Puzzle for Pilgrims Read Free

cheap socks. The pavement was cracked and filthy. An old woman followed me, waving a strip of lottery tickets and whining. A small boy whose brown-sugar skin showed through ripped denims claimed to have watched my car. I gave him twenty centavos, backed out past a flower barrow, and started home through the hard mountain sunlight.
    Some of the bullfight atmosphere still lingered. None of those bustling people seemed real, just marionettes allowed to wiggle a while before they were shut up in wooden boxes.
    I had stopped thinking about Sally Haven. She meant so much to the others. She had become to them the bogeyman of the whole setup. But you have to get adjusted to unhappiness before you look around for someone else to blame. I was still trying to get used to the fact that Iris was gone.
    Things had begun to go sour between us in New York. I’d come back from three years in the Pacific war, touchy, restless, and impossible to please. To make it worse, during my absence, Iris had become a famous movie star. I returned to find her with the world at her feet. I had nothing at my feet, just a bunch of ribbons on my chest. I tried to get back into theatrical producing, but things didn’t pan out. I had terrific, impractical plans for the indefinite future which mostly dissolved into mooning around the house, smoking, drinking. I hated everyone who hadn’t gone through what I’d gone through. I hated anyone who was more successful. I guess I almost hated Iris.
    She tried, God knows. When she saw our marriage sliding, she threw up her movie career. I should have been grateful, but perversely I felt she was playing the martyr. Her very patience with me seemed an accusation. Because I was insecure I wanted to hurt her, and because she was human she started hurting me back, and I was vulnerable. Our pointless, poignant antagonism climaxed when she moved into the spare bedroom.
    The psychiatrist a friend recommended laughed at me and said I was one of hundreds of thousands of ex-servicemen suffering from a temporary traumatic neurosis. In six months, he said, I would be my pre-war virile self. I told him I had wife trouble. He laughed again and said I was one of millions of ex-servicemen with wife trouble. The laughter was meant to reassure me, I suppose, and his advice was elementary. I was going through an unattractive phase and taking it out on Iris. It would be better for me and my marriage to sit out the unattractive phase alone.
    I told Iris what he’d said and we squabbled about it, the hostility still between us. Finally, in a sort of mental and physical exhaustion, we agreed that she would go away. We were both frightened then, frightened we were destroying something we couldn’t afford to destroy.
    When she left, she kissed me. It was one of the few physical contacts we’d had recently. She clung to me, and the bitterness went with the feel of her in my arms.
    “It’ll be all right, won’t it, Peter?” she said.
    “Yes, it’ll be all right.”
    And I believed it.
    She drove to Mexico, partly because it was far away from anything we’d known together, partly because a friend had offered her a house in Taxco.
    Maybe the psychiatrist had something. Without Iris, I felt better. All my old tenderness for her returned. I could write to her without self-consciousness. She wrote back—long, cheerful letters at first and then shorter letters, farther apart. I found nothing ominous in that. Iris had never been a letter-writer. I ran into a play script I liked and embarked upon producing it with high enthusiasm. The show was a smash success. Immediately my self-assurance came back and with it a sharp desire to see Iris. When the show no longer needed me, I wired her lightheartedly and took the next plane to Mexico City. Way up in the air over North America, I thought excitedly of our reunion and kindly of the psychiatrist. When I arrived at Mexico City airport, my dreams made a crash landing.
    Because—in the