Read This Sweet Sickness for Free Online Page B

father’s contented, adoring laughter as she told him what she had done. Only once in a while, certainly not more than once a month, his mother would sit on his bedside and kiss him good night. David could not even imagine what his mother would have thought if she had known he would be a scientist. “Go in for science,” she would have called it, and though she might have been excited about it at first, she probably would soon have decided it was too quiet a pursuit for a man. David preferred, however, to think that his mother would have approved of Annabelle Stanton.
    In that first sweet fire of his love, David had stopped smoking and drinking, though he had never done either to excess. He had not needed those pale little pleasures any longer. Once at Cheswick he had taken a cigarette with his mid-morning coffee, and it had seemed sacrilegious somehow, a breach of a promise, and he had put the cigarette out. Now he had no taste for tobacco and little for alcohol, except on his celebratory weekends when he imagined that, if Annabelle were with him, they might have taken a cocktail or two before dinner. The wine with his meals was for taste. Once he had written to Annabelle, “Do you like crème de menthe? Brandy? Chartreuse?” She had forgotten to answer. But then, that question had been put after her marriage to Gerald. Annabelle, David supposed, had little time now for pleasures, and certainly Gerald had no money for brandy.

4
    T he leaves fell, brown and yellow, and others turned red and clung for weeks longer. It was the first of November, and still Annabelle had not answered his letter. Should he send her another letter, or had she gotten into trouble with the one letter and was Gerald now pouncing on all the mail that came in?
    He thought of telephoning her, but he did not want to surprise her and perhaps get a negative answer that she wouldn’t want to change later. It was essentially for the same reason that he had never tried to telephone her. He could not have borne her saying, “I always like hearing from you, Dave, but you really mustn’t telephone again. Promise me you won’t.” And of course he would promise, if she asked him to. This way, not telephoning, the telephone was always open, as a last resort.
    In Mrs. McCartney’s house the girl Effie stared at him and frequently smiled, and always spoke an articulate, complete sentence, such as “Hello! Why, you’re as regular as a clock!” if they met coming back to the house at five-thirty. She now sat at his table, a table for four, at breakfast and dinner, and invariably tried to engage him in conversation before he got his book propped up at breakfast (he did not read at dinner, as it seemed to him more rude to read at dinner than at breakfast), and at dinner her efforts brought knowing smiles to the faces of Mr. Harris and Mr. Muldaven, with whom she shared the table. Her chatter was no worse than Mr. Harris’s and Mr. Muldaven’s grunted comments on baseball and the food. There was at least a warmth in Effie’s good humor that made David feel it was genuine. It was the amusement he saw in the faces of the two elderly men that irritated and embarrassed David, their imbecilic enjoyment of what they thought was a boy-meets-girl adventure. He imagined that Mrs. McCartney had her prurient eye on them too.
    Wes Carmichael, who visited David at least twice a week in the evening, asked David about the girl. He had never forgotten seeing David with her the night he had waited on the front steps, because it was the first time he had ever seen David with a girl.
    â€œI don’t know anything about her,” David told him.
    â€œWell, didn’t she tell you where she worked?”
    â€œYes, but I’ve forgotten.”
    Wes greeted this with a mocking laugh that made David stare at him. “She sure knows about you. Every little thing,” Wes said, grinning.
    David watched Wes roll