Pigeon Feathers Read Free

and now be starting up a drab avenue of business. Selling insurance, most likely. Poor Janet, Clyde felt; except for the interval of himself—his splendid, perishable self—she would never see the light. Yet she had retained her beautiful calm, an unsleeping tranquillity marked by that pretty little lavender puffiness below the eyes. And either she had grown slimmer or he had grown more tolerant of fat. Her thick ankles and the general
obstinacy
of her flesh used to goad him into being cruel.
    “Yes.” Her voice indicated that she had withdrawn; perhaps some ugliness of their last parting had recurred to her.
    “I was 4-F.” He was ashamed of this, and his confessing it, though she seemed unaware of the change, turned their talk inward. “A peacetime slacker,” he went on, “what could be more ignoble?”
    She was quiet a while, then asked, “How many children do you have?”
    “Two. Age three and one. A girl and a boy; very symmetrical. Do you”—he blushed lightly, and brushed at his forehead to hide it—“have any?”
    “No, we thought it wouldn’t be fair, until we were more fixed.”
    Now the quiet moment was his to hold; she had matched him failing for failing. She recrossed her legs, and in a quaint strained way smiled.
    “I’m trying to remember,” he admitted, “the last time we saw each other. I can’t remember how we broke up.”
    “I can’t either,” she said. “It happened so often.”
    Clyde wondered if with that sarcasm she intended to fetch his eyes to the brink of tears. Probably not; premeditation had never been much of a weapon for her, though she had tried to learn it from him.
    He moved across the linoleum to sit on the bench beside her. “I can’t tell you,” he said, “how much, of all the people in this town, you were the one I wanted to see.” It was foolish, but he had prepared it to say, in case he ever saw her again.
    “Why?” This was more like her: blunt, pucker-lipped curiosity. He had forgotten it.
    “Well, hell. Any number of reasons. I wanted to say something.”
    “What?”
    “Well, that if I hurt you it was stupidity, because I was young. I’ve often wondered since if I did, because it seems now that you were the only person outside my family who ever, actually,
liked
me.”
    “Did I?”
    “If you think by doing nothing but asking monosyllabic questions you’re making an effect, you’re wrong.”
    She averted her face, leaving, in a sense, only her body—the pale, columnar breadth of arm, the freckled crescent of shoulder muscle under the cotton strap of her summer dress—with him. “You’re the one who’s making effects.” It was such a wan, senseless thing to say to defend herself; Clyde, virtually paralyzed by so heavy an injection of love, touched her arm icily.
    With a quickness that suggested she had foreseen this, she got up and went to the table by the bay window, where rows of overlapping magazines were laid. She bowed her head to their titles, the nape of her neck in shadow beneath a half-collapsed bun. She had always had trouble keeping her hair pinned.
    Clyde was blushing intensely. “Is your husband working around here?”
    “He’s looking for work.” That she kept her back turned while saying this gave him hope.
    “Mr. Behn?” The petite secretary-nurse, switching like a pendulum, led him back through the sanctums and motioned for him to sit in a high hinged chair padded with black leather. Pennypacker’s equipment had always made him nervous; tons of it were marshalled through the rooms. A complex tree of tubes and lenses leaned over his left shoulder, and by his right elbow a porcelain basin was cupped expectantly. An eye chart crisply stated gibberish. In time Pennypacker himself appeared: a tall, stooped man with mottled cheekbones and an air of suppressed anger.
    “Now what’s the trouble, Clyde?”
    “It’s nothing; I mean it’s very little,” Clyde began, laughing inappropriately. During his adolescence he had