly, too? But now you present me with a different case. Your father preached one kind of courage. Maybe I can preach another."
    "Courage? Oh, not more of that, please, Mother!"
    "Just listen, my dear. We can't get around courage. It's at the root of what's wrong with you. Shall I go ahead?"
    "Go ahead."
    "I warn you. This is going to hurt."
    "I'm ready. Shoot."
    "You avoided the draft for a perfectly valid reason. You were over thirty, with a family to support and a sick child. Very good. Nobody had a word to say against you, except, of course, your father. That's the given, the
donnée,
as the French critics say."
    "And that is correct."
    "Except for one thing. Your family wasn't your real reason. Your real reason was that you were afraid to go to war."
    I felt like a piece of ice under a steaming hot faucet. Soon there would be nothing left of me. It was all over. At last.
    Mother waited for me to speak, but I didn't, so she went on.
    "And now comes the real lesson in courage. You must face the fact that you are a man who was afraid to go to war. It's as simple as that. It doesn't mean that