The Unpossessed Read Online Free Page B

concessions out of his picture. “He is just a symbol. He gets his from the higher-ups, just as I get mine from him.”
    She was choked with silly laughter. “Such a fat symbol, honey! I mean, it’s hard to recognize a symbol with a belly like that—and so many warts . . .”
    He wished to God she wouldn’t use nursery humor on him. She’d had a good malicious wit before she was a wife.
    â€œYou wouldn’t see a social trend,” he said, “unless it was crammed down your own personal throat: and then you’d try to think it funny. You know what I mean when I say Pidgeon is a symbol.”
    â€œThen doesn’t it seem wrong to call him Son-of-a-Bitch,” she said thoughtfully. “I mean—an epithet—if he doesn’t himself determine his status, if it’s all—” she waved her arm; deprecated her own ignorance, but falsely, he thought—“if it’s all, as you say, ec-o-nom-ic.”
    That perverse female logic again! Did they know what they were talking about? or did they bandy words, caught from the male-grown-ups’ table? “Miss Banner! you win your M for elementary Marx,” he decided to be gallant and smiled reluctantly.
    â€œYou surely aren’t worried, Miles!” she rallied warmly. He hated the way she picked up his crumbs! “We can still afford cigarettes and gin and a Charles Street roof over our heads—Mr. Pidgeon or no Mr. Pidgeon. We don’t give a damn!”
    He looked at her slowly, with distaste, the still-born smile sticking in his throat. (But thank God she had not said “each other—we still have each other!” Some tact, some happy accident, prevented that!) “I should hate to think that cigarettes and gin are what our life is made of.”
    She seemed to sit plunged in defeat, her foot making sad little designs this way and that on the floor. Then she strengthened suddenly, as though from the bottom she bounded up, reborn. “Cigarettes and gin!” she said scornfully. “When we have each other!” She seemed to flow toward him borne strongly on a tide of joy, suddenly too big and too amoeba-motherly to hold out against. She put her arms around him and drew him against her and he could feel himself like a bundle of dry sticks gathered to her side.
    He leaned against her, not unwillingly, but awkwardly, joint by joint, as though he did not know how. He was ashamed before her sudden largeness. He did his best for her. But his dryness would not melt.
    â€œThe best things in life are free, my love,” she whispered merrily; and ran her hand wickedly inside his shirt as she pressed him closer.
    He grew less brittle. The faint suggestion of wickedness in her tone and the sudden invasion of her hand on his unsuspecting chest warmed him, even thrilled him faintly, as though the thrill were sensed through veils of prohibition.
    â€œPinocchio!” she whispered.
    His heart ached for her. He felt indeed like the puppet-boy—he remembered pitifully how Bruno said (incredulously admiring, nevertheless, for Miles’s stiffness was a miracle to him, a mystery to Bruno’s rich amorphous Jewishness) that if he presented his friend Miles Flinders on the puppet-stage the audience would boo, demanding a more life-like marionette.
    â€œWill you wait, Blue Fairy, will you help?” he said gently. He wanted to be taken out of his shell; but at this moment he wanted it, guiltily, more for her sake than his own.
    â€œDear little Pinocchio,” she said; “of course, forever!”
    She seemed to hold her breath, hoping for the miracle. It irked him; but he felt he owed it to her to lie still in her arms.
    He closed his eyes. Pinocchio! It was an old story between them, a sad little joke. She had read him the whole book one night, after Bruno had called him a puppet; the story of the little wooden boy who wanted to become real, whose dear papa and