Her supposed former fiancé of so many years had told her in a letter that he knew to the penny how much he owed her. He had kept some sort of ledger. He must have kept it from the very beginning, from the time he took her to dinner and then realized he had forgotten his wallet. She blushed when she thought of it. He said he would pay it all back to the last penny, as soon as his situation began to improve. He said, “It will take some time to repay you in full, since the total is quite large.” What horrible, vindictive little streak of honesty had moved him to keep a record of these “debts”? She had not kept anything like an account, had never thought of such a thing, had never even felt she was giving anything away. None of it mattered now. To have been such a fool mattered. In that letter he had said, “I am sorry if I seem to have misled you.” She could not let herself remember the lonely pleasures she found in living so simply, actually enjoying the renunciations and the economies that would some time make possible — what? — ordinary happiness. The kind of happiness she saw in the luncheonette, passed in the street.
She knew there had to be Shakespeare and Dickens around the house, Mark Twain had to be somewhere. Kipling was on the dresser in Luke and Teddy’s room, as he always was, but she hated Kipling. Finally she asked her father what had become of the books she liked to read; he made a phone call, and within two weeks six boxes arrived from six addresses, full of the good old books and with some sober and respectable new novels included, too, Andersonville, The High and the Mighty, Something of Value. She put ten of them in a stack beside the radio. At this time she could decide nothing about her life. She did not want to think about her life. She opened Andersonville. Her father told her, “The fellow that wrote that is from Iowa. I forget what town. He’s famous now. I forget his name.” She knew about MacKinley Kantor of Webster City. Andersonville was long and notoriously sad. It had broken the heart of greater Des Moines. She decided she would read it to the end. She could weep without upsetting her father.
Then one day the mail came, a bill or two, a note to her from Hope, and a letter addressed to her father, who had come into the kitchen for a glass of water. “This letter is from Jack,” he said. “I know his hand. This is his hand.” He sat down and placed the letter on the table in front of him. “Quite a surprise,” he said softly, gruffly. Then he was so still she was afraid he might be having a spell of some kind, a stroke. But he was only praying. He put out his hand and touched a corner of the envelope. “I believe I’ll be needing a handkerchief, Glory, if you don’t mind. They’re in that top right-hand drawer.” And there they were, in a neat stack, large and substantial. He had always carried a beautiful handkerchief, since in his line of work he never knew when it might be needed. She brought him one, and he wiped his face with it. “So we know he’s alive. That’s really something.”
She thought, Dear God, what if he’s wrong? What if this is a mistake brought on by yearning and old age?
She said, “Do you mind if I look at it?”
“Well, it’s a letter from your brother! Of course you’ll want to look at it! Thoughtless of me!”
She took it up. It was slight, no more than a slip of paper, in an envelope with a St. Louis return address and postmark. Reverend Robert Boughton in a small, distinct, graceful hand. “Should I open it?”
“Oh no, my dear, I’m sorry, but I’d better do that myself, in case there’s anything confidential in it.
