The Whole Man Read Free Page B

formula issued against coupons at the corner store, labeled in six languages and bearing a colored picture as well, for the benefit of illiterates.
    It was agreed by everyone that things were worse now. In fact, from the material point of view things were slightly better. What depressed people so much was a subjective consideration. It had happened here. We, our families, our city, our country, have been shamed in the eyes of the world; murder was done on our streets, there were dynamite outrages and acts of terrorism here. Shame and self-condemnation turned readily to depression and apathy.
    There was no true economic depression, and little unemployment, during the next few years, but some of the savor of life seemed to be missing. Fashions no longer changed so quickly and colorfully. Cars no longer sported startling decoration, but became functional and monotonous. People felt obscurely that to treat themselves to luxuries was a betrayal of—of something; as it were, they wanted to be seen to concentrate on the search for a new national goal, a symbol of status to redeem their world-watched failure.
    Extravagance became a mark of social irresponsibility, the badge of the fringe criminal—the man with influence, the black-marketeer. These latter regarded the average run of the population—puritanical, working hard as though to escape a horrible memory—as mugs. The “mugs” condemned as parasites those who were blatantly enjoying themselves.
    Through this epoch Sarah Howson moved like a sleepwalker, measuring her life by routine events. For a while there was some sort of an allowance, issued in scrip and redeemable at specified stores, which was just about enough to keep her and the child. She didn’t bother to wonder about it, even though it was much discussed by ordinary folk: usually they condemned it, because it was available to women like Sarah Howson, who had committed the double crime of bearing an illegitimate child and also associating with a known terrorist. But these discussions she seldom heard; now hardly anyone talked to her in the street where she lived.
    When the period of the allowance expired, she got work for a while cleaning offices and serving at the counter of a canteen. Wages were low, part of the general syndrome of reaction against affluence which had followed the upheaval. She hunted without much success for better-paid employment.
    Then she met a widower with a teen-age son and daughter who wanted a housekeeper-mistress and didn’t mind about the brat or her decaying looks. She moved across the city to his apartment in a large, crumbling near-tenement block and was at least secured against poverty. There was a roof and a bed, food, a little spending money for clothes, for the child, for a bottle of liqour on Saturday night.
    Young Gerald endured what happened to him without objection: being placed in a nursery while his mother worked as a cleaner, being put aside, like an inanimate object, at the widower’s apartment when they moved there. At the nursery, naturally, they had clucked sympathetically about his deformity and made inquiries into his medical record, which was already long. But there was nothing to be done except exercise his limbs and enable him to make the best possible use of them. He learned to talk late, but quickly; surveying the world with bright grave eyes set in his idiot’s face, he progressed from concrete to abstract concepts without difficulty, as though he had delayed speaking deliberately until he had thought the matter through.
    But by then he was no longer being sent to the nursery, so no one with specialized knowledge noted this promising development.
    Crawling hurt him; he did it only for a short period, whimpering after a brief all-fours excursion like a dog with a thorn in its pad. He was four before he got his awkward limbs sufficiently organized to stand up without support, but he had already learned to get around a room with his hand on the wall or