The Whole Man Read Free Page A

him?”
    Sympathy had gone from the Israeli woman, as though a light had been turned off behind her eyes. She got to her feet.
    “That was bad,” she said. “You weren’t any shy virgin, were you? And you knew you shouldn’t have children, with your family history! To use a pregnancy as blackmail—especially on a man like Pond, who didn’t give a damn about anything except his own dirty little yen for power! Ach! ” Her accusing gaze raked the older woman like machine-gun fire, and she stamped her foot. The Pakistani officer looked, bewildered, from one to the other of them.
    “No, it’s not true!” stammered Sarah Howson. “I didn’t —I—!”
    “Well, it’s done now.” Ilse Kronstadt sighed, and turned away. “I guess all you can do is try and make it up to the kid. His physical heredity may be all to hell, but his intellectual endowment should be Okay: there’s first-rate material on the Pond side, and you’re not stupid. Lazy-minded and selfish, but not stupid.”
    Sullen, resentful color was creeping into Sarah Howson’s face. She said after a pause, “All right, tell me: what do I do to—to ‘make it up to the kid’? I’m not a kid myself any longer, am I? I’ve no money, no special training, no husband! What’s left for me? Sweeping floors! Washing dishes!”
    “The only way that matters, to make it up to the kid,” Ilse Kronstadt said, “is to love him.”
    “Oh, sure,” Sarah Howson said bitterly. “What’s that bit about ‘flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone’? Don’t preach at me. I had nothing but preaching from Gerald, and it got him a shot in the head and me a crippled boy to nurse. Can I go now? I’ve had enough.”
    The piercing blue eyes closed briefly, and the lids squeezed and the lips pressed together and the forehead drew down to furrows at the top of the sharp nose.
    “Yes, you can go. There are too many people like you in the world for us to cure the world’s sickness overnight. But even if you can’t love the kid wholeheartedly, Miss Howson, you can at least remember that there was a time when you wanted a baby, for a reason you aren’t likely to forget.”
    “He’ll remind me every time I look at him,” Sarah Howson said curtly, and got up from her chair. The officer reached for the phone again and spoke to a different number.
    “Nurse, bring the Howson baby back to the lobby, please.”
     
    When the unwilling mother had gone, he gave Ilse Kronstadt a questioning glance.
    “What was that about her grandfather?”
    “Never mind,” was the sighing answer. “There are a million problems like hers. I wish I could concern myself with all of them, but I just can’t.”
    She became brisk. “At least the big problem is soluble. We should be out of here in another month, I guess.”
     
     

 
     
    iii
     
     
     
    Things continued badly for a while longer. Stores remained closed; sporadic outbreaks confirmed that the thwarted terrorists were still capable of striking blindly, like children in tantrums. There were some fires, and the main city bridge was closed for two days by a plastic-bomb explosion.
    Little by little calm oozed back. Sarah Howson made no attempt to chart its progress. There was news on TV when the broadcasting schedule was restored; there was also—had been, throughout the crisis—radio news. Sometimes she caught snatches of information: something about the new government, something else about advisers and foreign loans and public-welfare services. … It was beyond her scope. She saw black headlines on discarded newspapers when she went down the street, and read them without understanding. There was no association in her mind between the arrival of technical experts and the fact that water became available at her kitchen sink whenever she wanted it, as in the old days, rather than for two hours morning and evening, as during the “crisis.” There was no connection that she could see between the new government and the cans of baby