On the Run by John D. MacDonald

he had not married her with the idea of receiving monies from me. She wrote us some letters. I did not answer them. I did not let my wife know I had received them. Ah, I was a righteous man, puffed with my own sense of injured self-importance, quelling any feeling of love and sympathy as being a kind of weakness.
    “Your brother George was born in 1921. Shanley was moving from job to job, from one industrial city to another. He was a brawler, and found it difficult to keep any job very long. I knew it was only a matter of time until he abandoned my daughter and my first grandson, and then she would come home. I would wait. I lost track of them entirely in 1925. I could have instituted a search, but I thought that would be a sign of weakness. You were born in 1927, I learned later. This was a bleakunhappy house, Sidney. Quite suddenly the world moved into a monstrous era called the Depression. No values were ever the same again. All the security I’d worked for, it all crumbled away, boy. Margaret died in her sleep in 1930. Jane Weese came here to take care of me and the house. I was sixty years old, and I did not give a damn. I was certain I would not live long. I was going through the motions of trying to ward off the ultimate financial disaster, because that was habit, the familiarity of things to do. In 1931 I received a phone call. Your father was in a city jail serving ninety days. Alicia had died after a long illness. They found my address among her papers. Your father’s term still had a few weeks to run, I peddled some jewelry that had belonged to your grandmother in order to get the extra money to go there and bring my daughter’s body back for burial here. I brought you back too. I would have brought George back, but I could not find him. Two weeks later your father came storming in here when I was out. He pushed Jane to the floor, grabbed you and took you away. I knew that a man like that should not, could not have custody of you. I would take you and George away from him, legally. But it costs money to accomplish such a thing. And I set about my work with a new goal, Sidney. But they were black years. It took time. So much time. I made mistakes. It was almost eight years before I reestablished myself. It took time to get information about you. I learned that Clyde Shanley had been killed in an industrial accident in Youngstown. I learned he had married again. My people could not trace the woman. Where were you?”
    “I was eleven when he died. George had run away two years before that. Hilda got some money when my father died. We went to Atlantic City. When the money was gone, she took off. I was twelve. I hitch-hiked back to Youngstown because, I guess, that was the place I remembered best. They picked me up after I was there about three days, and the juvenile court put me in a foster home. It wasn’t too bad. They, the couple who took me in, usually had three or four kids at all times. It was a business deal, extra income for sheltering kids.”
    “We’ll talk more, Sidney, later on. I’ve gotten too tired. Every part of this mechanism is ninety-two years old, full of flaws and fragilities. I’m a passenger in a racketyold vehicle, and I must not force it beyond its limits. But I want you to know I am ashamed of myself, Sidney. A large segment of my life is shadowed by an attitude I now find despicable.”
    “What else could you have done?”
    “Come now, my boy. Don’t try to present me with ready-made rationalizations. Out of pride I suppressed my love and denied my only child, giving her no opportunity to admit her marriage was a mistake, forcing her to live with it and die with it.” He closed his eyes. His voice became faint. “If I had only …”
    The voice stopped. Shanley stared at him. He hurried to find Paula and met her as she was coming through the living room toward the study.
    “I was coming to break it up,” she said.
    “He doesn’t look right.”
    Her smile vanished. She