The Pearl Harbor Murders Read Free Page B

out, Florence was younger than the duration of her parents' marriage. Everyone seemed to be making the assumption that he was discarding his fifty-nine-year-old, overweight wife for the slender shapely former actress, out of the usual crassly selfish, male, sex-driven reasons.
    The truth was more complex. Emma had always been plump, pleasantly so in her young, vivacious days, a "dumpling," as the old parlance went. In the early years of the marriage, even as her tendency toward stoutness increased, her intelligence and charm had made up for her excess weight After all, they had faced hardship, poverty and adversity together, theirs had been a marriage of closeness, of sharing. Emma would read his work and intelligently comment; his triumphs, his failures, had been hers—theirs, Jane to his Tarzan.
    But their interests had diverged, drastically, over the past twenty years. Emma seemed to resent his youthful ways, shared not at all his interest in sports and the great out-of-doors—horseback riding, golf, tennis, certainly not flying. She would chastise him for his preference for the company of younger people, calling him "immature," accusing him of trying to "prove his masculinity."
    The latter, in a marriage that had been sexless for some time, was a particularly cutting blow. But—despite the quarrels, and the recriminations—he had held on, out of concern for how his children might react to separation or divorce. With his business flourishing, he spent less and less time at home, doing his writing at the office, supervising the magazine serialization of his work, keeping an eye on the ticensing of Tarzan and other characters of his to the movies, radio, and comics.
    And all of this was rewarding—he thought of himself as a businessman first, a writer second, an "author" not at all. He had been the first writer he knew of to incorporate—ERB, Inc.—and even started a publishing company, printing his own books, to better maintain control of the product, and to maximize profits.
    And he had made it a family business, hiring Hully as his vice president, using his older son, Jack, a successful commercial artist, as the illustrator of his book jackets and the new "John Carter of Mars" comic strip, based on his science-fiction novels, set to debut this Sunday. He'd even hired his daughter's no-good husband Jim Pierce to play Tarzan on the radio.
    No one could say Ed Burroughs was not a family man, even if he did spend most of his time away from home, at the office. But few on this earth knew—besides his children, if they would admit it—how he had dreaded to come home, at the end of a long day. And even the kids could only guess that behind the happy moments of the marriage—and there had been some, even in the later years—hovered a specter of fear of what he knew would inevitably come the next day or the next....
    He blamed himself. He'd always been proud of the way he could hold his liquor, and had urged Emma—who had no tolerance for alcohol at all, and whose personality changed radically under the influence—to moderate her drinking. They had been party goers for years, but as Emma's problem worsened, he had cut back on the invitations they accepted, and didn't stay long at the parties they did attend.
    And so Emma had begun to drink at home. Alone—in secret, that open secret the families of all alcoholics know too well.
    He never knew what condition he would find her in—she might be in a vicious state or a comatose one. Whatever the case, countless hours of hideous suffering for both of them followed. Once he flew into a rage and dumped all of her liquor into the swimming pool—of course, since it had no filtration system, the pool had probably only benefited from the alcohol's sterilizing effect.
    He had never wished to make Emma unhappy. But he could not overlook how horribly unhappy she had made him; she treated her pet dog more kindly. Ten years before he left her, Emma had said to him mat she no longer