One afternoon, after returning home early from the office, he had sat in the living room with his sons and their grandmother and had watched a series of children’s cartoons and some nonsense involving a pair of animal-like hand puppets. Instead of concentrating on the screen he had watched the face of his mother-in-law become transformed with idiotic delight at the silliness of the cartoons. It was a sobering revelation: Lillian Hornsby was not a quiet, dignified old lady, but a simpleton to whom such television fare was high entertainment. From then on he could scarcely stand the sight of her, and he parried her purported jokes with a biting sarcasm that brought a meek lowering of her head, and shrill angry remarks from his wife.
During supper one evening he remarked that the boys needed haircuts, and said that he would take them to the barbershop the following day.
Brenda turned from the stove and said, “Why tomorrow? You’ll have to pay adult prices on Saturday. I’ll take them down after school on Monday.”
Normally this was as far as the incident would have gone, but Mrs. Hornsby had to say, “I don’t know why you don’t buy a pair of clippers and cut their hair yourself.” Then with her self-satisfied little giggle she added, “My husband always cut my boys’ hair himself. You know, Walter, a penny saved is a penny earned.”
The sudden anger he felt for her was out of all proportion to what she had said, but he felt it hot the muscles on his jaws and fill the backs of his eyeballs. “I don’t give a damn what Fred did!” he shouted. “This is my house and these are my kids. When I was a boy I didn’t like going out with an amateur haircut, and by God these boys aren’t going to either! And don’t give me any of your moronic pap about saving pennies!”
“Walter!” Brenda had cried, jumping away from the stove, her face ugly with pent-up hate and sudden anger.
“It’s all right, dear,” her mother whispered, in those tones of phony forgiveness and resignation he loathed. “I was only trying to help.” She covered her eyes with her hand as if crying, her mouth still working on her unswallowed food.
“I’m taking you two down to the barbershop in the morning!” he had shouted at the boys, who were pressed back against their chairs in fear. Then turning to his mother-in-law he said, “I make a fairly good living at my job. I can afford to squander an extra couple of dollars now and then, on haircuts or anything else. What did poor Fred get from saving his pennies while he was alive?” His voice rising to a shout. “He got nothing! Not a godammed thing but the knowledge that he had pissed away his manhood saving his money so that you —” leaning towards her — “so that you could outlive your usefulness, if you ever had any, and make life miserable for everybody else!”
Brenda was also shouting, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” in a long tearful monotone, but he wasn’t finished yet.
“You are everything I hate and despise in an old woman,” he said calmly, his voice strangely flat and even now. “You and your dried-up kind are responsible for half the divorces and nearly all of the fears and hatreds of my generation. Under the guise of mother love, or some other high-sounding piece of platitudinous crap, your kind have corrupted all your children. Well, you’re not going to corrupt my kids. From now on they watch their cowboy programs if they want to, and not the silly baby shows which are the only ones you understand.”
When he looked around him the children had run out of the kitchen, and Brenda rushed over and placed her arm around her mother’s shoulders. Both of them were crying.
“Come on, Mother,” his wife said, lifting the old woman to her feet and leading her from the room. He sat staring at his half-eaten plateful of food, still too choked with the things he hadn’t said to worry yet about the things he had.
That night and for the week following, his wife and mother-in-law slept together in one of the boys’ bedrooms. He ate his meals near the office and did not arrive home until late in the evening when all were in bed. The drinks he had had in downtown bars raised his spirits temporarily, but soured on his awakened anger as soon as he entered his house.
The following Friday he arrived home to find the house empty of occupants and in darkness. A curt note on the telephone table informed him that Brenda and the boys had gone West with Mrs. Hornsby. He picked it up and laughed; Brenda left more personal notes for the milkman. About three o’clock the next morning he awoke with a heavy feeling of loss and remorse, and it was only then that he began to see the emptiness that stretched before him.
Brenda had taken the TV set, her wedding gifts, and most of the kitchen gadgets, and even a new set of drapes from the picture window. He had laughed bitterly at her instinctive choice of these symbolic possessions.
Now, as he sat in his room in the rooming house, he recalled these things. His life with Brenda had not ended with one swift determined action, but slowly over a period of a month. He had been impatient to finish it, to escape from the bungalow, to get rid of his possessions along with his memories. But that, apparently, was not the way of such things. There had been endless negotiations about the sale of the house, furniture, and car which kept him imprisoned in the bungalow long after his use for it had ended.
He had discovered a trait in himself that had gone unrealized up to then: that there were usable objects and possessions he would sooner destroy than give to others. There had been evenings when he had sat before the living-room fireplace and had carried on a solitary burning of books, photographs and even a few cheap paintings, in a lonely auto-da-fé of his heretical dreams for the future. When the house was finally free of all his possessions but his clothes, he had felt free himself at last, free to go back to where he had begun more than eleven years ago. It was this search for his former freedom that had sent him back into a furnished room rather than into the apartment he could well afford.
Now he could write the novel he had been putting off for years, the autobiographical book about his youthful struggle for recognition, with his disguised self as its protagonist. Up to now he only had its title, Lead Them Through the Deep.
Tomorrow he would bring home some paper from the office and begin the writing of it. What was the name he had thought up for the main character? Jason. Jason Simon. No, Simon was the fictional name for too many villains, and it wasn’t Anglo-Saxon enough. Jason Bancroft? No. Jason Bourne. That was a good name, Jason Bourne. He rolled it around on his tongue.
He mentally wrote the title at the top of a fresh sheet of paper; beneath it, carefully centred, “by”; and, beneath that, “Walter Fowler.” It was a good name for a novelist — twelve letters and almost phonetic.
Glancing at his watch he saw that it was after six. He pulled on his topcoat and left the room.
As he crossed towards the stairs in the half darkness he became aware of a human presence, and caught a whiff of a pervasive perfume. He looked behind him just as the figure of a woman glided past and disappeared into the bathroom
“I’m sorry,” he said before she disappeared. “I didn’t see you.”
Without a word the woman pushed the door shut behind her, plunging the hallway into darkness. He had recognized her as the dark woman who had stared at him from the front window when he alighted from the taxi. With careful steps he felt his way down the stairs until he reached the area of light thrown by a small bulb in the downstairs hall.
As he headed for the front door a familiar voice from behind him shouted, “Going to supper, Mr. Fowler?”
He turned his head and found a doorway at the rear of the hall half-filled with the stocky figure of Mrs. Hill.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m going to supper.”
The early spring evening bore the smell of upturned earth and of growing things and the cars passed him with their windows open, so that he could hear brief snatches