“What did you want to be?”
“I don’t know that either.”
He said “either.” Why did he say “either”? It was true. What did he know? David spoke with an elation like a release.
“I don’t know, either. Really I don’t. You see—Uncle—Mr. Deane—he came up when mother died. I remember what he said. ‘Want to come to the big City and work for me?’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’ I think I answered that. Yes—I did. I knew I’d said the wrong thing. My uncle sort of smiled. ‘This is no work for you.’ I was at the shop. ‘Will you come?’ ‘All right.’ ‘Better try,’ said uncle. ‘Your first years won’t bind you—nor me.’ That was all.”
“Don’t let them bind you.”
“But it wasn’t like that, when you started to be a lawyer?”
“No, it wasn’t like that,” Tom Rennard smiled. “I wasn’t born in New York, either.” What was there David felt again in the word “either”? “My sister and I came East from Ohio.”
“And you went to college and studied to be a lawyer?”
“Not college. Law-school at night. Musty long rooms under dim gas jets. Days I was several things. I sold pen-knives for a time. I was a waiter in cheap restaurants. I worked in department stores. My sister earned next to nothing, then. At times, we shared one room.”
David tramped on, limbs free. At his shoulder the lake and the farther shore. The mist was lifted from the day. The mist was concentrate in clouds. The day and the water were clear. He felt this man beside him, sharp and strange, in the new lucid air.