Aurora Dawn by Herman Wouk

Author:Herman Wouk [WOUK, HERMAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316077026
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

The Dinner Party: IV—The aftermath,

in which three books are closed.

THE DITHYRAMBS OF all the imitators of Walt Whitman notwithstanding, there is something unheroic about our times. Samson went down in the temple of Dagon; Hector was destroyed before the walls of windy Troy; Hamlet died in the presence of the Danish royal court; and must our hero fall in no statelier setting than the back seat of a yellow taxicab? Well, this is a true story, and the author will not stray one hair from the facts on the plea of poet’s license. Let not the most trivial detail of this terrible event go unrecorded, but let us not attempt to rhapsodize over dreariness, but simply say: it was in Yellow Cab 774, license 606-683-41 New York 1937, driver Morton J. Kupelsky of 1422 Brenner Avenue, Queens, that Andrew Reale was predestined on the day of his birth to inform his one true love, Laura Beaton, that they must forever part. (That this predestination in no wise altered his free will, ergo his culpability in the matter, is a scholastic commonplace that we have touched on before but that cannot too frequently be emphasized.)

The dreadful thing, which the girl had anticipated no more than a collision of the earth with a comet, and which her faithless lover had been half-consciously planning for weeks, had just happened. The taxicab was speeding through the deserted Sixty-sixth Street underpass from the east to the west side of the park. Honey Beaton cringed in a corner of the back seat as though she had been struck, her face tear-stained and bowed, her left hand tightly gripping a metal bracket, her whole body shrinking against the side of the car as though she feared nothing so much as that Andrew Reale might touch her. Indeed, this gallant had endeavored to quiet her grief with a caress, only to be repulsed with a vehemence that startled his very soul. Now he sat in confusion, gazing at the appalling havoc he had wrought. There was little in the girl’s appearance to recommend her to the buyers of beauty now, as she wailed, clutched her tumbled yellow hair, gnashed her teeth and contorted her face in the fury of a death-wounded heart. In vain did Andrew attempt to interject words of comfort or apology; she seized on every phrase as it came from his mouth, twisted it into a bitter denunciation and made it an occasion for a fresh paroxysm of misery. The taxi swung around corners, stopped like a trained metal beast at the flash of red lights, and moved again with a grinding whine of old gears as the lights snapped to green. The broad back, round head, and wide ears of the driver might have been made of the dead substance of the automobile, for all the acknowledgement he made of the horrid scene behind him, and for all the attention that the agonized lovers paid him.

The girl’s passion, after raging for twenty minutes

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