It

gently because she was really very sweet and had had even less experience with men than he’d had with women. And then, after she had finally sailed over the horizon of his life, he could maybe take those tennis lessons he’d been thinking of for such a long time
(Eddie often seems very well and happy in his physical-education classes’)
or there were the pool memberships they were selling at the UN Plaza Hotel
(Eddie loves to play games)
not to mention that health club which had opened up on Third Avenue across from the garage . . .
(Eddie runs quite fast he runs quite fast when you’re not here runs quite fast when there’s nobody around to remind him of how delicate he is and I see in his face Mrs Kaspbrak that he knows even now at the age of nine he knows that the biggest favor in the world he could do himself would be to run fast in any direction you’re not going let him go Mrs Kaspbrak let him RUN)
But in the end he had married Myra anyway. In the end the old ways and the old habits had simply been too strong. Home was the place where, when you have to go there, they have to chain you up. Oh, he might have beaten his mother’s ghost. It would have been hard but he was quite sure he could have done that much, if that had been all which needed doing. It was Myra herself who had ended up tipping the scales away from independence. Myra had condemned him with solicitude, had nailed him with concern, had chained him with sweetness. Myra, like his mother, had reached the final, fatal insight into his character: Eddie was all the more delicate because he sometimes suspected he was not delicate at all; Eddie needed to be protected from his own dim intimations of possible bravery.
On rainy days Myra always took his rubbers out of the plastic bag in the closet a nd put them by the coat– rack next to the door. Beside his plate of unbuttered wheat toast each morning was a dish of what might have been taken at a casual glance for a multi-colored pre-sweetened children’s cereal, but which a closer look would have revealed to be a whole spectrum of vitamins (most of which Eddie had in his medicine –bag right now). Myra, like Mother, under-, stood, and there had really been no chance for him. As a young unmarried man he had left his mother three times and returned home to he r three times. Then, four years after his mother had died in the front hall of her Queens apartment, blocking the front door so completely with her bulk that the Medcu guys (called by the people downstairs when they heard the monstrous thud of Mrs Kaspbrak going down for the final count) had had to break in through the locked door between the apartment’s kitchen and the service stairwell, he had returned home for a fourth and final time. At least he had believed then it was for the final time — home again, home again, jiggety-jog; home again, home again, with Myra the hog. A hog she was, but she was a sweet hog, and he loved her, and there had really been no chance for him at all. She had drawn him to her with the fatal, hypnotizing snake’s eye of understanding. , Home again forever, he had thought then.
But maybe I was wrong, he thought. Maybe this isn’t home, nor ever was — maybe home is where I have to go tonight. Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark .
He shuddered helplessly, as if he had gone outside without his rubbers and caught a terrible chill.
‘Eddie, please! ‘
She was beginning to weep again. Tears were her final defense, just as they had always been his mother’s: the soft weapon which paralyzes, which turns kindness and tenderness into fatal chinks in one’s armor.
Not that he’d ever worn much armor anyway — suits of armor did not seem to fit him very well.
Tears had been more than a defense for his mother; they had been a weapon. Myra had rarely used her own tears so cynically . . . but,