The Lonely by Paul Gallico Page A

Harman had not yet given up the fight. He believed more than ever that he was right and Jerry was wrong.
    He asked quietly, without moving: “What are you going to tell Catharine when you see her?”
    Jerry turned and looked up at him heavily. He replied: “About what happened—I’ve got to . . . about Patches and me . . .”
    “Are you going to tell her that you lived together . . .”
    Jerry suddenly cried: “Oh, Christ, Dad, stop hitting below the belt!” Then he said: “I’m sorry. I guess not. One doesn’t speak about such things. I’ve got to ask her to let me out. I thought if I told her what Patches means to . . .”
    He stopped suddenly, because his mind, grown vivid under the impact of the things that had been happening to him, leaped ahead as it were to show him to himself sitting in the chintz-decorated sun-porch off the living-room of the Quentin house with Catharine at his side.
    And he saw her there as he had last remembered her—so healthily beautiful, loving, young, vigorous, clear-eyed, innocent, sexless, and inexperienced as . . . as he had once been and now was no longer. His imagination took him the next step onward and, with shocking clarity, showed him the expression of disbelief, anguish, injury, and deep hurt come into her eyes when he told her about Patches and himself.
    What was he going to tell her? How was he going to make her understand? Back in Glasgow yesterday, in his agony and fear of losing Patches forever, in the confusion of his mind that came from the realization of what she meant to him, he had seen himself in a way making up to Patches for the things he had not said to her by saying them to Catharine.
    His thought had been that Catharine would understand then, that she would not want him when she heard from him the story of his love for Patches. And on the long, drumming flight across the ocean he had even made up the words.
    “It’s like nothing that ever happened before to me. I’ve got to tell you, Catharine, so you’ll understand. She’s part of me. She’s under my skin and in my heart. She’s my pain and my delight and my breath. She’s in my mind and in my blood wherever I go, whatever I do. I never understood what love was before I knew Patches. There’s nothing of me left, nothing that doesn’t belong to her and always will . . .”
    Standing at the sideboard, the telephone within his reach, the dark instrument that had so nearly contained the voice of Catharine, Jerry suddenly found himself so filled with shame, horror, and revulsion that he could hardly bear to contemplate it. He thought his knees would give way, and he slumped into a chair and buried his face in his hands. Dreadful lightnings of truth were searing the dark abyss that had opened up before him.
    For now that he was home—here in his father’s house, where he had been raised, where he had spent his childhood and his boyhood, where he had been taught the creed and tenets of a gentleman—now that for the first time he had begun to think, he knew that the idea that had driven him to take the crazy ride with Eagles was utterly fantastic and completely impossible.
    It was the purest madness to have thought that he could walk coolly into Catharine’s house, jilt her, win his release, and fly back to his Patches. Life wasn’t like that.
    Had he really contemplated facing this girl he had known and worshipped for all of his adolescent life, to whom he was engaged by public announcement, who by now had his most recent letter, in which he had written to hint of the close approach of the day when they might be married, to ask her sympathy and understanding because he had fallen in love with someone else? Had he actually thought he could make a love declaration to Catharine about another girl?
    The shock of the total collapse of this ridiculous, wholly illusory boy’s world shook him physically and made him feel sick.
    Harman Wright got up and came over to his son and put his hand on his shoulder,