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PARTISAN REVIEW
listlessness, as though the visit were a dreadful jail sentence. He sat
motionless, resting his pink head against the back of the chair, his
mouth falling open apathetically, revealing one of his prime vanities,
a sturdy set of teeth with only two fillings. Marooned and suffering,
he stared at the ceiling until it was time to leave and his affectionate
regard for the Johnson family flowered again magnificently.
The two men really had only one thing in common and that
was Mayor Johnson's daughter, Susie, and even on this tender
subject they were temperamentally divided, the gambler thinking,
"I'd do anything for that kid, just as if she was my own," and the
father feeling at a loss to know what to do. Young people liked
Charlie Bowman and Susie liked him especially. She did not, even
as a child, sit on his lap, having always been too matronly in appear–
ance and character to make that proper, but she showed her partiality
for the gambler by settling herself in a chair with Bowman's own
frightful immobility, while waiting for the time to pass.
An unpromising child, Susie's only talent was for making
salads that looked like ballet dancers. Her lettuce skirts and pimento
lips were extraordinarily lifelike! And Susie herself had just enough
life to make one demand before retiring to the kitchen. She cheer–
fully decided at the age of ten, to spare her parents the expense of a
college education and even her father, sensitive about equal rights for
women and a fundamentalist about mass education, agreed with
relief; but, when she was sixteen, she suddenly announced the desire
to spend her last year of education at an unscholarly Southern
boarding school. This was no fleeting wish. There was a hunger in
Susie's eyes for that boarding school, a thing so pure, dedicated, and
unswerving that, deprived of it, one could imagine her hanging her–
self or simply dying immediately, like a child in a book, from an un–
forgettable loss or disillusionment.
"Am
I going? Tell me!" she would say to her father, her lips
trembling anxiously. Her father procrastinated, looked the other way,
fled to his room, but there she was again the next morning, fixed
madly upon him, whispering, "I must know today! I must!"
Bewildered and frightened at the persistence of sheer idea in his
daughter'S mind, the Mayor at last surrendered $500 of his savings,
and Charlie Bowman, struck to the heart by this dominating passion,
gave another $500.
