In the Night Season Read Online Free

felt that way, she said, married to Bishop. “You were meant to live alone, Eddie,” she told him. “You do anyway, even when you’re with people. And I’m tired of trying to find you. You hate it, too. That’s the weird thing about it.”
    He suspected it was true.
    He slept badly, again. In the morning, he walked out to the mailbox and looked in. He remembered the face staring at him out the back window of the speeding car. It was a freezing morning. He went inside and tried to work. There were four VCRs in various stages of disassembly on the table by the living room window. He worked all morning, watching for the police car, but none came. There wasn’t any traffic at all. At noon he made something to eat for himself and sat in the kitchen, in the quiet. Finally he went upstairs, to his office, and put some music on. Benny Goodman. Cheerful, unintellectual music, purely delightful, and sunny. He left the record brace up, so the arm would keep returning to the beginning of the recording, and he let it play into the afternoon.
    Out on the porch, in the chill, he threw some scraps on the lawn, for the cats. He could hear the music out here. The sky was dotted with little tufts of cloud. He experienced a wave of loneliness, or depression.
    The one was the other.
    He went back into the house. Thinking had become so troublesome, these days: This is how I’ve lived most of my life He went to the living room and sat down.
    His only remaining family connection, his sister, believed that her life and his had both been blighted by their parents, by the stern, quiet people who’d inhabited this Virginia property and then sold it to their eldest son as their interest in life and their health waned. Eugenia had washed her hands, she said, of every vestige of those two. She’d married a chiropractor named Crane and moved to Syracuse, New York. For years she led a rather adventurous life. The chiropractor made a lot of money, and she used it to travel; she had been in most of the world’s capitals before she reached the age of forty. She gathered possessions from far-flung cultures and learned to speak several languages. And her manner toward her brother had become somewhat magisterial.
    “Edward, do you know what your trouble is? You have no gumption. You don’t like to make waves. You’re just like Daddy in that respect. An old colored man with worries. I don’t mean this in abad way, particularly. It’s just the truth. For instance, when is the last time you left the state of Virginia for anything? Even a vacation.”
    “I’ve gone places,” he said. “Just because I haven’t been around the world.”
    “Well, if you had been anywhere at all other than that—farm—you wouldn’t be so painfully uncomfortable in social situations.”
    Bishop hadn’t seen her in years and hadn’t wanted to, for she had become a carbon copy of her mother—critical, painfully blunt, not to say cruel. A boxy-shaped, frowning, humorless woman with highly polished manners and a slight accent, an affectation of substantial wealth and influence, a heavy lady putting on airs. A snob, really, and Edward Bishop was evidently an embarrassment to her. She had been widowed more than ten years ago and was childless. Now she lived in a retirement village somewhere near Erie, Pennsylvania. Fifty-two and living there. Occasionally he would send flowers to her, for her birthday, or for one of the holidays. He rarely heard anything back. Dear Edward. Thank you for the lovely arrangement. Please send no more, as I have very little room where I am presently living .
    Well, and now after years of a kind of growing acceptance about himself and his solitary existence, this young woman’s trouble had drawn him into her life, and he could not get her out of his mind. Her need of him, even in the face of these veiled threats from thugs, had made him want all that much more to be helpful, to keep her from harm.
    He had been sitting there daydreaming,