Free The Lonely by Paul Gallico Page A

over roads every inch of which he had traversed in his jalopy when he was a kid, he wanted more time to think, to get acclimatized to being back, to rid himself of the dream fabric that seemed to enfold him like a mantle. He had the queer feeling that if he came banging up the house in a cab, slamming the door, he would wake everyone. He wished now that he had telephoned. Sometime the queer illusion must break, sometime he must find himself at home . . .
    Half-way through Westbury he tapped on the window. “This will do right here.” He got out and dismissed the cab at the corner of Main and Chestnut opposite the high school.
    The street was filled with Saturday-afternoon shopping traffic. Through the store window he could see Joe the shine man giving the final gloss to a patron’s shoes with the characteristic flamboyant flip of his polishing rag. Next door was Malloy’s, the candy store where he and Catharine would stop for some ice cream after the movies. Down the street the Bijou Theatre marquee advertised a picture he had seen six months ago at Gedsborough Airbase. Templeton’s market, where his mother used to send him on his bicycle to pick up something the delivery boy had forgotten, was jammed with people picking over the vegetables and fruits. He recognized Herbert the fat groceryman tearing off the greens from bunches of carrots.
    Under the noise of motor traffic and the squawks of a swing band from Milt’s radio shop, he could hear the thudding of ball against racket gut from the tennis courts at the side of the high school. Looking up at the high school, he could see the windows of the chem. lab. were open and figures moving about or bending over, kids working overtime on a problem late Saturday afternoon . . . The showcase of Pappos the florist was full of blue hydrangea plants, and Jerry remembered that his mother liked them. The air smelled of expensive cars and caramel popcorn from Malloy’s and gasoline and summer sun on pavements, and still he was not at home . . .
    His mind was turning back to Kenwoulton with a queer kind of yearning for the ugly red-brick buildings with their bomb gaps, odor of bitter beer when you passed a pub, the persistent peat-smoke smell that hung in the air, the drab queues waiting at the bus signs, the tobacco shops with their green- and red-colored packets of cigarettes and tins of tobacco, old newsmen hawking the London papers, apple-cheeked slatterns gossiping in front of the butcher shops or standing in line at the fishmongers’, startling and yet amusing his ears with the off-key music of their Midlands burr.
    It wasn’t that he liked Kenwoulton, or even England. He had felt exiled there like the rest of the kids, and thought only of home, talked of it, longed for it, counted each mission, each day that brought him nearer to it. It was more that his mind, confused and harried by the events of the past forty-eight hours, was searching for surroundings where he would not feel a stranger, where he could feel comfortable. He had never so much as consciously looked at Kenwoulton when he had been in that dismal, ugly Midlands manufacturing town, but now his memory of it was suddenly sharp and filled with warmth. And it was the place where Patches would be . . .
    Jerry saw no one he knew; no one appeared to recognize him. There was no one who expected to see him standing there. He was just a young Air Force officer, another soldier of many who were a part of the afternoon traffic, but it gave Jerry the strangest feeling that he was invisible, that he did not exist as a corporeal body, that physically he was not really there at all.
    He turned slowly and walked up the street towards the road that would lead him the half-mile to Severn Avenue and home. A block away he saw the familiar porticoed front of the public library and the building of St. John’s Episcopal Church next to it. A girl came out of the library with some books under her arm, and something about her swinging