Seasons of the Heart Read Free

shops. America was booming, and Israel was a shrewd and prudent businessman. He lived to ninety, surviving his son, Daniel, by nearly a decade. Simon always remembered the day when Israel called him to his bedside and said, “This is your legacy, Simon. I leave it to you with my blessings. Guard it. Keep it safe, for your sons.”
    Israel could not have foreseen that the word prudence would disappear in the postwar boom of the twenties. If you had money, why not triple it, and Simon, like most of his generation, gambled recklessly and lost. He would never recover his pride. He envisioned Phillip finishing high school no closer to knowing what he was going to do without the family business than he had been on that tragic day in 1929.
    It hadn’t been an easy task, but somehow Simon had managed to salvage a little money from his collapsed empire. After dinner one evening, he sat across the kitchen table from Phillip and asked, “What are your plans, Phillip, now that you’re graduating?
    Phillip lowered his eyes. “I really don’t know.”
    “Well, Phillip, I’ve thought a great deal about your future.”
    For a moment, Phillip wanted to say, Why didn’t you think about me while I still had a future? But instead he asked, “And what have you been thinking?” hoping that his anger didn’t show.
    “The one thing no one can take from you is a profession. I’ve been able to scrape up enough money so that you can start premed at the University of California.”
    It had been decided for him, Phillip thought resentfully. But he said nothing, and only stared at his father’s worn face. Over the past year he had been able to view his father’s failure with more compassion. He did love both his mother and father deeply, in spite of everything, and lately he had begun to realize that he himself was to blame for not having been able to accept the devastating change in their fortunes. He had made his parents doubly miserable by letting them see his resentment. Like his father, Phillip realized he too lacked Israel Coulter’s ambition and iron will.
    Looking at Simon, Phillip knew that he could not deny his father’s attempt to make amends.
    “I’ll do it, Dad,” he forced himself to say. “Thanks.”
    And with that, the die was cast. Phillip enrolled at U.C. But his future as a doctor was cut short the first morning he confronted a cadaver. Ice-cold perspiration rolled down his back, and his stomach heaved uncontrollably.
    Although he knew that his father would be terribly hurt, Phillip knew that he had to drop medicine. As he suspected, Simon took the decision badly. He had wanted Phillip to become a doctor as much for his own sake as his son’s. If Phillip were a success, Simon would not be a complete failure, so when he saw Phillip was adamant, Simon suggested law.
    Ironically, he could not have forced Phillip into a more incongruous profession. To be an attorney requires great confidence as a speaker and an adviser. Phillip had none. He’d been trained from childhood to be a merchant. That was all he’d ever wanted to be. Sure, he could have gotten a job in a men’s store. That was probably the only thing he had any talent for—selling socks over a counter, or perhaps Arrow shirts.
    But he could not bring himself to refuse his father the only thing Simon had left: pride in his son. Phillip finally acquiesced.
    Somehow he plodded through college and law school. Graduation left him with a strange feeling of relief, rather than the conviction that he had found his métier.
    Dressed in a black gown, the mortarboard on his head, Phillip stood on the stage, looking out at his parents. When he saw his father take out a handkerchief and wipe his eyes, Phillip knew that whatever his feelings about his profession, he had made the only choice possible.
    A year had passed since then, and the only change was that he had another birthday—his twenty-sixth. Every time he thought of Ann, he realized how empty his life was.