Eleven Read Online Free Page A

was it so awful?
    Don got a suit from his closet to take to the cleaners, and picked up Dusenberry’s letter. But with the letter in his hand, he was suddenly curious to know what was in it. Before he had time to feel shame, he went to the kitchen and put on water to boil. The envelope flap curled back neatly in the steam, and Don was patient. The letter was three pages in longhand, the pages written on both sides.
“Darling,” it began,
I miss you so, I have to write to you. Have you really made up your mind how you feel? You said you thought it would all vanish for both of us. Do you know how I feel? The same way I did the night we stood on the bridge and watched the lights come on in Bennington . . .
    Don read it through incredulously, and with fascination. The girl was madly in love with Dusenberry. She waited only for him to answer, for merely a sign from him. She spoke of the town in Vermont where they had been, and he wondered if they had met there or gone there together? My God, he thought, if Rosalind would only write him a letter like this! In this case, apparently, Dusenberry wouldn’t write to her. From the letter, Dusenberry might not have written once since they had last seen each other. Don sealed the letter with glue, carefully, and put it into his pocket.
    The last paragraph repeated itself in his mind:
I didn’t think I’d write to you again, but now I’ve done it. I have to be honest, because that’s the way I am.
Don felt that was the way he was, too. The paragraph went on:
Do you remember or have you forgotten, and do you want to see me again or don’t you? If I don’t hear from you in a few days, I’ll know.
    My love always, Edith
    He looked at the date on the stamp. The letter had been posted six days ago. He thought of the girl called Edith Whitcomb spinning and stretching out the days, trying to convince herself somehow that the delay was justified. Six days. Yet of course she still hoped. She was hoping this minute down there in Scranton, Pennsylvania. What kind of man was Dusenberry? A Casanova? A married man who wanted to drop a flirtation? Which of the six or eight men he had ever noticed in his building was Dusenberry? A couple of hatless chaps dashing out at 8:30 in the morning? A slower-moving man in a Homburg? Don never paid much attention to his neighbors.
    He held his breath, and for an instant he seemed to feel the stab of the girl’s own loneliness and imperilled hope, to feel the last desperate flutterings of hope against his own lips. With one word, he could make her so happy. Or rather, Dusenberry could.
    “Bastard,” he whispered.
    He put the suit down, went to his worktable and wrote on a scrap of paper, “Edith, I love you.” He liked seeing it written, legible. He felt it settled an important matter that had been precariously balanced before. Don crumpled up the paper and threw it into the waste-basket.
    Then he went downstairs and forced the letter back in the box, and dropped his suit at the cleaners. He walked a long way up Second Avenue, grew tired and kept walking until he was at the edge of Harlem, and then he caught a bus downtown. He was hungry, but he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to eat. He was thinking, deliberately, of nothing. He was waiting for the night to pass and for morning to bring the next mail delivery. He was thinking, vaguely, of Rosalind. And of the girl in Scranton. A pity people had to suffer so from their emotions. Like himself. For though Rosalind had made him so happy, he couldn’t deny that these last three weeks had been a torture. Yes, my God, twenty-two days now! He felt strangely ashamed tonight of admitting it had been twenty-two days. Strangely ashamed? There was nothing strange about it, if he faced it. He felt ashamed of possibly having lost her. He should have told her very definitely in Juan-les-Pins that he not only loved her but wanted to marry her. He might have lost her now because he hadn’t.
    The thought made