“Well, youve not communicated with your father or mother since you left home, fourteen years ago. You say you had a dear friend in the man from Haiti, yet youve never tried to find out whether he lived or died.”
“Oh, that way. I thought you meant ... something different.” By not taking advantage of Barbara’s offer I certainly was cutting myself off from the past.
“Yes?”
“Well, I guess more or less everyone at the haven has done the same thing. Let outside ties grow weak, I mean. You for one—” “But I have no parents, no friends anywhere else. All my life is here.”
“Well, so is mine.”
“Ah, dear Hodge; it is unlike you to be so indifferent.”
“Catty darling, you were brought up comfortably in an atmosphere knowing nothing of indenting or sharecropping, of realizing the only escape from wretchedness was in a miracle—usually translated as a winning number in the lottery. I can’t convey to you the meaning of utterly loveless surroundings, I can only say that affection was a luxury my mother and father couldnt afford.” “Perhaps not; but you can afford it. Now. And nothing of what you have said applies to Enfandin.”
I squirmed shamefacedly. My ingratitude and callousness must be apparent to everyone; even Barbara, I remembered, had once asked me much the same questions Catty asked now. How could I explain, even to my own satisfaction, how procrastination and guilt made it impossible for me to take the simple steps to discover what had happened to my friend? By a tremendous effort I might have broken through the inertia years ago, just after Enfandin had been wounded, but each day and month between confirmed the impossibility more strongly. “Let the past take care of itself,” I muttered.
“Oh Hodge! What a thing for an historian to say.”
“Catty, I can’t.”