I kept on going to meet the mail, but my heart was heavy now like a lump of lead. I only smiled because I thought of the mailman counting on it, and he didn't have an easy life, with the winter driving ahead.
Till it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all over. There were women just waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to go grey, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that.

I have said that my grandmother would choose a certain kind of love. I have implied that she would be stubbornly, secretly, destructively romantic. Nothing she ever said to me, or in my hearing, would bear this out. Yet I have not invented it, I really believe it. Without any proof I believe it, and so I must believe that we get messages another way, that we have connections that cannot be investigated, but have to be relied on.

I understand that my grandmother wept angrily for Susie Heferman and also for herself, that she knew how I longed for home, and why. She knew and did not understand how this had happened or how it could have been different or how she herself, once so baffled and struggling, had become another old woman whom people deceived and placated and were anxious to get away from.

He had joined these clubs not out of a real desire to be sociable but as a precaution against his natural tendencies, which might lead him, he thought, into becoming a sort of hermit. During his years in the drugstore business he had learned how to get through all kinds of conversations with all sorts of people, to skate along affably and go on thinking his own thoughts. He practiced the same thing with his wife. His aim was to give people what they thought they wanted, and continue, himself, solitary and unmolested. Except for his wife, few people had ever suspected what he was up to. But now that he was no longer obliged to give anybody anything, in the ordinary daily way, he put himself in a position where now and again he would have to, as he believed in some way it must be good for him. If he left it all to his own choice who would he talk to?

The city where you lived, which you described to me wryly, but on the whole contentedly, in your letters. Full of old crocks and bewildered tourists, you said. No. Full of old crocks, like me, you said, making yourself out as usual to be older than you were. You loved to do that, to pretend to be tired and lazy, to stress your indifference. I thought it a pose, to tell you the truth. What I could not credit, did not have the imagination to credit, was that it might be real. You told me once that you did not care at all whether you died soon or went on living for another twenty-five years. Blasphemy from a lover. You told me that you did not think about happiness, the word did not occur to you. What pomposity, I thought, taking such things as if a young man had said, them, unwilling to strain myself to understand a man for whom these statements were flat truth, in whom some energy I expected to find was worn down or entirely forgotten. Though I had stopped dyeing my hair and learned to live, as I thought, with a decent level of expectation, I did send hope in your direction, gigantic hope. I refused, I refuse, to see you as you seemed to see yourself.

I see myself searching these streets for some memory of you as I once looked for clues in the articles you wrote for newspapers and magazines, in the books you wrote so efficiently to serve others' purposes, never your own. Amusing and informative you are, so skilled you verge on elegance, but you hold back, even from that. Is that all there is, I hear myself asking, and you laughing, indulgently; what more could there be? But I am not convinced, I keep after you, I desire revelations.
If I had to describe you, as I secretly see you, I would say that you are uncompromising. And you would say impatiently that you have compromised all your life. But that is not what I mean. I wise say it: you are uncompromising, angular in some thoroughgoing way (body and spirit together), chaste, kind but not compassionate. I would emphasize that there is something chivalric about you. I do expect you, like a night, to be capable of acts of outmoded self-sacrifice and also of marvelous acts of brutality, both performed wit the kind of style that indicates obedience to secret orders.
You, on the other hand, would describe yourself as genial, corrupt, ordinarily selfish and pleasure-loving. Yo would look over your glasses at me like some mild inflexible schoolmaster, put out by my extremity. We would have to consider my being in love, the way I am in love, as if it were a curable extravagance, a highhanded assumption in an essay.

My grandfather was not a man to complain. He had a taste for solitude, he had married rather late, he had chosen another man's offended sweetheart, for reasons he did not divulge to anybody. In the wintertime he finished his chores early, doing everything thoroughly and efficiently. The he read. He read books on economics and history. He studied Esperanto. He read his way several times through solid shelves of Victorian novels. He did not discuss what he read. His opinions, unlike his brother-in-law's, were not made public. His demands on life, his expectations of other people, seemed to be so slight there was never any possibility of disappointing him. Whether my grandmother had disappointed him, privately, and so thoroughly that any offers he might have made had been withdrawn, nobody could know.