Free The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer

It was not the doctor, though, who told. He was a kind, old-fashioned, whiskey-smelling white man who stopped toothaches with melted rubber and sewed catgut stitches with the precision of his seamstress mother. It was the neighbors who heard him driving to the house that morning and saw a healthy old widow standing on the porch, motioning to help someone inside. Within twenty-four hours the police were there with a draft officer and Holland was pulled, still sweating from sickness, into a waiting Ford while I screamed from the living-room window as if the nerves had been ripped out of me. In my mind, I had killed him.
    “Did your mother make you do it, boy?” the draft officer asked. Holland sat in a perfectly square little room with one long window; on its frosted glass, the shadow of a holly tree waved back and forth.
    Oh no, Holland told the man without looking at him. Then he pointed out it wasn’t something he did; it was just something he neglected to do. His mother had never said a word.
    “Was it philosophical beliefs?”
    He didn’t know, and wondered why he had to put anything.
    The man looked up at Holland and a terrible green reptile fury flashed over his features. “Boy, I can’t put down that you’re just a goddamn Negro coward. I can’t have that in my district. It don’t mean you’re not going to war.” Then, after making a few notes on his pad, he added, “I wouldn’t come back here, boy.”
    He was drafted after all, and put on an army bus; his mother could barely look at him to say goodbye; she was so cocooned in grief and shame and the waste of it all. She gave him a kiss and I gave him an old charm that he later lost in the ocean: a tarnished silver feather. I did not know what else to give a boy headed to purgatory. He hung it around his neck and tried to smile as the military bus began to rumble, pulling away from me and our hometown. He never saw Kentucky again or his mother, who died from a bad heart the following spring. He would never have seen me again if blind chance had not led me right by him on the beach. He never wrote in all those years.
    And then I was alone. Not only because I had lost Holland, which seemed like an unclimbable mountain of grief, but because of how things are in a small town. I was as smeared with yellow paint as Mrs. Cook, as much as Holland himself. My own family was ashamed of me, and it was this shame that sent me away from them forever.
    It was 1944, and his unit had been at sea only two weeks before they were blown to pieces and Holland found himself naked, his brown skin burning in the oily middle of the Pacific. He floated along on a bamboo chest, a 1-A Ishmael, staring at a sky all green and saffron and cotton wool, treading and waiting. Did it occur to him this was all because a girl back home had tried to save him? A girl who blamed herself for breaking the spell, for deciding to go for the doctor? I wonder what went through his head in those mad hours before they found him. A drowning man, grasping for any hand. Perhaps he never left that sea.
    The sun sank, with the ship, into the raisin-colored water. Glowworm lights of rescue boats arrived, echo-yelling in the darkness, and Holland was discovered babbling about a feather; he was taken to a medical boat, then to the overcrowded hospital where he was mistakenly assigned a white roommate who lay asleep for days until one morning, as Holland smoked out on the balcony, the stranger awakened and Holland said, laughing: “The dead have arisen.” That was it: the moment. When the love story passed from me to the man in the bed, staring at the vision before him. The moment, like the smallest gear of a hidden machine, that set our lives in motion.
    Did you love me? I wondered as I remembered it all over again. I had to go over every image, pick it apart for clues. I had not thought about it, not in years. I had wrapped my story in tissue and put it away. I had never told it to a soul. Not until the day I