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Q: Is there anything you would care to add?

A: Yes. I would like to put on the record the fact that I weigh one hundred and twenty-three pounds, and Verne Petrie weighs two hundred pounds and is a full foot taller than I am. I had no choice but to use a weapon. I stand ready, of course, to pay his hospital bill.

(illustration credit 6)

GUARDIAN OF THE PERSON

“I wish there wasn’t all that money,” said Nancy Holmes Ryan. “I really wish it wasn’t there.” Nancy had been married for an hour and a half now. She was driving with her husband from Boston to Cape Cod. The time was noon, late winter. The scenery was leaden sea, summer cottages boarded up, scrub oaks still holding their brown leaves tight, cranberry bogs with frosty beards—

“That much money is embarrassing,” said Nancy. “I mean it.” She didn’t really mean it—not very much, anyway. She was enduring the peculiar Limbo between a wedding and a wedding night. Like many maidens in such a Limbo, Nancy found her own voice unreal, as though echoing in a great tin box, and she heard that voice speaking with unreasonable intensity, heard herself expressing extravagant opinions as though they were the bedrock of her soul.

They weren’t the bedrock of her soul. Nancy was bluffing—pretending to love this and hate that—dealing as best she could with the confusing fact of Limbo, of being nothing and nobody and nowhere until her new life, until her married life could truly begin.

A moment before, Nancy had launched a startlingly bitter attack on stucco houses and the people who lived in them, had made her husband promise that they would never live in a stucco house. She hadn’t really meant it.

Now, out of control, not really meaning it, Nancy was wishing that her husband were poor. He was a long way from being poor. He was worth about two hundred thousand dollars.

Nancy’s husband was an engineering student at M.I.T. His name was Robert Ryan, Jr. Robert was tall, quiet—pleasant and polite, but often withdrawn. He had been orphaned at the age of nine. He had been raised from then on by his aunt and uncle on Cape Cod. Like most orphaned minors with a lot of money, Robert had two guardians—one for his finances and one for his person. The Merchants’ Trust Company of Cape Cod was his financial guardian. His uncle Charley Brewer was the guardian of his person. And Robert was not only going to Cape Cod to honeymoon. He was going to take full control of his inheritance as well. His wedding day was also his twenty-first birthday, and the bank’s financial guardianship was legally at an end.

Robert was in a Limbo of his own. He wasn’t full of talk. He was almost completely mechanical, in harmony with the automobile and little else. His responses to his pink and garrulous new bride were as automatic as his responses to the road.

On and on Nancy talked.

“I would rather start out with nothing,” she said. “I wish you’d kept the money a secret from me—just left it in the bank for emergencies.”

“Forget about it then,” said Robert. He pushed in the cigarette lighter. It clicked out a moment later, and Robert lit a cigarette without taking his eyes from the road.

“I’m going to keep my job,” said Nancy. “We’ll make our own way.” She was a secretary in the admissions office at M.I.T. She and Robert had known each other for only two months before they were married. “We’ll live within whatever we actually make ourselves,” she said.

“Good,” said Robert.

“I didn’t know you had a dime when I said I’d marry you,” said Nancy.

“I know,” said Robert.

“I hope your uncle knows that,” said Nancy.

“I’ll tell him,” said Robert. Robert hadn’t even told his Uncle Charley that he was going to get married. That would be a surprise.

It was typical of Robert to deal in large surprises, to make his decisions in solitude. Even at the age of nine, he had found it somehow important to show very little emotional dependence on his uncle and aunt. In all the years Robert had lived with them, only one remark had been made