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Show Acting Alone Page 37 Wamsutter family table three times a day, and watch Benny Hill on the Wamsutter family TV every night instead of the late local news. There would have to be a meeting of the minds or the glands or something before Sam committed himself to anything really firm here. The situation was not helped at all by that certain peculiar component of Sam's personality which he'd termed his Poean Imp of the Perverse (from the Edgar Allen Poe essay of the same name). The idea of a vengeful, jealous God who dabbles in personal affairs was still valid in Sam's case. He contained within himself a scheming, manipulative, totally Christian conscience that operated far beyond his control. It had gone perverse on Sam, maybe because he'd read too many books, or too few books; and it was constantly getting him into trouble. Sometimes it got him into very serious, violent sorts of trouble (as we are about to witness), and sometimes just regular, insipid, middle-class trouble. But the trouble always, sooner or later, revealed itself in splendid chesslike regularity to be logical and fitting and just punishment for specific sins Sam had committed. Sam's Imp of the Perverse was thoroughly schooled in the remedial arithmetic of Midwestern Protestant morality. Example after example could be put forth, with only a superficial scratching of the surface of Sam's short, troubled past - There'd been a certain very hideous bit of extravagance across the ocean once where Sam had been accessory to an act that, if not philosophically, then purely legally could've been called gang-rape; and his Imp had taken care to mention Sam's name and passport number in full over the phone to friends of the "victim," and Sam had escaped deportation by the sheer |