Transparent Things Read Free

announced an impending event: inexorably the slow barrier came down.
    Its brown curtain was only half drawn, disclosing the elegant legs, clad in transparent black, of a female seated inside. We are in a terrific hurry to recapture that moment! The curtain of a sidewalk booth with a kind of pianostool, for the short or tall, and a slot machine enabling one to take one’s own snapshot for passport or sport. Hugh eyed the legs and then the sign on the booth. The masculine ending and the absence of an acute accent flawed the unintentional pun:

    As he, still a virgin, imagined those daring attitudes a double event happened: the thunder of a nonstop train crashed by, and magnesium lightning flashed from the booth. The blonde in black, far from being electrocuted, came out closing her handbag. Whatever funeral she had wished to commemorate with the image of fair beauty craped for the occasion, it had nothing to do with a third simultaneous event next door.
    One should follow her, it would be a good lesson—follow her instead of going to gape at a waterfall: good lesson for the old man. With an oath and a sigh Hugh retraced his steps, which was once a trim metaphor, and went back to the shop. Irma told neighbors later that she had been sure the gentleman had left with his son for at first she could not make out what the latter was saying despite his fluent French. When she did, she laughed at her stupidity, swiftly led Hugh to the fitting room and, still laughing heartily, drew the green, not brown, curtain open with what became in retrospect a dramatic gesture. Spatial disarrangement and dislocation have always their droll side, and few things are funnier than three pairs of trousers tangling in a frozen dance on the floor—brown slacks, blue jeans, old pants of gray flannel. Awkward Person Senior had been struggling to push a shod foot through the zigzag of a narrow trouser leg when he felt a roaring redness fillhis head. He died before reaching the floor, as if falling from some great height, and now lay on his back, one arm outstretched, umbrella and hat out of reach in the tall looking glass.

6
    This Henry Emery Person, our Person’s father, might be described as a well-meaning, earnest, dear little man, or as a wretched fraud, depending on the angle of light and the position of the observer. A lot of handwringing goes about in the dark of remorse, in the dungeon of the irreparable. A schoolboy, be he as strong as the Boston strangler—show your hands, Hugh—cannot cope with all his fellows when all keep making cruel remarks about his father. After two or three clumsy fights with the most detestable among them, he had adopted a smarter and meaner attitude of taciturn semiacquiescence which horrified him when he remembered those times; but by a curious twist of conscience the awareness of his own horror comforted him as proving he was not altogether a monster. He now had to do something about a number of recollected unkindnesses of which he had been guilty up to that very day; they were to be as painfully disposed of as had been the dentures and glasses which the authorities left with him in a paper bag. The only kinsman he could turn up, an uncle in Scranton, advised him over the ocean to have the body cremated abroad rather than shipped home; actually, the less recommended course proved to be the easier one in many respects, andmainly because it allowed Hugh to get rid of the dreadful object practically at once.
    Everybody was very helpful. One would like in particular to express one’s gratitude to Harold Hall, the American consul in Switzerland, who was instrumental in extending all possible assistance to our poor friend.
    Of the two thrills young Hugh experienced, one was general, the other specific. The general sense of liberation came first, as a great breeze, ecstatic and clean, blowing away a lot of life’s rot. Specifically, he was delighted to discover three thousand dollars in his father’s battered, but