EVENINGS AT HOME
these blithe, busy husbands. They sigh tenderly under the delightful
burdens of propitious marriages and smile at the less fortunate with
queenly compassion. Some wan, sensitive souls carry the dreadful
obligations of being "wellborn" and do their noble penance by as–
surning an expert, affecting dowdiness, like so many rusty, brown,
pedigreed dogs who do not dare to bark.
There is something false and perverse in my playing the ob–
server, I who have lived here as long as anyone. Still these bright
streets do not belong to me and I feel, not like someone who chose
to move away, but as
if
I had been, as the expression goes, "run out
of town." I can remember only one person to whom that disgrace
actually happened and he was a dapper, fastidious little man who
spoke in what we used to call a "cultured" voice and spent the long,
beautiful afternoons in the park beside the wading pond in which
the children under five played. No doubt he too went to New York,
the exile for those with evil thoughts.
For the first week or so everything went well here and I was,
during this sweet coma, under the impression that I might have a
fine time. And suddenly a terrible thing happened. Just after dark
I walked up to the mailbox, a few blocks away. On the way back
home I passed a group of small, identical, red brick houses, four
of them, each with a low concrete porch and a triangular peak at
the top. In one of these houses I saw him, sitting alone on the porch,
with a ray of light from the inside hallway shining behind his head.
I stopped involuntarily and gasped because his face seemed with
the years to have become much larger. It was incredibly ugly and
brutal, a fierce face, rather like a crocodile's with wide, ponderous
jaws, sleepy reptilian eyes, heavy, indolent features in horrible in–
compatibility with his fresh, pinkish skin. I walked on quickly with–
out speaking, but my heart raced painfully, and I prayed I had not
been recognized. When I reached my own house I was almost out
of breath and rushed into the living room, believing I would ask
what he was doing here in our neighborhood, what had happened
to him in the last years. But I did none of these things. Instead I
looked suspiciously at my mother, trying to decide why she hadn't
mentioned
him
or if she had forgotten that I once knew him.
"You devil, you witch!" I thought, enraged by her bland face
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