The Make Believers by Berry Fleming

Author:Berry Fleming
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504009867
Publisher: The Permanent Press

Three: MARGARET

XVI

The October afternoon of Peter’s visit was for Ike like a moment in midwinter when you realize all at once that the days are getting longer, that the darkest day is past and spring is gathering over the horizon—realize they have been getting longer for some time but so slowly you haven’t seen it, the day with Jerry Clowe in the cemetery standing for the darkest (not, curiously enough, the day of his defeat at the polls but the second defeat, which seemed to clinch it).

There had been days of false spring, one of them so full of a lingering exultancy as to have made him think his winter was done with; Maud told him she had heard Margaret Izlar was going to have a baby, and all that day and the next and the next he had gone about whispering to himself that but for the grace of God or Fortune or Fate or all three he might at that moment have been unable to think for worrying it might be his. If he had followed up their week at the Island, so full of her understanding and concern as to wipe out the lost election and its consequences, leave nothing visible forward or back but her immediacy; if he had acted on opportunities then and later (not that she had made, though it had sometimes seemed so—except that the whole fantasy of her being such a wife made him stand off and squint at his sanity!) a love affair might soon have been impossible to halt and instead of today’s wide sense of well-being he would have been tormenting himself with regrets, with the consciousness of secrets that might come out, with the deep uneasiness of having taken a path that society had made no acceptable provisions for. He thought he felt then exactly as he had in a hospital once when the surgeon who had removed a polyp from his intestine came to his bed and said, “Lucky you!” “You mean it’s all right?” “I mean it’s all right.”

Dark days came again, winter returned—though always mitigated by the wonderful words “Lucky you!” that by chance he was able to say to himself—and then the afternoon that made him sure the darkest day was past; not Peter’s visit alone but the afternoon as a whole.

First, a message on his desk when he got back from lunch: “Mr. Peter bringing option papers on way home for your approval. Said you would understand.”—He understood all right, whether he approved or not, Peter there in his client-rocker six weeks ago talking about the business, the possibility of an option proposal, asking-price, trading-price; talking particularly about the young man at the bottom of the whole thing. “I made him go to college, Ike,” (unable to free the words of a sort of baffled frown), “kept him there four years, sent him abroad for six months; that’s about all I can do. If he’s determined to paint pictures, well, that’s the way it is.

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