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Show 51b "No. You keep her. She's too much hasse^." As usual there was no apology in h i s voice. I couldn't blame him about Becky. The f i r s t night in our apartment, when he had been home only about a week, he had taken her shopping for household goods. She had pulled down a display of glassware while he was looking at magazines. He told me l a t e r that he almost walked out and l e f t her there - let them think she was somebody e l s e ' s kid. Since returning from Vietnam he had been l i k e that - impulsive and e r r a t i c and r e s t i v e as a caged animal. Even the first night home he had a r i s e n at midnight and asked me to get dressed so t h a t he could drive through the city and look at the l i g h t s . And now, although months had passed, his restlessness had not waned but seemed to have grown, a building of the pressure inside him so that I came to think of him as a time bomb, t i c k i n g away, threatening to explode at the most unexpected moment. There was something in the way he paced through the house, in the way h i s foot tapped continually while he sat at the table, eating or taking, that reminded me of my father. Since the years when the family was s c a t t e r e d across the Western s t a t e s , my f a t h e r had been r e s t l e s s , always on the move, his fingers drumming on the tabletop while playing chess or pinochle. Even when he read he seemed driven forward to °y an almost physical concentration. I d i d n ' t know^what to ascribe t h i s a g i t a t i o n and the loneliness that seemed to accompany i t. I thought about it A trying to relate it to my learning at the University, (as I watched Brian drive off.) It had |
