VI
That night Nathan took a bundle of big square envelopes tied with a red ribbon, Bernie’s letters, and put them where the sight could no longer hurt him. He hid them on a beam close to the eaves out in the three-foot attic over the Forge ell. Then he crawled back over the studding and buttoned the low door that led to that windowless garret from his bedroom. That button also fastened a door on a chamber in his little heart. He had completed his first thumb-nail cycle with The Sex.
His cynical observations about “girls,” delivered in the family circle, gladdened the heart of his father and made the latter feel that his precepts were at last bearing fruit, that he had a son who might not be quite so incorrigible as he had begun to fear.
That Christmas he gave Nathan five dollars and reminded the boy of his paternal generosity all through the balance of the year.
But the five dollars meant nothing to Nathan. He was compelled to deposit it in the Paris Savings Bank. Johnathan “borrowed” it three years later to help pay a grocery bill.