Read Online The Celebrity by Laura Z. Hobson - Free Book Online

bed last night.
    Last night? This morning; less than five hours ago. He should have made her turn the light out much earlier, but he had felt as much like talking as she had. At Thorny’s, with everybody around, neither of them had said much; they never did any more when they were with young people, even with their own children. Once you were close to seventy, you knew that everything you said sounded pokey or silly, except to other people of seventy; and more and more you kept things to yourself. Even Geraldine hadn’t said much until they had left the party; then she had started and not once during the whole drive home had she stopped.
    If Geraldine had any serious fault, that was it. That not-stopping, that need to tell him every tiny thought she had about every single thing, from the reasons she had decided to paint the kitchen or top a cake with a new kind of icing, to the reasons she felt wonderful that this great success had come to Gregory instead of to Thornton or one of the girls.
    Well, at least this wasn’t paint or icing; this was enough to make anybody want to talk forever. Gregory, of all the children! There was always something strange and special about that long string bean of a boy, but who in his senses would ever have thought he could turn into a famous author? He suddenly remembered the day Gregory had gone off alone to see the editor—he was fourteen and had never traveled on a train by himself. He hadn’t opened his mouth about his plans but he left a note so they wouldn’t worry. “Gone to New York, back soon,” it had said, or something equally laconic. They had worried; the boy was so immature and impractical compared to the way Thorny had been at fourteen. Why, even at ten, Thorny had a paper route that took him three miles from the house every afternoon; by eleven, he was earning two dollars a week mowing neighbors’ lawns; at thirteen, he was regularly employed every Saturday as delivery boy for the store. But at ten Gregory showed not a spark of ambition or gumption; he kept his nose forever in a book, and if you asked him to phone anybody, he would freeze with shyness.
    Maybe Geraldine and he hadn’t been clever about bringing Gregory up. It was so much easier and quicker to send Thorny to the phone, to tell Thorny to water the lawn, to get Thorny to hammer in a nail. It was a real shock when Gregory came jauntily back from New York that day and said, “I’m going to write school news for the Sun. I saw the school page editor and I’m the correspondent for Freeton High.” A boy who had never written anything except bits for the school magazine, having the nerve to tell newspaper editors what he wanted! He never earned more than fifty or sixty cents a week for the items he sent the Sun about class elections and Arista and the S.O.—what had S.O. stood for?—but he was prouder of being “on a real newspaper” than if he’d been captain of half the school teams like Thorn. Maybe that alone should have tipped them off that someday he’d be a big author. Student Organization, that’s what it was, and Thorn had been president of it in his last year, while Gregory had never been elected to anything.
    Gerald shook his head, and consulted his watch. It was much too early to go downtown, but he could Start on the Squibb cartons that came yesterday. And, behind the locked doors, alone, he would be able to think everything out. He finished dressing quickly. The store was a good place any time. He was proud of the Johns Pharmacy, especially now that it was the only independent drugstore left in Freeton. He didn’t care how many Liggetts and Rexalls and Walgreens opened up on Main Street, there still would be folks who preferred getting their drugs and cosmetics and sodas in a store that was the lifework of somebody who had belonged to the town for over forty years. They never could have that same confidence, or even affection, for a salaried manager of a unit in a big chain.
    His father