Greenwich by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page B

intended, which didn’t matter much because this would be her third reading of a manuscript she did not like. She had mastered the delicacy and intricacy of being married to someone she loved who was a writer. Fortunately, she enjoyed most of what he had written. When he wrote something that, to her mind, was either bad writing or bad thinking, she enjoined herself from an immediate response. “I must think about it,” she would say, which meant either an exploration of various ways of indicating that it was lousy or simply letting time pass. That was the best way; a time would usually come when he would reread it and put it to rest with, “This stinks.”
    But his book about assassination was something else. Sellig had linked the process of assassination to a sort of national Jungian guilt, which Ruth simply rejected; and reading the manuscript again to assess his changes was the last thing that interested her now, and with her father in the operating room, it was an untimely wifely obligation. Thus she read without reading.
    Ruth Sellig adored her father. He was an internist, a family physician in this era of specialization. His wife had died many years ago of cancer, when Ruth was twelve years old, and he had never remarried, raising his child alone, treasuring her, yet using her as the reason he was unable to make a connection with another woman. When, as a student at Smith College, she fell in love with an English professor very much her senior, who had once given up his job teaching to become a naval historian in Vietnam—and become a fierce pacifist—her father was first amused and then concerned. But when they both decided to settle in Greenwich, he as a writer and she as a photographer, Seth Ferguson and Harold Sellig became fast friends. That was so many years ago, and now Dr. Seth Ferguson was in the operating room for a bypass operation that he had dismissed with a wave of his hand as, “Nothing, nothing at all.”
    N ellie Kadinsky, David Greene’s date for the evening, was an operating-room nurse at the hospital. At age twenty-three, she was young for an OR nurse, an only child, fathered and mothered by two Polish immigrants, her father a janitor in a Stamford apartment house. At school at Tufts, she met David at an intercollegiate dance, and they had been going together for two years now, mostly weekends and summertime. Her story of her struggle for an education and a profession put David Greene in utter awe of her. She was a tall, rawboned young woman, with blue eyes and straw-colored hair and almost graven features, sometimes beautiful when she smiled, sometimes very plain. When she was off duty, they biked together.
    His competition was Dr. Harvey Loring, a very handsome divorced surgeon, whom Nellie dismissed as “no competition at all” but nevertheless confessed a certain indebtedness to him for bringing her along as part of his team.
    On this night, when David picked her up at the entryway of the hospital, her face was drawn and tired, her hair pulled back and tied in the knot she used in the operating room. “I’ve had my own day of hell,” she said, “so forgive me the way I look.”
    â€œYou look good to me.”
    â€œYou’re a dear boy,” she said, kissing him, “a very dear boy.”
    â€œI’m a grown man of twenty-one years, ready to complete my last year of college. I don’t enjoy being called a dear boy.”
    â€œOK, you’re a dear man.”
    â€œAnd why did you have a day of hell?” he asked as they got into his car—and then added, “It’s none of my business, is it?” He was examining his words as he spoke, having never seen her quite like this, so drawn and intense. He had not started the car yet, a 1988 Ford Mustang.
    â€œWhere should we go?” he asked gently. “Are you hungry?”
    â€œNo.” Then she added, “Forgive me, Davey. I feel rotten and