Cancel All Our Vows by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online

burnishing his quick, elusive mind. Laura remembered the odd story that Ellis’ mother had told with such unwholesome pride.
    In high school there had been a boy who consistently topped Ellis in the class marks. Ellis lost weight worrying about it, struggling to beat the other boy. It appeared that the other boy would become valedictorian of the graduating class in the senior year. A week before final examinations, Ellis astounded the other boy by asking to study French with him in preparation for the exams. During the French examination one of the proctors picked up a folded sheet of paper from the floor. It contained a list of French verbs, the most difficult irregular verbs and their declensions. It was in the other boy’s handwriting. He could not deny that, but he did deny loudly that he had brought it into the examination room. They compromised by giving him the minimum passing grade, because of his previous record.
    Ellis became valedictorian. The other boy did not attend graduation. And Ellis’ mother told the story with a certain unholy glee. Her Ellis was shrewd, all right.
    In the business world Ellis had found out, Laura knew, that you don’t get marks. You get position and salary. And if there is a man in the job just over yours who shows no intention of stepping aside, you find some way to move him aside—delicately, subtly, effectively. Yet it had backfired rather badly at Tuplan and Hauser. The wrong man had protected himself by saving a tape recording of a singularly crucial conversation with Ellis. There was no basis on which to fire Ellis. But it had been made quite clear to him that he might be happier in some other firm.
    Laura took the new yellow dress out of the closet and laid it carefully on the rumpled bed. She thought of her own childhood and how different it was from what Ellis had experienced. While he had been brought up in the prim, unchanging, middle-class environment of Fall River, Massachusetts, taking his bride back at last to show her off in the same high-shouldered stuccoed house in whichhe had been born, she had spent her own childhood in a dozen states of the west and southwest.
    Her father, John Raymond, had been a failure of almost classic dimensions. A failure, perhaps, at everything but life itself. Her mother had died when Laura was three and her brother, Joshua, was two. John Raymond had never married again. He had taken the two kids with him on his restless, unending search. He had been a big laughing man with a raw edge to his tongue and an unhappy knack of saying exactly what he thought. Salesman, trucker, hotel clerk, carnival pitchman, restaurant keeper, builder, bulldozer operator. Nevada and Utah, Arizona and San Berdoo, Texas and New Orleans.
    Somehow, he had always managed to provide food, and a bed of sorts. When the car broke down and they slept out it became an adventure, and desert sunrises had been golden indeed. They went to over twenty different schools. And life was going to be like that forever. And one evening in July—they had been living in a trailer in a park in San Antonio, and John Raymond and Josh were working on the same road job—and John Raymond came home in time to stop the silent, animal, terrifying struggle. She could remember that the most horrifying part of the struggle was within herself, fear and disgust fighting against the death wish to give in, the wish to surrender to the hard hands, to languid mysteries. And John Raymond had broken the man’s face and comforted her, and sent her east to school in September.
    He couldn’t send much, and she had to work for the rest of it. But it was the end of a known world. School meant Tom, and he was killed in North Africa when something went strangely wrong with tank tactics. And later Josh died in Italy. And John Raymond got into a political argument with an Oklahoma Indian and died three days later of the stab wounds. And Andy, who was becoming what Tom had been to her, Andy who comforted her,