National Avenue by Booth Tarkington (book recommendations website .txt) 📕

kind things for me that do not help me at all, and the truth is most of them only irritate me. How odd it is that I write to you about not being understood⁠—you who are seldom kind to me and often most unjust! Yet in a way I have always felt that you do understand me a little⁠—perhaps unsympathetically⁠—but at least you give me the luxury of being partly understood.

Yes, I still care for him, but when I think of his awful Ornaby thing I sometimes believe I have married a madman. It is nothing as I said⁠—hopeless⁠—a devastated farm⁠—and yet when he speaks of it his eye lights up and he begins to walk about and gesture and talk as if he actually saw houses and streets⁠—and shops⁠—and thousands of people living there! If this isn’t hallucination, I don’t know what hallucination means.

But since our excursion to the place I’ve almost cured him of talking about it to me! I just can’t stand it! And what is pleasant, I think he probably goes to talk about it to another woman. Already! A perfectly enormous girl seven or eight feet tall that he’d picked out to be my most intimate friend! Because she’s been his most intimate friend, of course. But I suppose all men are like that.

The heat did relax for a day or two⁠—but it’s back again. Sometimes I can’t believe I am actually in this place⁠—apparently for life⁠—and I begin to hope that I’ll wake up. I think even you would pity me sometimes, George.

XII

In the minds of Mrs. Savage’s neighbours across the street and of the habitual passersby, that broad plate-glass window where it was her custom to sit for the last hour of every afternoon had come to bear the significance of a glass over a portrait. All long thoroughfares and many of even the shortest have such windows; and the people who repeatedly pass that way will often find the portrait window becoming a part, however slight, of their own lives; but it will seldom be an enduring part, except as a fugitive, pathetic memory. For a time the silent old face is seen framed there every day, or it may be a pale and wistful child looking out gravely upon the noisy world. Then abruptly one day the window is only a window and no more a portrait; the passerby has a moment of wonder whenever he goes by, but presently may have his faintly troubled question answered by a wreath on the door; and afterwards the window that was once a portrait will seem to him a little haunted.

Mrs. Savage’s window had been a portrait so long that even the school children who went homeward that way in the autumn afternoons noticed a vacancy behind the glass and missed her from the frame; but new seasons came and passed, and no wreath appeared upon her door. She had been so thoroughly alive for so many years that the separation of herself from life could not be abrupt, even if she wished it. She did not wish it she told Harlan, one rainy night, as he sat beside her bed after bringing her the news that she was a great-grandmother.

“I suppose it seems funny to you,” she said. “You must wonder why an old woman with nothing to live for would still want to live. I suppose you think it’s because I just want to eat a little more and to lie here listening to that!” With a hand now become the very ghost of a hand, she gestured toward a window where the parted curtains revealed black panes slushed with noisy water by the strong west wind. “How you must wonder!”

“Oh, no,” Harlan said, though she spoke the truth. “I don’t wonder at all, grandma.”

“Yes, you do! How could a young person help wondering about such a thing? Year before last I could still go out for a little walk; last year I could only go for a drive in the afternoons. After that I could still get downstairs and sit by the window; then I couldn’t even do that, and could only hobble around upstairs;⁠—then I couldn’t even get into another room without being helped. And now for a month I’ve not been able to get out of bed⁠—and I’ll never be able to. No wonder you wonder I want to hang on!”

“But I don’t,” he insisted. “I don’t, indeed.”

“You do. What do you think I have to live for?”

“Why, partly for your family, grandma. We’re all devoted to you; and besides you have your memories⁠—I know you have many happy memories.”

She laughed feebly, but nevertheless with audible asperity, interrupting his rather stumbling reassurances. “ ‘Happy memories!’ Young people are always talking about ‘happy memories’; and they think old people ‘live in their happy memories.’ I advise you not to look forward to spending your old age in that way! There’s no such thing, young man.”

“No such thing as a happy memory?”

“Not when you’re as old as I am,” she said. “You can only have a happy memory of something when you can look forward to something of the same kind happening again; but I can’t look forward to anything. Yet I still want to hang on!”

Harlan laughed gently. “Then doesn’t that prove you do look forward to something, grandma?”

“No,” she said. “It only proves I still have a little curiosity. I’d like to live twenty years just to prove I’m right about how this baby’s going to turn out.”

The implication of her tone was grim with conviction⁠—clearly she spoke of a baby who could not turn out well⁠—and Harlan was amused by his own perception of a little drama: his grandmother, clinging with difficulty to one extreme edge of life and prophesying only black doom for this new person who had just crawled up into life over the opposite extreme edge. “I’m sorry you feel so gloomy about that baby, grandma. I’m rather pleased, myself, to