Free The Translator by John Crowley Page B

tall (a quarterback), with Ben’s dark short hair, but thick glasses too, designed probably to correct a still-detectable crossed eye: Kit cherished that weakness. She couldn’t think of any way to attract him, and didn’t try. In her diary and inwardly she assembled the parts of her crush like the elements of a hard poem, oddly assorted things to be connected in such a way that they made an anfractuous figure, a

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    tetrahedron maybe, solid and gleaming and worthy of the feelings that had evoked it, that it evoked.
    She hadn’t written to Ben about Burke. She found she couldn’t write down his silly name on letter paper. For one thing.
    “Well it’s swell,” Ben said, and gave her back the sheet of onionskin.
    He had changed while he was away. She watched him, they all did when he wasn’t noticing; they could watch him because he didn’t notice. Watched how he looked out the windows at the brown lawns and bare trees, trying to remember them maybe, or maybe not seeing them at all, his attention on something else: as though during his absence he had grown a private self, and was no longer whole, all of a piece, the way he had been. Kit babbled at him and teased him, afraid and cold inside.
    Christmas Eve after George and Marion went to bed, Kit and Ben sat up; Kit insisted they watch an inane Christmas movie they’d seen together as kids. The only lights were the TV and the gray-green tree; already it looked a little tawdry and leftover, on the way out. On the sofa’s broad arm were the two books Kit had given Ben, printed by the Peter Pauper Press: The Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire and Pascal’s Pensées.
    “A matched pair,” she said. “Small, so you can carry them.”
    “Uh-huh,” he said, nodding earnestly, maybe too earnestly. The Baudelaire had harsh, black woodcuts, dark women, demon lovers. It was for him, but even more it was from her: something of her, a part of her life for him to carry. The Pascal, though, was just for him, for his faith and his clear-eyed austerity: it scared Kit, but she thought Ben would respond. “So nicely wrapped too.”
    Kit had got a Christmas-season job at a department store downtown; they’d taught her to wrap, tie bows, skills she’d never lose.
    “So Merry Christmas,” she said; and because it was allowed, on this night of this year surely, she hugged him, laid her cheek against his rough one and held him a long time: feeling a hot dreamlike relief in his touch, a completeness, even as she felt him shrink and begin to extricate himself. Merry Christmas they said on the screen, the bishop’s 64

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    wife, the suave angel who had come from heaven to help them, the happy people. Merry Christmas, while the big flakes of snow fell on the black-and-white town and the overcoats and fedoras and pheasant-feather hats.
    “So tell me,” he said. “What’s the plan? What are you going to do next year?”
    “I don’t know yet.” She spread her skirt flat with her hands, far from him again; shy to be questioned, her imaginary futures brought forth.
    “I’ve sent away for some college catalogs. I could get a scholarship maybe. Mom wants me to apply to Vassar.”
    “Good school.”
    “Oh my God,” Kit said. “All girls? I don’t think so. I don’t really like girls that much.”
    “No?”
    “No. You know that.”
    “Just boys?”
    “Well no, I mean . . . Oh you. You know. Ben: you know.”
    He wouldn’t talk about his own plans for when he got out, whether he’d use the GI Bill to go to school or if he’d get a job or what; he deflected his family’s inquiries with jokes, maybe he’d be a cop, the army was good training for police work, a lot of guys he knew. Or jani-torial work too. Then Christmas night, as they sat in the kitchen eating cold turkey and pie, he told them what he had decided: he was going to reenlist when his hitch was done. Re-up he said: he’d learned a new language, and used it shyly but