OCR Text |
Show •56 himself; now and then his eyes would rest on Jacob or on me but he didn't see us. Jacob went on talking as if it was very important now Adam was dead to invent a happy childhood we'd never had with that gloomy self-driven man. Morgan watched us with pleasure, interested as always in anything odd. We Skinners are a difficult people, but she suffered us gladly, she loved us all. I liked that in her, this ability to take joy in the diversity of human nature instead of trying to make everybody over tq fit. At the same time I was old enough to know that the things I liked in Morgan were not the reason I'd picked her-they were happy accidents discovered when it was already too late. Whether you like the woman you love is always a matter of luck. It works the same way for women, who are neither more or less governed by reason than we are: Mary-Ellen, my first wife, found out she didn't like me very much after a while, and with the help of her Aunt Maybelle (and cooperation from that other hungrier Buckdancer I remember so well) did her level best to make me over into somebody more to her taste. She nearly did it, too. Maybelle was a power in Tucson politics, a formidable woman. In the thirties she had guided parties of pilgrims in Palestine; her letters from the Holy Land had been published in the Chicago Sun. She took flying lessons from Wiley Post and knew Lindbergh socially. In World War II, |