marked off intervals, the mileage each person in the vehicle would have to drive for the driving to come out even-steven. But the family was one fewer than it had been. This is how come the younger boy got the wheel in Utah instead of in Idaho. He said his prayers when he got it—then drove under a truck with twenty-four tires.
FOR RUPERT–WITH NO PROMISES
I DON'T THINK I would be writing this story if the facts did not force it. Actually, it's publishing this story that I do not think I would be doing unless I had a very pressing—really an irresistible—reason. It is probably necessary for me to say that I always imagined such a reason would one day come along. But I imagine many things—and why this one has caught up with me and most of the others have not is only the way it is with luck.
Not too much should be made of it, I suppose. My brother's, actually— his bad luck. But I believe that when I arrive at the end of what I want to say, I might also arrive at seeing the bad luck mine too. This is what comes of imagining things. It is also what comes of making promises you never intend to keep—or, worse, which you do not keep but which you try to convince somebody (even yourself) you have.
I made a promise like that once. It was a long time ago, and the one who inspired the promise was a child. A girl in this case. It was my conceit to think that she would remember what I had promised her, but I don't think she really did. After all, the year was 1944 and she must have had other things on her mind, there being a war going on at the time and her being twelve or thirteen or fourteen (despite a large opinion to the contrary, I am not all that much a student of children, and am especially inferior, I have often noticed, at pinpointing their ages), with all the calamitous worries that seize a child of such an age when its father has gone away. But she always wore a Campbell tartan and a watch much too big for her delicate wrist—and in those days in Devon and those days in my heart, a promise of any sort to a gentle child in plaid (with a weight too great for her to bear) was not a thing I would not want to make. Besides, she had a little brother and always took good care of him, fretting if he were within earshot of a fact too awful for a small boy to hear.
At any rate, I promised the girl a story (I had wanted to be a writer then, and for too long a while thereafter I was one)—and some years later I wrote a story that was meant to appear to be the fulfillment of that promise.
Of course, it wasn't. A writer, especially the sort of writer I was trying to be, can't write stories like that—a pretty story when a child asks for one, a squalid story when this is the favor she asks. What I am paying for now is that I shabbily led this young lady to believe otherwise. I wrote a story, a not very sincere story, nor a very graceful one (the years since demonstrate that the world disagrees with me in this judgment—but all I care about is that the story was mainly made up and is bruised by a very great fracture in its posture of narration), and when the piece was cast into print, I sent her a copy of the magazine sheets with a patch of paper pinned to the first page. I hadn't even the courtesy to set out my one sentence in my own hand, but instead typed the following, after a greeting that consisted of no more than the two lovely parts of her lovely English name: "I always keep a promise—I mean, p-r-o-m-i-s-e." Well, I hadn't—and what I am paying for now is the lie I tried to get by with then.
I often read a Viennese logician who, I think, would go along with such reasoning. And let's not overlook the penalty for too much reasoning. So you see the kind of logic the fellow favored when he lived?
It will presently be clear that I am, however, chiefly paying for my having a brother I love more than I love my silence. It will presently be clear that by publishing—and only by publishing—the little story I want
FOR RUPERT–WITH NO PROMISES
I DON'T THINK I would be writing this story if the facts did not force it. Actually, it's publishing this story that I do not think I would be doing unless I had a very pressing—really an irresistible—reason. It is probably necessary for me to say that I always imagined such a reason would one day come along. But I imagine many things—and why this one has caught up with me and most of the others have not is only the way it is with luck.
Not too much should be made of it, I suppose. My brother's, actually— his bad luck. But I believe that when I arrive at the end of what I want to say, I might also arrive at seeing the bad luck mine too. This is what comes of imagining things. It is also what comes of making promises you never intend to keep—or, worse, which you do not keep but which you try to convince somebody (even yourself) you have.
I made a promise like that once. It was a long time ago, and the one who inspired the promise was a child. A girl in this case. It was my conceit to think that she would remember what I had promised her, but I don't think she really did. After all, the year was 1944 and she must have had other things on her mind, there being a war going on at the time and her being twelve or thirteen or fourteen (despite a large opinion to the contrary, I am not all that much a student of children, and am especially inferior, I have often noticed, at pinpointing their ages), with all the calamitous worries that seize a child of such an age when its father has gone away. But she always wore a Campbell tartan and a watch much too big for her delicate wrist—and in those days in Devon and those days in my heart, a promise of any sort to a gentle child in plaid (with a weight too great for her to bear) was not a thing I would not want to make. Besides, she had a little brother and always took good care of him, fretting if he were within earshot of a fact too awful for a small boy to hear.
At any rate, I promised the girl a story (I had wanted to be a writer then, and for too long a while thereafter I was one)—and some years later I wrote a story that was meant to appear to be the fulfillment of that promise.
Of course, it wasn't. A writer, especially the sort of writer I was trying to be, can't write stories like that—a pretty story when a child asks for one, a squalid story when this is the favor she asks. What I am paying for now is that I shabbily led this young lady to believe otherwise. I wrote a story, a not very sincere story, nor a very graceful one (the years since demonstrate that the world disagrees with me in this judgment—but all I care about is that the story was mainly made up and is bruised by a very great fracture in its posture of narration), and when the piece was cast into print, I sent her a copy of the magazine sheets with a patch of paper pinned to the first page. I hadn't even the courtesy to set out my one sentence in my own hand, but instead typed the following, after a greeting that consisted of no more than the two lovely parts of her lovely English name: "I always keep a promise—I mean, p-r-o-m-i-s-e." Well, I hadn't—and what I am paying for now is the lie I tried to get by with then.
I often read a Viennese logician who, I think, would go along with such reasoning. And let's not overlook the penalty for too much reasoning. So you see the kind of logic the fellow favored when he lived?
It will presently be clear that I am, however, chiefly paying for my having a brother I love more than I love my silence. It will presently be clear that by publishing—and only by publishing—the little story I want
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