SEIZE THE DAY
0427
Freedom! he thought with consuming bitterness. Ashes in his
mouth, not freedom. Give me my children. For they are mine, too.
Can you be the woman I lived with? he started to say. Have you
forgotten that we slept so long together? Must you now deal with me
like this, and have no mercy?
He would be better off with Margaret again, than he was today.
This was what she wanted to make him feel, and she drove it home.
"Are you in misery?" she was saying. "But you have deserved it." And
he could not go back to her any more than he could beg Rojax to take
him back.
If
it cost him his life, he could not. Margaret had ruined
him with Olive. She hit him, and hit him, beat him, battered him,
wanted to get the very life out of him. He could not, could not.
"Margaret, I want you please to reconsider about work. You have
that degree now. Why did I pay your tuition?"
"Because it seemed practical. But it isn't. Growing boys need
parental authority and a safe home."
He begged her, "Margaret, go easy on me. You ought to. I'm at
the end of my rope and feel that I'm suffocating. You don't want to
be responsible for a person's destruction. You've got to let up. I feel
I'm about to burst." His face had swelled. He struck a blow upon the
tin and wood and nails of the wall of the booth. "You've got to let me
breathe.
If
I should keel over, what then? And it's something I can
never understand about you. How you can treat someone like this whom
you lived with so long. Who gave you the best of himself. Who tried.
Who loved you." Merely to pronounce the word love made him tremble.
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features in its
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South Africa: Ordeal and Hope,
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(an interview) • The New West
African Nations,
by Keilh Irvint
•
Behind
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by
Marlin Kilson,
Jr.
•
African Nationalism: a Critical Por–
trait,
by F.
Oladipo Onipede
•
Is South
Africa Near Revolt?,
by
George Houser •
Islam: a Portrait of an Intellectual,
by
Edouard R odili
•
Is a Solution Possible
for Algeria?,
by
Jean Rous
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Algeria Was
Never French,
by Daniel Guerin
•
From
the Tribe to the Town,
by William
J.
Newman
•
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Also: Irving Howe writes on the new
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tion of Stalinism.
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