Free After Dachau by Daniel Quinn Page A

let them flow.
    After a while we had another drink.
    Then, after another while, we agreed we were getting soresitting on those goddamned hard chairs. The mattress was there in the corner, and we didn’t think anything of transferring our tortured bones to it—didn’t think anything of it or mean anything by it. Mallory was in the middle of a story about her and another painter I’d never heard of.
    To be blunt about it, she slept with them all. She figured this was bound to bother “a prissy-assed character” like me. I told her I could always cover my ears if it got to be too much for me.
    We were getting pretty drunk.
    We went on handing the bottle back and forth.
    It wasn’t very comfortable just sitting on the mattress. Before long, without thinking about it or meaning anything by it, we were stretched out with both our heads on her one pillow. But since there was just that one pillow, it was eventually more comfortable for us both for me to slide my arm under her shoulders.
    And so on.
    I woke up in the middle of the night, got dressed, and used a sketch pad to write a note saying some things I was glad to say to her and telling her I’d be in touch in a day or two.

FOUND
    It is much easier to dig one large grave than to dig many small ones.

IN MY NOTE I didn’t try to explain why I had to leave—or even that I did have to leave. I can’t imagine how I could have.
    At some point during that long, boozy evening, it all became clear to me—but not in a dazzling flash that had to be acknowledged and dealt with right away. It was rather more like a dull, echoing thud, almost a groan, that could be ignored for the time being, because, after all, it wasn’t going to go away.
    No, it certainly wasn’t going to go away.
    I had to go home. Home was where I had to be in order to figure out what to do next. I needed a place where someone would cook me things to eat without my asking for them or deciding what they should be. I needed a place where someonewould open the drapes in my room in the morning and close them at night while I sat there slack-jawed, staring into the middle distance.
    It took me a day and two nights to come up with a solution. It was a solution that seemed almost ridiculous, though it did (or might do) what it had to do, and I could ask for no more than that. After breakfast I invaded Mother’s study, interrupting the writing of one of the dozens of charmingly intelligent letters she seemed to produce every day.
    She looked up and with all the noblesse oblige of a royal instantly gave me her full attention.
    “If I’m not mistaken, we own a school,” I stated, knowing she would understand this shorthand, which meant that there was a school singularly in our debt owing to our generous contributions.
    “Yes,” she said, “a very swank little establishment for young ladies. Somewhere north of the Catskills.” Bless her, she didn’t add (as many a mother would), “Why do you want to know?”
    “I need an extraordinary favor there. I need to borrow a class for an afternoon.”
    This was not shorthand, so she had to ask what I meant by borrowing a class. After I explained, she said, “I can’t imagine why you’d want to do such a thing, but I’m not the person who needs to be persuaded.”
    Taking a sheet of notepaper from a drawer, she jotted down the name and number of that person, and that was that.
    I phoned and spoke to the director, a Dr. Alwyn Reese. Like Mother, she couldn’t imagine why I wanted to do such a thing. This wasn’t resistance. We both knew there was practicallyno request from the Tull family that would have been denied, provided it wasn’t manifestly illegal or immoral. She was rather in the position of a parish priest receiving a request from an archbishop fresh from a personal audience with the pope. All the same, she wanted to understand and deserved to understand.
    I explained, knowing how bizarre it must sound and knowing that the entire explanation would