and he was encouraged to try to express the
inner life behind his jobs. Hesitatingly he sought to make vivid his
small-boy life in the hills of West Virginia: carving initials, mowing
lawns, smoking corn silk, being arrested on Hallowe'en, his father's
death, a certain Irving who was his friend, "carrying a paper route"
during two years of high school. His determination to "make something of
himself." His arrival in Columbus, Ohio, with just seventy-eight
cents--he emphasized it: "just seventy-eight cents, that's every red
cent I had, when I started out to look for a job, and I didn't know a
single guy in town." His reading of books during the evenings of his
first years in Ohio; he didn't "remember their titles, exactly," he
said, but he was sure that "he read a lot of them." ... At last he spoke
of his wife, of their buggy-riding, of their neat frame house with the
lawn and the porch swing. Of their quarrels--he made it clear that his
wife had been "finicky," and had "fool notions," but he praised her for
having "come around and learned that a man is a man, and sometimes he
means a lot better than it looks like; prob'ly he loves her a lot better
than a lot of these plush-soled, soft-tongued fellows that give 'em a
lot of guff and lovey-dovey stuff and don't shell out the cash. She was
a good sport--one of the best."

Of the death of their baby boy.

"He was the brightest little kid--everybody loved him. When I came home
tired at night he would grab my finger--see, this first finger--and hold
it, and want me to show him the bunny-book.... And then he died."

Mr. Schwirtz told it simply, looking at clouds spread on the blue sky
like a thrown handful of white paint.

Una had hated the word "widower"; it had suggested Henry Carson and the
Panama undertaker and funerals and tired men trying to wash children and
looking for a new wife to take over that work; all the smell and grease
of disordered side-street kitchens. To her, now, Julius Edward Schwirtz
was not a flabby-necked widower, but a man who mourned, who felt as
despairingly as could Walter Babson the loss of the baby who had crowed
over the bunny-book. She, the motherless, almost loved him as she stood
with him in the same depth of human grief. And she cried a little,
secretly, and thought of her longing for the dead mother, as he gently
went on:

"My wife died a year later. I couldn't get over it; seemed like I could
have killed myself when I thought of any