Read Online The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder - Free Book Online

I’m convinced he’ll make it. Let me know if I can be useful in any way.”
    â€œThank you, Doctor.”
    â€œTake the hurdles as they come. What’s Roger got a mind to do?”
    â€œI think he told Sophia that he was planning to go to Chicago.”
    â€œYes . . . ? Yes . . . ? Tell him to come and see me tonight at six.”
    â€œI will.”
    â€œMrs. Gillies wants to know if there’s anything you need.”
    â€œNo, thank you. Thank Mrs. Gillies for me.”
    Silence.
    â€œExtraordinary thing, Mrs. Ashley.”
    â€œYes,” she answered faintly. An awe, as in the presence of something unearthly, hung in the air between them.
    â€œGood morning, Mrs. Ashley.”
    â€œGood morning, Doctor.”
    Roger presented himself at the doctor’s office as the clock in the town hall tower struck six. Doctor Gillies was taken aback at the boy’s height. He was struck also by how poorly he was dressed. The Ashleys lived in all the wealth of contentment on very little money. The boy’s clothes were neat and clean and homemade. He looked the country yokel. His sleeves barely reached his wrists; his pants barely reached his ankles. It was a large part of their wealth that they gave little concern to the neighbors’ opinions. Roger was the first student in the high school; he was the captain of the baseball team. He was the little lord in a small town, as his father had been before him. He was solid, level-eyed, and taciturn.
    â€œRoger, I hear you’re going to Chicago. You’ll find work all right. If worst comes to worst, you carry this letter to an old friend of mine. He’s a doctor in a hospital there. He’ll find you a job as an orderly. That work is very hard. It takes a strong stomach to do the things an orderly has to do, and to see ’em. It pays very little. Don’t do it unless you have to.”
    Roger’s only question was, “Do they give these orderlies meals?”
    â€œThis other letter is a general one. It says that you’re honest and reliable. I haven’t put your name in there yet. I thought maybe you’d want to change your name—not because you’re ashamed of your father, but because it would save you answering a lot of foolish questions. Is there some name that’s always appealed to you?. . . ? I must go and speak to my wife for a moment. Run your eye over the backs of these books. Pick out some names. Combine two names for yourself.”
    Roger weighed them. Huxley and Cook and Humboldt and Holmes . . . ? Robert, Louis, Charles, Frederick. He liked the color red. There was a book bound in red called Tumors of the Brain and Spine by Evarist Trent and another, Law and Society , by Goulding Frazier. Maybe he was going to be a doctor or maybe a lawyer, so he chose a name from both and Dr. Gillies added the name “Trent Frazier” to the letters.
    On the morning of July twenty-sixth Roger left for Chicago. He had not thought it necessary to discuss the project with his mother. The relation between mother and daughters was an orderly landscape—clear and a little cool; the relation between mother and son was a stormy one. He loved her passionately and bore a deep resentment. She knew her fault and reproached herself. She had given all her love to her husband; there was little left over for her children. Mother and son seldom looked into each other’s eyes; each could hear the other think—a relationship that does not necessarily involve tenderness. Each admired the other boundlessly and suffered. Between them had stood John Ashley, who had never been called on to suffer, who had acquired no faculty that could make him aware of suffering about him.
    Sophia watched her brother pack one of two small grips left from the sale. In silence she brought the clothes his mother and Lily had washed and ironed for him and a package of sliced bread, unbuttered, but spread