Ordinary People by Judith Guest Read Free Book Online Page B

feel?”
    “Okay,” he said. “How did you sleep? How do you feel?”
    “That’s not it!” she said. “If we could all just relax a little! If things could just be normal again. I don’t want you to start asking me the questions, I want you to just stop!”
    Well, okay. Fair enough. If she knew, though, that it is not only of Conrad but of himself that he is asking questions now; basic, hopeless questions that mock him, finger him as a joker, a bumbler, a poor dope. Who the hell are you? as he walks down the street, and who can step in time to that music for more than thirty seconds? He ducks into a drugstore for respite, buys himself a cigar. Who the hell are you? follows him inside, leaning on the glass counter, waiting. Maybe everybody does it, that is the thought he hangs on to, like a drunk at a friendly lamppost. Who in the world knows who he is all the time? It is not a question to ask a guy over a sandwich at the Quik-Lunch. If you must ponder it, then do it alone at isolated periods with long intervals in between, so as not to drive yourself bats.
    I’m the kind of man who —he has heard this phrase a million times, at parties, in bars, in the course of normal conversation, I’m the kind of man who —instinctively he listens; tries to apply any familiar terms to himself, but without success.
    Arnold Bacon. There was a man who knew who he was. Years since he has thought about him. In 1967, Ray noticed his obit in the Tribune “... nationally known tax attorney dies at seventy-two.... Tragic loss to the profession, ABA president says....”
    He was seventeen years old when he first met Arnold Bacon. Seventeen, a senior in high school, his plans for the future not extending past the next afternoon, and Bacon had come up to him at, of all places, a Christmas Tea in the lounge of the Evangelical Home. “Well, young man, what are you planning to do with the rest of your life?” He had laughed politely, looking for a neat and pleasant exit to the conversation, but Bacon was serious. “I’ve looked at your grades,” he said. “You’re smart. You know the importance of a good education. You ever thought about going into law?”
    He had thought about being a Soldier of Fortune, after reading The Three Musketeers. Or a fireman. A professional athlete. He was a good tennis player, he was well coordinated. He learned games quickly. Those vague and wistful occupations faded out of the picture after that December afternoon. He did more than think about the law. He applied and was accepted to prelaw at Wayne University; he took a part-time job clerking in Bacon’s office; he graduated from Wayne and was accepted into law school at the University of Michigan, backed by Bacon’s influential recommendation, he later found out from one of the deans.
    A lucky accident. Bacon took him on; decided to be his mentor; told him what courses to take and which ones to stay away from; which scholarships to apply for; which professors he must not miss. He came to his aid financially whenever it was necessary. It was the closest thing to a father-son relationship—it was a father-son relationship, he thought. Bacon had one daughter; no sons. Bacon’s daughter might have made a smashing lawyer; but women lawyers were rarer, then, and suspect. And he had this reverence, this vast, eclipsing love for the law that had to be coalesced. He needed a student, an apprentice. He needed to know that he was leaving his baby protected.
    Bacon had not approved of law students who married while they were in school. Diffusion of energy, he called it. And so, of course, everything had changed, after Beth. Bacon was a man of strong views. He had principles. Integrity. He knew who he was and where he stood on certain—what he considered—inviolable issues. Bacon had been Cal’s first actual experience with loss.
    When he was eleven, he learned the association of that word with death. The director of the Evangelical Home had called him in to