The Love of a Good Woman

in the years ahead and how all these jobs that seemed incidental and almost playful, on the borders of my real life, were going to move front and center.
    I TOOK the job, sitting with Mr. Gorrie in the afternoons. On one little table beside the green recliner there was spread a hand towel—to catch spills—and on top of it were his pill bottles and liquid medicines and a small clock to tell him the time. The table on the other side was stacked with reading material. The morning paper, last evening’s paper, copies of
Life
and
Look
and
Maclean’s
, which were all big floppy magazines then. On the lower shelf of this table was a pile of scrapbooks—the kind that children use at school, with heavy brownish paper and rough edges. There were bits of newsprint and photographs sticking out of them. These were scrapbooks that Mr. Gorrie had kept over the years, until he had his stroke and couldn’t cut things out anymore. There was a bookcase in the room, but all it held was more magazines and more scrapbooks and a half shelf of high-school textbooks, probably Ray’s.
    “I always read him the paper,” Mrs. Gorrie said. “He hasn’t lost his ability, but he can’t manage to hold it up with both hands, and his eyes get tired out.”
    So I read to Mr. Gorrie while Mrs. Gorrie, under her flowered umbrella, stepped lightly off to the bus stop. I read him the sports page and the municipal news and the world news and all about murders and robberies and bad weather. I read the letters to the editor and the letters to a doctor who gave medical advice and the letters to Ann Landers, and her replies. It seemed that the sports news and Ann Landers roused his interest the most. I would sometimes mispronounce a player’s name or mix up the terminology, so that what I read made no sense, and he would direct me withdissatisfied grunts to try again. When I read the sports page he was always on edge, intent and frowning. But when I read Ann Landers his face relaxed and he made noises that I took to be appreciative—a kind of gurgling and deep snorting. He made these noises particularly when the letters touched on some especially feminine or trivial concern (a woman wrote that her sister-in-law always pretended that she had baked a cake herself, even though the paper doily from the bakeshop was still under it when it was served) or when they referred—in the careful manner of that time—to sex.
    During the reading of the editorial page or of some long rigmarole about what the Russians said and what the Americans said at the United Nations, his eyelids would droop—or, rather, the eyelid over his better eye would droop almost all the way and the one over his bad, darkened eye would droop slightly—and the movements of his chest would become more noticeable, so that I might pause for a moment to see if he had gone to sleep. And then he would make another sort of noise—a curt and reproving one. As I got used to him, and he got used to me, this noise began to seem less like reproof and more like reassurance. And the reassurance was not just about his not being asleep but about the fact that he was not at that moment dying.
    His dying in front of my eyes had been at first a horrible consideration. Why should he not die, when he seemed at least half dead already? His bad eye like a stone under dark water, and that side of his mouth pulled open, showing his original, wicked teeth (most old people then had false teeth) with their dark fillings glowering through the damp enamel. His being alive and in the world seemed to me an error that could be wiped out at any moment. But then, as I said, I got used to him. He was on a grand scale, with his big noble head and wide laboring chest and his powerless right hand lying on his long trousered thigh, invadingmy sight as I read. Like a relic, he was, an old warrior from barbarous times. Eric Blood-Axe. King Knut.
    My strength is failing fast, said the sea king to his men.
I will never sail the seas, like a conqueror again.
    That was what he was like. His half-wrecked hulk of a body endangering the furniture and battering the walls as he made his momentous progress to the bathroom. His smell, which was not rank but not reduced to infantile soap-and-talcum cleanliness, either—a smell of thick clothing with its residue of tobacco (though he didn’t smoke anymore) and of the enclosed skin that I thought of as thick and leathery, with its lordly excretions and animal heat. A slight but