PARTISAN REVIEW
But just as I stepped upon the back porch I stopped and pre–
tended to be admiring an old fat hen which the neighbors had in–
tended to kill long ago but hadn't found the heart to do so because
the hen has a human aspect and keeps looking at them gaily and as
an equal. I was not thinking about the hen; I was wondering, of
course, why my family hadn't mentioned that my friend was living
on the street. We had spent many hours talking about new tenants,
deaths and births, who had become alcoholic or been sent to the
asylum. It wasn't like my mother, a talented gossip, to forget such
an arrival, and I concluded sorrowfully that she remembered all my
lies and tricks and thought me guilty of the one, unforgivable wrong.
Yet when I finally entered the house my family was in such a good
mood I hadn't the nerve to mention my suspicions. Perhaps they
want to forget me, I thought. Silly, proud people who must see the
broad face of the boy on the street and recoil, thinking, "Oh, my
sweet daughter! What dreadful horrors she was born with.... Some
genes from an old Tennessee reprobate who cropped up in the fam–
ily, passed on, and now wants to live again in her."
I will force nothing, I decided. It will all come out and then I
shall leave forever, vanish, change my name, and begin over again
in Canada.
Several nights later I went to visit a friend in the neighborhood,
a girl who weighs over two hundred pounds and who is so fearful
of becoming a heavy, cheerful clown that she is, instead, a mean–
spirited monster. And yet her malice, which is of a metropolitan
order, is often quite entertaining, and I might have stayed longer
if I had not begun to imagine the inspired tales she could tell on me.
Her small eyes seemed to contain all my secrets and I could see her
plump, luxurious mouth forming the syllables of misdeeds even I
could not name. At nine o'clock I went home where I found the
house dark and supposed my family had gone out for a few minutes,
perhaps to the drugstore or across town to the ice-cream factory.
This was the moment at last. I felt it acutely.
There he was, sitting on the steps, smoking a cigarette. I realized
it was he the moment I saw the figure, the wide, slumping shoulders,
the head turned somewhat to the side. Even in the dark I felt his
slow, calm, somnolent gaze upon me.
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