The Third Figure by Collin Wilcox Page B

salesman. He made a good living. However, unfortunately, he always spent more than he made. My mother, you see, appreciated the finer things in life. Her family, we were always told, had raised her to expect the best and to act accordingly. So we were always in debt. Then, when the depression came, my father lost everything. He got some of it back, of course, during the war, but he was never quite the same. Neither was my mother. She never let him forget that he’d failed. Never. So, gradually, my father became a—a hollow man. And my mother became bitter. Brittle, and bitter.”
    I sighed. “That’s a common story.”
    She smiled with a kind of pensive, wistful regret. “The rest is common enough, too. During my last year in college my parents finally got divorced, so when I graduated I decided to come out to California, to San Francisco. I had an aunt in San Francisco, my mother’s sister. She got me a suitable job, in the financial district, and found me the right kind of apartment, in the right neighborhood. And, in due time, I met the right kind of a young man. John Hanson. We got married, after a glittering kind of cocktail-party courtship. And then, slowly, I proceeded to do to my husband what my mother had done to my father.”
    “How …” I cleared my throat. “How do you mean?”
    “John was a stockbroker,” she said softly. “A young, bright, golden-haired stockbroker, with a wonderful smile and a boyish charm. His family was well off and even had social pretensions. They could afford to go to the opera and to charity balls, and once in a while they got their names in the society columns. And so did John and I, occasionally. We were a handsome young couple, you see, and we lived on Russian Hill and drove a sports car and sailed and had a Japanese couple cater when we gave cocktail parties. That was in 1948 and 1949. We were both happy, I suppose. But then, unfortunately, it became increasingly apparent that John wasn’t really a very good stockbroker. He was good at entertaining people, especially in bars, but he wasn’t good at selling them stocks or bonds. So John’s parents started giving us money, ‘until we got on our feet.’ And the more money they gave us, the less John worked. And the more he drank.”
    “That’s a common story, too”
    She nodded. “So is the last of it, too, I suppose. I decided that what we needed was a child, to bring us closer together and give John a sense of responsibility. Unfortunately, however, the child was conceived at almost exactly the time North Korea invaded South Korea—and John was in the reserve.”
    She sighed. “In a way, Korea was John’s last chance. He was a pilot, flying cargo planes, and he liked it. When his Korean tour was over, he told me that he wanted to stay in the Air Force. But I wouldn’t let him. My mother, I suppose, had told me it was a ghastly life, being an army wife. So, anyhow, John went back with his old company, selling stocks. Except that, this time, he didn’t even make any pretense of working. He just stayed in the bars all day and drank. Sometimes he’d go to movies, and once a week or so he’d visit an old girl friend who’d just got divorced. He was never obvious about it, though, or inconsiderate. John was always considerate and really very sweet. He would have made a good husband, probably, if he’d stayed in the Air Force. The army can be a good place for weaklings.”
    “What happened then, Mrs. Hanson?”
    “Well finally, after a year or so, John became an embarrassment to his family—and to me. So we decided, his family and I, that the best thing for John would be for us to move to Los Angeles. If we could get John away from his old environment, we decided, everything would be all right. And also, as part of the therapy, John’s family would stop sending us money. As it turned out, there was more than just therapy involved. Mr. Hanson’s business was failing, and two years later, in the recession of