AN EXPENSE OF SPIRIT
me in the long lines at the Induction Center; I do not willingly recall
those terrible hOUI1l when all my hard-won integrity pulsed naked
and afraid under those prodding fingers. The doctors had kept us
together, making use of our disparity (I am somewhat under middle
height), as one of them put it, "for the laughs."
"Yes," I said with what I hoped was apparent coldness, turning
to
go. "Yes. How have you been?"
He reached out a great soggy paw, and held me by the
ann,
helpless. "Hey, wait now. That isn't polite. We're sort of buddies, after
all." He must have seen me wince at the obnoxious epithet, the
gross
assumption of familiarity, for, not releasing his hold, he turned to
his
wife, turning me about with
him,
will-less and bafHed like a
sulky child. "This is myoId buddy-" He stopped for the name,
mocking me.
"Brandler," I said, managing, I think, some dignity despite the
fact that I was barely touching the floor, "Hyman Brandler."
"You're Noel's friend?"
his
wife asked, and her few
words,~·her
smile were conspiratorial; in that instant she had somehow assured
me that she knew his grossness, my plight. "I've met so few of his
wartime-"
"Just a buddy!" Noel shouted across my attempt to speak. "He
made five bucks for me."
"1-"
"You nothing!" he cried with a hostility I could not understand;
he had released his hold at last, but had wedged me securely between
his body and the wall. "I took one look at
you-one
look, mind you,
in that line.
It
was in the old Armory, and I said to the guy behind
me, 'I'll give you five to one that
this
joker gets rejected.'
'Hel~'
this
guy says, 'in this man's army,
if
he can
walk-' "
"Noel!" his wife interrupted, feeling perhaps that so crude an
onslaught might embarrass me. "Noel, we're supposed to-"
I may, indeed, have blushed. I do not have a bad limp, but
it is noticeable, particularly when I am distraught. The examining
psychiatrist told me that very day that I
want
the limp, that I cling
to it as at once a kind of revenge against my father and a punishment
of myself. I find it, removed now from those painful circumstances,
and as a theory, not improbable, though long since I have learned
to face the truth: my father had intended only to punish me in the
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