Greenwich by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

knew the Selligs and observed how easily they lived with each other fell back on the cliché that opposites attract, but this was an idle and somewhat obvious conclusion. Ruth Sellig was tall, slender, and dark, with dark eyes and close-cropped gray hair. Her features were well-defined, her nose small, nothing effusive about her, her brown eyes searching rather than inviting, and only in her full, wide mouth any hint of passion lying somewhere in her tight, well-controlled body. Her husband, Harold, was a full three inches shorter, plump; a sandy mustache; sandy, whitish hair around a bald pate; good-natured; open to anything and everything; blue eyes peering out of metal-rimmed glasses; originally from Flatbush, Brooklyn; a Rhodes scholar with a sort of English accent, which he had cultivated assiduously after a year at Oxford. He had done a long tour in Vietnam—the most unlikely member of the armed forces ever enlisted—as a naval historian on an aircraft carrier off the coast; and while this resulted in a book, still unpublished, he was somewhat ashamed of the fact that his days ashore amounted to less than a month.
    Ruth had remarked to her father that she never spent a boring hour with her husband. Frequently his way of thinking drove her up the wall, but at least it was never the expected.
    The manuscript, which he had persuaded her to take with her to the hospital and to read once again while she waited through the hours of the operation, contained the quality of being both the expected and the unexpected—unexpected when she first read it years ago and very much expected now. He had begun to write it after the Vietnam tour was over, and as he explained to her, “I am going to write an autobiography of an assassin, and I am going to call it ‘The Assassin,’ because no one in Greenwich, which is absolutely a capsule of the United States in every way I can think of, would ever dream of being in the shoes of an assassin.”
    Her reaction was summed up in one short word, “Oh?”
    â€œJust oh?”
    â€œWhat else can I say, Hal?”
    â€œYou don’t think Greenwich is a capsule of the U.S. today?”
    â€œI never thought about it,” Ruth replied.
    â€œWhat is Greenwich?”
    â€œYou really want me to play this game with you, Hal?”
    â€œIf you will, humor me.”
    â€œAll right. Greenwich is a town in Connecticut that borders on New York State. It is partly a commuter suburb and partly a local financial and big-business center. It contains a number of very rich people, a lot of middle-class people, and our own share of the poor. It is a well-kept decent town with excellent schools and a very low crime rate, and no assassins that I have ever heard of.”
    â€œExactly,” Harold said.
    Ruth sighed. “And therefore,” she said patiently, “you’re going to write the autobiography of an assassin and base it on Greenwich, Connecticut. Do I follow you?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œEach to his own,” she said, and left it at that.
    Then Harold wrote his first draft and Ruth read it. He asked her whether she had enjoyed it.
    â€œNot very much.”
    â€œDo you see why I base it on Greenwich?”
    â€œNo,” Ruth admitted.
    â€œLook at it this way: There is the gun and there is the shooter. They add up to a weapon. Each is part and parcel of the world we live in. Each is nothing without the other. Both together add up to you and me, and every one of us. The guilt is collective.”
    â€œOh, Hal, come on! If you want to lay all this Jewish guilt on yourself, fine—but don’t include me. Thank God I’m a housewife, a mother, and a photographer. I take pictures of what is. I don’t approve of killing anyone—not even mice.”
    And now, Ruth Sellig sat in a waiting room in Greenwich Hospital reading the story of the assassin. She was reading without being aware of what any word meant or