Three Short Novels Read Online Free

all were imposed by him. There did not seem to be any core within herself that was unaffected by him, by the men of her life, by her father and brother, by Paul and by her lover, and by her son.
    At two in the morning she went down to shake him off the sofa. “When I didn’t know you existed, why should I have waited for you?” she cried. “Why should I have waited even if I knew you existed? Can you tell me why?”—shouting down the opposing voice within her that said she ought to have waited because he had wanted her to, that all that was necessary was his wanting her to, even though he had not known her then, that his wanting was more than enough.
    Upstairs, David began to wail. Unable to stop her trembling, she did not go up to him. Her husband, glad of the excuse to escape her, went up to the boy, closing the door after him.
    She lay on her back, alone again in her bed, her hands clasped below her breasts, enticing sleep with that position, enticing with that innocent position a blamelessness for the use she had made of her womanness. That use of it as a weapon was not the use she wanted for it, and she was as dismayed by that use as she was by the entire eruption that followed upon her flirtatious finger on Mussolini’s chin.
    George wept dryly in her arms the first night he returned to their bed, after several nights on the couch in David’s room, and she covered his head with kisses and confessed that she had lied and urged him not to weep, for she was unable to bear the sounds in his throat that were as unreasonable as their discord had been.
    When the Japanese bombed the U.S. fleet in Hawaii, a changewas brought about in their marriage. Because they were now plunged into momentous times, swept into war and the unknown with the rest of the world, because of the imminence of separation or death, what it was that each feared in the other seemed not so fearsome, and they became inseparable. They seemed to have been mated by destiny—the condition that her husband had desired in the beginning.
    In the blackouts they held hands, and, if David was still awake, they picked him up and held him and looked out the window at a dark city, imagining the suspense everybody must be feeling—the anti-aircraft men and the sailors on the ships in the bay and the people at all their windows. She was aware of the thousands, the millions of people who held one another in the dark of other cities in Europe and Asia. She was aware of tremendous armies, of the magnitude of the seas and the land, and she was alive, as never before, to the near particulars of the earth—the tree in the street below and a solitary seagull soaring, its white breast made visible by the natural light in the sky.
    George enlisted in the army medical corps and was flown East for training, and Vivian and her son were left alone. Before the child went to sleep, she told him about the heroic exploits his stepfather was to perform, rescuing wounded and dying soldiers, saving every life. But as she told her tales of heroism, lying on her bed with the child, her mind was not on the absent man but, with pleasurable fear, on the encroachments of the world on her life.
    In that genteel neighborhood changes took place. Late at night doors were slammed and voices were heard in the street, and sometimes she was wakened by curses and by footsteps running down the hill. She went for walks with David, who was three years old and ran ahead of her and off on tangents, up porch steps and into stores; she sat on a bench in the park while he played on the grass; they had lunch often at her mother’s or at her aunt’s or at her cousin Teresa’s; she wrote every day to her husband and she read the newspapers; andher restlessness increased, the impatient waiting for the chaos around her to break in upon her. The country was in an uproar, millions of people were moving across the continent, whole families moving, armies moving from