The line formed by these elements, then, made an angle with the line representing his children, and the single fact here was that he loved them. He loved them! No amount of ignominy or venom could make parting from them imaginable. As he thought of them, they seemed to be the furniture of his soul, its lintel and roof tree.
The line representing himself, he knew, would be most prone to miscalculations. He thought himself candid, healthy, and knowledgeable (who else could remember so much Euclid?), but waking in the morning, feeling useful and innocent, he had only to speak to Mathilda to find his usefulness and his innocence squandered. Why should his ingenuous commitments to life seem to harass the best of him? Why should he, wandering through the toy department, be calumniated as a Peeping Tom? His triangle might give him the answer, he thought, and in a sense it did. The sides of the triangle, determined by the relevant information, were equal, as were the angles opposite these sides. Suddenly he felt much less bewildered, happier, more hopeful and magnanimous. He thought, as one does two or three times a year, that he was beginning a new life.
Coming home on the train, he wondered if he could make a geometrical analogy for the boredom of a commuters’ local, the stupidities in the evening paper, the rush to the parking lot. Mathilda was in the small dining room, setting the table, when he returned. Her opening gun was meant to be disabling. “Pinkerton fink,” she said. “Gumshoe.” While he heard her words, he heard them without anger, anxiety, or frustration. They seemed to fall short of where he stood. How calm he felt, how happy. Even Mathilda’s angularity seemed touching and lovable; this wayward child in the family of man. “Why do you look so happy?” his children asked. “Why do you look so happy, Daddy?” Presently, almost everyone would say the same. “How Mallory has changed. How well Mallory looks. Lucky Mallory!”
The next night, Mallory found a geometry text in the attic and refreshed his knowledge. The study of Euclid put him into a compassionate and tranquil frame of mind, and illuminated, among other things, that his thinking and feeling had recently been crippled by confusion and despair. He knew that what he thought of as his discovery could be an illusion, but the practical advantages remained his. He felt much better. He felt that he had corrected the distance between his reality and those realities that pounded at his spirit. He might not, had he possessed any philosophy or religion, have needed geometry, but the religious observances in his neighborhood seemed to him boring and threadbare, and he had no disposition for philosophy. Geometry served him beautifully for the metaphysics of understood pain. The principal advantage was that he could regard, once he had put them into linear terms, Mathilda’s moods and discontents with ardor and compassion. He was not a victor, but he was wonderfully safe from being victimized. As he continued with his study and his practice, he discovered that the rudeness of headwaiters, the damp souls of clerks, and the scurrilities of traffic policemen could not touch his tranquility, and that these oppressors, in turn, sensing his strength, were less rude, damp, and scurrilous. He was able to carry the conviction of innocence, with which he woke each morning, well into the day. He thought of writing a book about his discovery: Euclidean Emotion: The Geometry of Sentiment.
At about this time he had to go to Chicago. It was an overcast day, and he took the train. Waking a little after dawn, all usefulness and innocence, he looked out the window of his bedroom at a coffin factory, used-car dumps, shanties, weedy playing fields, pigs fattening on acorns, and in the distance the monumental gloom of Gary. The tedious and melancholy scene had the power over his spirit of a show of human stupidity. He had never applied his theorem to landscapes, but he discovered that, by translating the components of the moment into a parallelogram, he was able to put the discouraging countryside away from him until it seemed harmless, practical, and even charming. He ate a hearty breakfast and did a good day’s work. It was a day that needed no geometry. One of his associates in Chicago asked him to dinner. It was an invitation that he felt he could not refuse, and he showed up at half past six at a little brick house in a part of the city with which he was unfamiliar. Even before the door opened, he felt that he was going to need Euclid.
His hostess, when she opened the door, had been crying. She held a drink in her hand. “He’s in the cellar,” she sobbed, and went into a small living room without telling Mallory where the cellar was or how to get there. He followed her into the living room. She had dropped to her hands and knees, and was tying a tag to the leg of a chair. Most of the furniture, Mallory noticed, was tagged. The tags were printed: CHICAGO STORAGE WAREHOUSE. Below this she had written: “Property of Helen Fells McGowen.” McGowen was his friend’s name. “I’m not going to leave the s. o. b. a thing,” she sobbed. “Not a stick.”
“Hi, Mallory,” said McGowen, coming through the kitchen. “Don’t pay any attention to her. Once or twice a year she gets sore and puts tags on all the furniture, and claims she’s going to put it in storage and take a furnished room and work at Marshall Field’s.”
“You don’t know anything,” she said.
“What’s new?” McGowen asked.
“Lois Mitchell just telephoned. Harry got drunk and put the kitten in the blender.”
“Is she coming over?”
“Of course.”
The doorbell rang. A disheveled woman with wet cheeks came in. “Oh, it was awful,” she said. “The children were watching. It was their little kitten and they loved it. I wouldn’t have minded so much if the children hadn’t been watching.”
“Let’s get out of here,” McGowen said, turning back to the kitchen. Mallory followed him through the kitchen, where there were no signs of dinner, down some stairs into a cellar furnished with a Ping-Pong table, a television set, and a bar. He got Mallory a drink. “You see, Helen used to be rich,” McGowen said. “It’s one of her difficulties. She came from very rich people. Her father had a chain of laundromats that reached from here to Denver. He introduced live entertainment in laundromats. Folk singers. Combos. Then the Musicians’ Union ganged up on him, and he lost the whole thing overnight. And she knows that I fool around but if I wasn’t promiscuous, Mallory, I wouldn’t be true to myself. I mean, I used to make out with that Mitchell dame upstairs. The one with the kitten. She’s great. You want her, I can fix it up. She’ll do anything for me. I usually give her a little something. Ten bucks or a bottle of whiskey. One Christmas I gave her a bracelet. You see, her husband has this suicide thing. He keeps taking sleeping pills, but they always pump him out in time. Once, he tried to hang himself?”
