"In a way he wanted to be like you, or thought he did anyway, and because you let him be friends with you, he could feel he was like you, a little bit. He thought you brought a touch of glamor to his life. He was absolutely fascinated by the people that you know, all the rogues and rascals you and Dan did battle with, in your daily life. He envied you. I didn't mind that, as long as he didn't actually try to be like you; he couldn't've done it. He wasn't cut out for the rough and tumble, and deep down inside he knew it. But when he had too much to drink and started talking big; that pose he liked to put on, pretending he was part of your life, the turmoil, and the drama, and the thrills, well, he just loved doing that. For a while he forgot who he really was."
"But you didn't," Merrion said, 'you didn't love having him do it."
"I didn't encourage it, no," she said. "But I didn't try to discourage it, either. I don't think I could've, if I'd tried, but I didn't really try. He had a great time, a wonderful time, pretending he was one of you. But then you all went home. The next day he was back here with me, hung-over but with me, the solid Walter I'd liked the minute that I met him, and grew to love, and married. Of course I was glad he'd had fun. But I hoped he'd never change.
"And so when he died, well, I had no idea of winding up with you. When I felt it starting to happen, felt myself getting attached to you, I hoped I was getting it wrong. But I wasn't. I did become attached to you. Wanting to or not. And so now I have to deal with it, that's all. We have to deal with it now."
"Yes," he said.
"Be patient with me, Amby," she said. "I do have a good heart, you know."
The young man she had met and started living with during her second year at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the spring of 1963 had been a graduate assistant in the department of economics assigned to teach a basic survey course to freshmen, 'very bright and very intense, and very Marxist, too." She said his name was "Tommy."
In February of that year he learned that he had won a fellowship to study for a year at the London School of Economics, 'which sort of disappointed him, because he'd wanted Cambridge. But I thought it was wonderful, and I thought he was wonderful and we were wonderful, and when it was time for him to go I went right along with him. Maybe I was right who knows? Maybe the two of us actually were wonderful, just like I thought, and therefore when we lived in Saint John's Wood, flat broke, it wasn't really cold and dreary, like it began to seem half an hour or so after we got there. Maybe it was magical, whee, just like I pretended.
"Tommy couldn't pull it off, believing it was magic. I suppose it's just possible he was right, and I was silly. That fellowship was for one, not two, and my stuffy, settled Three-M parents my father was a scientist for Three-M back home in strait-laced old Minneapolis had cut off my allowance when I dropped out of school.
"They really took a very narrow view of things. They said they didn't recall seeing anything in the Wisconsin catalogue that described a year of shacking up in London as the third year of what they'd agreed to pay for me to get, a four-year, liberal arts education.
"They'd thought of that as their biggest present to me, the foundation of the rest of my life. After I graduated if I still really wanted to apply to Juilliard and see if I was a good enough oboeist to become a professional musician, I could do that. And if I didn't want to do that, or did but didn't get in, then I'd be able to teach music in high school somewhere, because I'd have that solid college education. I'd be able to make a living for myself like a responsible adult. But I'd only completed half of the bargain. Now I was living in sin and being free in London. So therefore no more money.
"I don't know or maybe I just don't remember what it was exactly that I was going to do after that, after Tommy's year in London. Live happily ever after, maybe. But it was okay, just the same. We had a year like every girl and boy should have, one of wretched, grinding poverty, but unlike a lot of traveling scholars, he actually did study, and he did get his master's degree. And then we came back to Amerika with a K instead of a C and were against the war and stuff, and Tommy taught at MIT and got his Ph.D. You had to give that boy credit. He looked like a dope-smokin' hippie; he talked like a refusenik draft-resister, and he really didn't have a single stinkin' capitalist-running-dog bone in his whole body. But he loved his economics and he worked his butt off, and whatever you thought about how he looked or how he talked, you had to admit he knew his stuff. The kid was good, clearly headed for stardom.
