Free The Pledge by Howard Fast Page B

mean, well, you know. Yes. What I mean is that one develops certain stereotypes and one applies them to a model —”
    She burst out laughing. “Oh, Bruce Bacon, you are precisely the kind of man one would meet in church.”
    â€œHey, come on,” Bruce said, “that was the first time I’ve been to church since I was in school.”
    â€œOh, I’m not putting you down, believe me. I mean you have such a delicious lack of sophistication — I mean you’re the way guys should be but aren’t. Oh, hell, I’m making you feel foolish.”
    He felt foolish, damn foolish. She reached across the table and took his hand. “Bruce, I model sport clothes. In college I majored in biology, and I thought I would do postgraduate work and become a marine biologist. That was the thing a few years ago. Very romantic. Then I met this designer — purely by accident — his name was Phil Sturtz, and he’s a part owner of Hillsdale. I met him at a party, and he asked me to help him out because one of his girls was sick, and that’s about it, and it’s as prissy and proper a job as one could have, and Hillsdale is a very large corporation, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and they had a very good war —”
    â€œWhat did you say?”
    â€œI said they had a good war.”
    â€œExplain it, please,” Bruce said. “What is a good war?”
    â€œBruce, you’ve been away too long, and I know exactly what you’re thinking, but people have made scads of money out of the war, and they say this one or that one had a good war, and it’s nothing I invented —”
    They worked it out. Bruce was able to confront his indignation and put it in its place. Sally was quite right; it was nothing that she had invented. Sally was bright, practical, and pragmatic, and indeed she helped anchor Bruce in a world called “postwar U.S.A.” It was a world apparently untouched by the incredible suffering the war had caused, and while there were those who wept for the dead, there were infinitely more untouched and unmoved who wanted to forget the extermination camps and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bleak, jobless days of the Depression were behind them forever, and there was a brisk, strutting little haberdasher who had come into the presidency. Nothing was the same, and Bruce might just as well come down to earth and realize that nothing was the same.
    On his second date, he took Sally to bed. There had been a
    French girl whom he met in Paris, and who was sweet and willing, and whom he had taken to bed in a brief affair that lasted for the three days he was in the city at the time; but beyond that he had not been unfaithful to Prudence. Now his passion exploded, and when their lovemaking was over, Sally studied him with surprise and new interest. She had not dreamed of such passion.
    â€œI want to marry you,” Bruce said. Actually, he was not expressing a need or even a desire; he was reacting to the sudden erasure of his loneliness, to the warm, wonderful feeling that he was part of another human being. Sally, on the other hand, had no thoughts or intentions of marriage, and certainly not to a newspaperman who spoke of giving up his job to write a book. Yet she found in Bruce qualities lacking in so many of the men she met: he was warm, nonjudgmental, well educated, better in bed than she could have expected, reasonably tall and good-looking, and well mannered. Sally had grown up with a mother who had very urgent social pretensions. She hardly could have escaped being influenced by those social pretensions and sharing in them to a certain degree, and while Bruce’s family were not a part of what went for society or celebrity — the two becoming interchangeable in New York City — they had enough breeding and elegance and money to satisfy her. But as for marriage, that was another thing entirely.
    â€œDo you?” she said,