Vol. 24 No. 1 1957 - page 60

B. M. Wolpert
A FALSE NOTE
When the decree was made final, she left the city of her
seven-year marriage and went back to the university town where, as
she remembered it, life had been less stifling. Through this return to
the campus, she felt she could blow away Arthur and the seven
years as though they had been so much gathered dust on the image
she had of herself. She would somehow begin anew, be able to see
herself clear. Her mother and father were dead, her brother was far
off in Oregon, with a wife and sons and daughters sapping even the
memory of a sister, and really, she was quite alone; and in this being
alone, when she saw the lives of so many about her dismally en–
tangled with the lives of others, crushed by material, moral, emo–
tional responsibilities-the couples burdened with children, the young
shackled to the aged, the hale to the halt-she felt almost exultant,
glorying in her freedom and irresponsibility. How fortunate that she
had no children, no elderly parents, no decrepit relatives, that she
had, in fact, nobody but her own sweet self, not even Arthur
any more.
At the university she got a job as secretary to the dean of the
College of Letters and Sciences, and she got herself an apartment
and she settled down. After a year, however, what was to have been
a pleasant, unhampered life became somehow, she realized, a monoto–
nous existence. In the quiet of the little apartment, with the cafe
curtains she had made for it, the Klee and Leger prints on the walls
she had painted white, and in the gray-hushed and steamy mornings
when she trudged to her job, she began to feel oppressed with a
great sense of emptiness. Futility, like a colossus, overstrode her
world, and the freedom and irresponsibility, for which she had been
S<?
grateful, became suddenly a little hollow, or like a dream tarnished,
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