The Progress of Love

put it in the stove and burned it.
    My father turned around and faced the road ahead.
    I could feel Beryl twisting beside me while my mother talked. She was twisting, and moaning a little, as if she had a pain she couldn’t suppress. At the end of the story, she let out a sound of astonishment and suffering, an angry groan.
    “So you burned up money!” she said. “You burned up money in the stove.”
    My mother was still cheerful. “You sound as if I’d burned up one of my children.”
    “You burned their chances. You burned up everything the money could have got for them.”
    “The last thing my children need is money. None of us need his money.”
    “That’s criminal,” Beryl said harshly. She pitched her voice into the front seat: “Why did you let her?”
    “He wasn’t there,” my mother said. “Nobody was there.”
    My father said, “It was her money, Beryl.”
    “Never mind,” Beryl said. “That’s criminal.”
    “Criminal is for when you call in the police,” Mr. Florence said. Like other things he had said that day, this created a little island of surprise and a peculiar gratitude.
    Gratitude not felt by all.
    “Don’t you pretend this isn’t the craziest thing you ever heard of,” Beryl shouted into the front seat. “Don’t you pretend you don’t think so! Because it is, and you do. You think just the same as me!”
    My father did not stand in the kitchen watching my mother feed the money into the flames. It wouldn’t appear so. He did not know about it—it seems fairly clear, if I remember everything, that he did not know about it until that Sunday afternoon in Mr. Florence’s Chrysler, when my mother told them all together. Why, then, can I see the scene so clearly, just as I described it to Bob Marks (and to others—he was not the first)? I see my father standing by the table in the middle of the room—the table with the drawer in it for knives and forks, and the scrubbed oilcloth on top—and thereis the box of money on the table. My mother is carefully dropping the bills into the fire. She holds the stove lid by the blackened lifter in one hand. And my father, standing by, seems not just to be permitting her to do this but to be protecting her. A solemn scene, but not crazy. People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people might not think so. They do not care.
    How hard it is for me to believe that I made that up. It seems so much the truth it is the truth; it’s what I believe about them. I haven’t stopped believing it. But I have stopped telling that story. I never told it to anyone again after telling it to Bob Marks. I don’t think so. I didn’t stop just because it wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. I stopped because I saw that I had to give up expecting people to see it the way I did. I had to give up expecting them to approve of any part of what was done. How could I even say that I approved of it myself? If I had been the sort of person who approved of that, who could do it, I wouldn’t have done all I have done—run away from home to work in a restaurant in town when I was fifteen, gone to night school to learn typing and bookkeeping, got into the real-estate office, and finally become a licensed agent. I wouldn’t be divorced. My father wouldn’t have died in the county home. My hair would be white, as it has been naturally for years, instead of a color called Copper Sunrise. And not one of these things would I change, not really, if I could.
    Bob Marks was a decent man—good-hearted, sometimes with imagination. After I had lashed out at him like that, he said, “You don’t need to be so tough on us.” In a moment, he said, “Was this your room when you were a little girl?” He thought that was why the mention of the sexual shenanigans had upset me.
    And I thought it would be just as well to let him think that. I said yes, yes, it was my room when I was a little girl. It was just as well to make up right away. Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner orlater. I wonder if those moments aren’t more valued, and deliberately gone after, in the setups some people like myself have now, than they were in those old marriages, where love and grudges could be growing underground, so confused and