You by Anonymous

Author:Anonymous
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1-85501-535-8
Published: 1994-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

PS: I must tell you this; I have your mother’s painting. When I married Paul, I made him buy it for me. It took a long search, and a great deal of money, to acquire it. It was the only wedding present I wanted.

THE

THIRD

LETTER

to

her

Your answer came as a surprise; not that you wrote the letter, nor that you mailed it after it was done— but that you went beyond the scope of my letter into the new time and the new place where we were no longer the hero and heroine but the villains. We all like to think of ourselves as the good guys, don’t we? When those upright midwestern men came to discuss solemnly the termination of my contract, I was indignant and angry and self-defensive. It was not that I feared to face them; I did not dare face myself. I saw myself, and accepted their moral verdict, only when one member of the board, the man who had talked least, who had watched my antics most intently, remarked quietly that Frank Swenson was putting up the money to buy out my contract.

My letter spoke of us as innocents; you chose to write of us as evil. My letter stopped when it did because, I told myself, it was far too long already and, besides, that was another country. I expected an answer, if you answered at all, within the frame of reference I had laid down, there on the far side of September where we yet dwelled in Paradise. But, unflinchingly, you entered upon the evil time—for we were evil, not in what we did to each other, because we deserved each other, but for what we did to others.

So what does that leave me? Our third encounter—and I can’t flinch from it, as you did not flinch.

But first I must tell you this, my love. There in Piercetown, where you should not have been and I should not have been, you were opaque to me. I understood with absolute clarity what you were doing to yourself, to me, to the innocent others; but somehow there was in me a suspension of insight, the avoidance of judgement. Knowing, in that time and that place, that you were evil, I aided and abetted the evil that was in you. Yet within you I perceived somehow the wonderful innocence of old we had shared through the summer days of Pass Robin. So, as we had once shared innocence, we now shared evil, so that it was my sin as much as yours, because I didn’t know why. In the final analysis, I understood myself no better than I understood you. We all yearn to be the good guys forever.

In that winter town, you were a spring flower, totally unconscious that they, winter people, midland people, saw you as an exotic stranger from a land that was forever spring. There was in you an unconscious assumption of flowering and growth that they, in their eternal winter, had lost. You

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