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PARTISAN REVIEW
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loud what I was doing in silence." He felt along the covers until
he found Owen's hand, and Owen nearly pulled away in alarm; his
father's hands felt as though they'd been soaked in ice water. "I came
in to say goodbye," his father said.
"Where are you going?"
"Dp to the cabin for the weekend."
"Can I come?" Owen didn't want to, but he felt it was what
his father wanted to hear.
"You don't want to do that. I scare you to death. You're trem–
bling right now." He drew away his hands. "Besides," he said, "I
think I should be alone."
Now Owen was afraid he'd hurt his father's feelings. "I want
to go," he said. "I want to be with you."
"Maybe later we'll take a trip together. Would you like that?"
"Yes."
"I might even take you out of school to do it. What do you
think
of that?"
"I like school."
There was a long pause, and in the silence Owen felt a shift in
the atmosphere of the room; it was as if a third person had stepped
into it.
"If
you didn't want me to teach you, I'd get you a tutor," his
father said, and the tone of his voice, confirming the altered state
of the room, altered it even more.
"What's a tutor?"
"Somebody who'd follow us wherever we went, and teach you
all the subjects you wanted to learn whenever you wanted to learn
them."
"Where would we go?"
"I don't know. Far. Maybe even out of the States."
"To a foreign country?"
"Maybe." There was a sudden change in his voice that was so
brisk, it was as if a light, a bright one, had been switched on. "But
that's something we can always talk about later. Right now I want
to go up to the cabin for a few days, by myself, and fix that stove
1 never fixed and
think
things over. Your mother has an inkling
I'm going but she doesn't know for sure when, and I'm not going
to bother to wake her, so you tell her in the morning that I've left,
