THE BLEEDING HEART
for which he was admired by two or three people in the town; and
one time when he must have been as drunk as a monkey, he brought
her a box of Cheese-bits and a copy of
Sweetheart Stories
when she
had the pinkeye. Although as far back as she could remember, she
had been driven to get away, far away and never go home again, she
was often resentful that he never wrote to her and that he had not
been at all sorry or at all possessive when she had gone away.
As
a
matter of fact, he had not even seen her off on the bus and her
mother did not know where he was. Her mother said, looking vaguely
up and down the street and nodding to several
acquaintanc~,
"Well,
I'll tell him goodbye for you," and handed her a lunch in a Honey
Kist bread wrapper. The simple and humiliating fact was that he
cared so little that he had clean forgotten.
The memories of her father, each one of which was uglier than
the one before, made her so cross and jumpy that she knew she must
quiet herself and she sat down to read
Self Reliance
which she had
always found very soothing because it was so sedately dull. But she
could pay attention to it even less than usual and the pattern of
sounds next door presently was repeated: the telephone, the opening
and closing of the door, the sound of china and silver on a tray. She
was irritated and when she returned to Emerson, exhorting him to lull
her, the voice would give her no peace but went on in its protracted
peeve, hovering like a gnat over every word on the page. Finally she
grew really angry and she knocked sharply on the wall. There was
an immediate silence and then a most terrible and much louder sound:
it was a laugh! And such a laugh as she had never heard in her life
for it was as thin as a needle and unlike the speech,
it
did not quaver.
For a moment she was afraid and she stepped away as if there were
real danger, and then she was even angrier than before and her
thoughts went quickly down this ladder of unreason,
"If
my father
had not been a low person and if he had loved me, I would not have
grown up in poverty and I would not have hated him so much that
I had to go away from home to the first job that came along, this
mean one that pays so little that I must live in a dark, depressing
room where the walls are so thin that the sound of sickness comes
through and for no reason at all I am laughed at by a cruel person
who does not even know me." And she envisaged her father as he
had probably been that day she had boarded the orange bus; fat and
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