The Matter With Morris Read Free Page B

to him. Don’t you get lonely, Morris? I feel for you.”
    “Don’t,” he said. “I don’t need your amazing capacity to pretend to understand. And as far as the column goes, I told Robert that I was finished. I won’t be writing anymore.”
    “I wonder sometimes.” Lucille’s tone crept upwards, ever so slightly, and Morris knew that she was standing, back arched, chin raised, with her left hand, the one free of the phone, held out from her body, bent a little, as if to ward offa blow. “I wonder if that woman hadn’t lost her son, if you hadn’t corresponded with her, if I had been more vigilant, if I hadn’t settled into my own sadness, and if I had forgiven you, whether we would still be living in the same house.”
    “That’s such an interesting word,” Morris said. “If.”
    “Why can’t you answer the question, Mo? Why can’t you dip a little into your thinking? Are you thinking?”
    “Too much. Though my thinking is shallow. I have to think about my thinking.”
    “And you don’t cry.” Lucille’s voice was softer now, as if she had sat down. He imagined her in the kitchen, or perhaps the soft red-leather chair in the den. “What will you do?” she asked. “It isn’t good for you to have all this time. You’re only fifty-one, Morris.”
    “Oh, I’ll keep writing my columns for myself. Bob said that at some point I would move past the nonsense and rediscover the path of righteousness. The money path, as he calls it. He’s a parasite.”
    Lucille ignored this. “You’re taking Libby out for lunch Saturday. Don’t forget.”
    “Hnnh. I remember.” He studied his hand and said, “My right palm is all flaky. There’re cracks on my fingertips, sometimes they bleed.”
    “Go to a clinic. It might be eczema.”
    “It was way easier when we lived together, don’t you think? We’d play doctor. Give Jake a hug from me, okay?”
    “I do. I always do. Lunch on Saturday. Pick Libby up at noon. Bye, Morris.” And she hung up.
    Ursula was an American woman who wanted to be but was not yet his lover. She was six years younger than he was and he had come to know her in December of 2006, when she sent him a letter in response to one of his syndicated columns that he had written ten months after his son died. The column, one of the hardest he had ever written, and something he had put off for a long time, had been about a young soldier who was killed in Afghanistan. He had described the soldier’s fear and his bravery, and he had referred to the boy’s e-mails and phone calls to his parents in which he had talked about the good that the army was doing. He had also mentioned his own fear and the boy’s doubt, the sense that people at home didn’t truly believe or support what the soldiers were doing. “There are times, Dad, when I’m not even sure. I get scared, Dad. Scared that I’m going to be killed over here.” The whole column was written in the third person, and only at the end did Morris write, “This boy? This beautiful twenty-year-old with his life ahead of him? This boy who was killed? This was my son.”
    He received Ursula’s letter via his agent. She wrote:
Dear Mr. Schutt,
My name is Ursula Frank and I live on a dairy farm two hours from Minneapolis. This is not far from where you live, and though an international borderseparates us, I feel very close to you today. I just finished reading your column about your son who was killed in Afghanistan. My heart broke as you described your son’s death. I also had a son who was killed during the war, only he was in Iraq. His name was Harley. He was nineteen and he was killed last year by a bomb that exploded underneath the Humvee he was driving. He died immediately. When I heard about my son’s death and felt that first wave of shock, and then waited and waited and finally watched his casket being lowered from the transport plane, all of that was easy compared to what came after, and that’s why I’m writing you. It’s