Free The Cry of the Owl by Patricia Highsmith Page B

sister and the house was chaos.” Robert smiled. “But still it was a home, you know? You won’t know unless you’ve ever not had a home. I had a tiny room to myself and it was hard enough to find an uninterrupted hour to study in, kids were always coming in and out, but around midnight, if Kermit and I were still up studying, his mother would bring us pie and cake and milk. It sounds silly, but it was a home, more than I’d had at my home. Not that I blame my mother. She had her troubles with my father and she did the best she could. But she couldn’t make anything solid out of what she had—my father always drinking and divorce or maybe desertion just around the corner. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear. Probably not.”
    “Where’s Kermit now?”
    “Dead.” He took another cigarette. “He died in a fluke accident up in Alaska. We were doing our Army service, and we’d arranged to be in the same outfit. We thought we might get sent to Korea, but neither of us ever saw Korea or ever saw any fighting. Kermit was killed by a catapult. Hit in the back with it. It happened one morning. I was getting some coffee for both of us and I’d just lefthim for five minutes and was coming back with it—and there he was on the ground dead, with a few fellows standing around him.” Robert felt suddenly awkward with her steady, serious eyes on him. He had not mentioned Kermit to anyone in years, had never told the story to any of his friends in New York. “As soon as I got through my Army service, I went to New York,” Robert said.
    Jenny nodded. “You know something about death, too, then.”
    “I know something about losing a friend. But death—? I never saw fellows I knew killed all around me, the way a lot of fellows see it in war. Death? No.” Robert shook his head.
    “I know exactly what you mean about hanging on to sanity. I have to do it, too. When my kid brother died three years ago, I suddenly thought nothing made sense any more. It seemed to me everybody was crazy except me. You know what they always say about real nuts thinking that?” A shy smile spread her lips and made her eyes sparkle. “I mean, the whole world just went on the way it did before, my father went on going to the office, my mother cleaned the house—and yet death had just been staying with us there.” She drew on her cigarette, staring ahead at nothing that was in the room. “I was afraid of death. I had to keep thinking about it and thinking about it until I came to terms with it—in my way. Until it became familiar—do you know what I mean?” She glanced up at him, then looked in front of her again. “Now I’m not afraid of it at all. I can understand why the man says ‘Brother Death’ in your dream.”
    “Well—
I’m
not exactly comfortable when I have that dream,” Robert said.
    She looked at him. “But someday you will be, if you think about it. Think long enough about it.”
    Involuntarily, Robert shook his head. It was almost a shudder. He stared at her young face, puzzled.
    “When I realized this about death,” she went on, “I saw the world in a different way. Greg thinks death depresses me, but he’s wrong. I just don’t like to hear other people talking about it with the usual horror. You know. And—after I met you, you made me see the world in a different way, too, only a much happier way. For instance, the whole inside of the bank where I work. It used to be so bleak and so bo-oring. It’s different now. It’s cheerful. Everything’s easier.”
    Oh, he knew the feeling. Being in love. Suddenly the world’s O.K. Suddenly the barren trees are singing. The girl was so young. Now she was talking about Dostoevski, and he was hardly listening, because he was trying to think how to cut it off, painlessly. All their conversation had done, he felt, was trammel her more with him. He walked the floor while she talked about “destiny” and “infinity”—she seemed to believe in an afterlife—and