Footprints by Kay Cleaver Strahan

I

A gray kitten batted the tip end of a fern flowing green to the tiles of the sunroom's floor, leaped three feet, killed an inch of fringe on the rug, toppled flat, waved coral set paws, and purred.

Dr. Elm snapped alluring fingers and said: "Puss? Puss? Puss? Look, Judy, I didn't think you'd take it like this. I don't think this is the right way for you to take it, my girl."

Judith loosed tightened lips to tremble words. "Only -- I can't believe it, Dr. Joe. I mean -- How could Neal possibly have forgotten?"

"It is easier to say, maybe, how could Neal, being Neal, possibly have remembered? Of course though, Judy, we aren't dead certain and can't be, for a while, that Neal did forget. That part of it was Miss MacDonald's one and only piece of guesswork. Jehoshaphat, though, I hope she was right about it!"

"Yes. If she is right about-the other, I suppose we have to hope for that, too."

"She is right, Judy. There is no getting away from what she called her footprints. They walk right through the letters, making a path so plain it looks to me, now, like nobody but a fool could have missed it. Lucy's second letter to you makes the first track. Maybe it would take a crime analyst to discover it; but, in the third letter, the path starts off, good and deep, and follows straight along through Neal's last letter to you-not a misstep, not a detour, not a doubt. Soon as we can find time, we'll go through them, if you want to, and trace them along. I thought I could tell you all the points-but I must have missed some, if you aren't convinced."

"I am. I have to be. Except-Neal's forgetting."

"Look, Judy. I don't need to tell you about the findings of modern psychology. You understand it better than I do. But would you like to kind of whittle through Neal's case with me, the way Miss MacDonald explained it-smart as a whip, that girl is-to kind of refresh your memory and help you understand about Neal?"

"I wish we might, Dr. Joe. You are wrong about my understanding the new psychology. I don't understand it very well. I never have."

"No; and who does? I shouldn't have said ‘understand'-I should have said ‘believe in,' maybe, or some such thing. We don't understand gravitation, or love, or sin, or electricity, or-much of anything. But we believe in them because we've been forced to.

"Well, to begin with, Miss MacDonald says that Neal is a supersentimentalist. That's why he has always fought sentimentality to the last ditch, and derided it. He knew how extra-sentimental he was, and he was ashamed of it; hated it like he'd have hated a club-foot; inferiority complex right there, to use the jargon, to begin with. What Neal should have done was to have married real young, as Dick did. Then he'd have had a nice conventional outlet for his floods of sentiment-love of his wife and babies. That's a lot different from loving his aunties and uncles and sisters. He didn't marry. And, along in mid-adolescence, a doggone unfortunate thing happened.

"He got the idea of marriage muddled up in his mind with all the distress and fear and self-humiliation that had ever come to him. Never had a worry in his life-I mean a real, serious one-until Chris came home, and the woman Chris had married started all the distress about selling Q 2. Too sentimental, too loyal, to blame Chris-or even Chris's wife-blame it on marriage. You know, Lucy quotes him as saying a blameless young man and a pleasant girl married will make a curse or a crime. Then, Chris and Irene were hugging and kissing and loving and being as sentimental, here, there, and everywhere, as they darned pleased. Neal was jealous-though he didn't know it, of course-so that made him hate marriage (their liberty), and himself, worse than ever.

"Look. Who let him out of his locked room that night and directed him to Dick's room, where he found Dick killed? The woman Chris had married. Who made a fool of him with her fake murder business? The woman Phineas had married. Further back: What caused his father to kill a man? (That went awful hard with Neal, and I knew it, at the time.) The man your Aunt Gracia was going to marry. Blame any of the folks? Same as I said before-too loyal, too sentimental. Lots easier to blame marriage. Marriage, you see this, Judy, mixed up with the dark experiences of his life; mixed up with murder, grief, despair, fear, self-disgust. Look-a firm resolve never to have any truck with marriage. Or, if you like it better, a marriage complex. About as easy for a loving, sentimental lad like Neal to endure, as a boil on the end of his nose.

"It didn't look so pretty, and he knew it. He stopped talking about it, soon as he got a little older, and hoped folks wouldn't notice it. Before long, he stopped looking cross-eyed, so's he could see it himself. He began to look-well, crooked, out of the sides of his eyes so's he couldn't see it at all. Got the habit of looking crooked. Forgot the boil; and it was a relief, you can bet on that. Here I am, though-that's what always happens to me when I try to do fancy work with my words-with a boil on Neal's nose, when I want a complex against marriage stored away in his mind's dark chambers and forgotten. Stowed right next on the shelf to the secret he had to keep; the secret that smashed his life to chips for a while-the secret he'd like to forget, but couldn't. So far so good, Judy?"

"Yes -- "