Power by Howard Fast Page A

He felt that he was being patronized. When I had finished playing, he made some polite remarks, and a little while after that, he took his leave.
    Then, as always, I was sensitive to his every mood and action. Father was not. After he had seen Ben to the door, he turned to me, rubbing his hands with delight and grinning, and asked me,
    â€œWell, what do you think of your unwashed digger now?”—for all the world as if Ben was something he had created specially for that evening.
    â€œI think that’s a dreadful way to characterize him!”
    â€œHoney,” he cried, exploding with laughter, “that was your characterization, not mine.”
    â€œAt least I want to forget it.”
    â€œThen he got through to you.”
    â€œI found him quite interesting,” I said demurely. “I just wonder what happened when I was playing. He became very surly and unhappy, I think.”
    â€œDid he? Well, a young man’s to be forgiven his moods. The point is, he’s quite a man with quite a mind. You’ll agree to that, won’t you?”
    â€œHe’s certainly the most opinionated young man I ever met.”
    â€œYou mean that he has opinions and voices them. That’s not exactly the same thing as being opinionated.”
    â€œHe’s very sure of himself.”
    â€œAnd with reason,” Father said. “He’s had no one to depend on but himself.”
    Should I have told Father that I was in love? It was something I hardly dared to admit to myself—that for the first time in my life, I wanted a person so desperately that I could not think of anything but Ben Holt. I don’t believe that these things are accidents. If I had left it alone, perhaps I would never have seen him again, although Ben insisted that he was already in love with me. But that was after the fact, and people love differently, and to be in love—if indeed he was—meant something else to Ben than it meant to me.
    So here is a whole day, another day, gone with my writing, dear Alvin, and now for the first time, this journey so far back into the past is beginning to trouble me just a little. But I will finish it as truthfully as I know how, which is little less than truthful. I mean that the Dorothy Aimesley and the Ben Holt I write about are like two people I have read about or been told about. Have you ever remarked on the fact that in a dream you will see yourself in the third person, so to speak? This remembering is somewhat like a dream.

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    5
    Two days, and I have written nothing, but I have gone back into a past I never thought I would revisit. What sort of people are we, Alvin, that we look upon growing old with such skepticism and fear—yet avoid the past as the plague and revisit it with even greater fear? But I have been prowling over the old house, going through drawers and rummaging in the attic, and I have even wept a little over this and that. In my old bedroom, just where I had placed it more than forty years ago, I found a long, long letter from Ben, and I am sending it to you but in its proper place. You may peruse its intimacies without embarrassment and use it just as your own judgment dictates.
    I thought that I had the letter I wrote to Ben after the Sunday evening I spoke of above; I had some notion that he kept it and gave it back to me some time later. Well, perhaps he did—or perhaps he threw it away. Ben did not suffer from sentimentalism—and I mean that more as praise than criticism. In any case, I could not find it, but I remember the general tenor of it. The evening after, Monday evening, I wrote to him:
    Dear Mr. Holt:
    I enjoyed our evening with you, and would like to see you again, if you can find time. Since I am leaving for school soon, I have only this coming Sunday free. If your day is also free, I think it might be nice to pack a picnic basket and spend the day out of doors. Providing the weather is suitable. If you can let me know