Boys and Girls Together by William Saroyan Page A

arms.
    â€˜You mustn’t let yourself scream that way. I
want
to love you. Why don’t you let me? It’s easy to let me. You don’t have to do anything but be on the level and love Johnny and Rosey and not
talk
about it.’
    When she had stopped sobbing he walked with her to the living-room and sat with her there, looking at the fire. It was a small fire now, barely a fire at all. The door of the bedroom opened and the little girl wandered out into the hall, sobbing the way her mother had sobbed, naked and sobbing.
    The woman ran to the girl and took her in her arms.
    â€˜Did you have a bad dream? It’s all gone now. You don’t have to cry any more. You sit on the toddy and Mama’ll give you some water and then you go right back to sleep.’
    He heard the girl stop crying and then he heard the woman and the girl talking softly.
    When the woman came back she said: ‘I’m afraid she heard us. I’m so ashamed.’
    If I had thirty thousand dollars, the man thought, I could straighten this out.

Chapter 16
    Seven years ago, a year before he met her, he was thirty-two and free and anything could happen because he was a son, not a father, which more than anything in the world he wanted to be. But he wanted the mother of his kids to be all right, so he was taking his time.
    You had to take your time, you just couldn’t start your kids anywhere. You wanted them to have a mother who was all right, because once somebody was their mother she was their mother for ever. You had to think about that.
    Everybody knew what a difference a mother could make. If a man took his time and finally got to somebody who looked as if she’d be all right, as if she wasthe one for them, then the time taken would be worth it because
they
would never know about the time taken, they would only have more than they might have had if the time hadn’t been taken, they’d have more because their mother had more.
    You had to keep thinking about that because whatever you were yourself couldn’t be helped, but whatever their mother would be for them could be. You could see that she would be the best you could find for them. You could keep looking.
    Besides being fun, looking was important for the kids. You wanted several of them, not two or three but six or seven, or eight or nine. If their mother was all right, why not a lot of them? They might enjoy it. It might just turn out that they might be very happy about it, happy about their mother, their father, one another, and everybody else.
    It was lonely enough waiting to see them, but it was better to go on being lonely than to see them unhappy about it, not caring about it, not enjoying it, not glad and nicely made inside and out. It was lonely most of the time, but you had to hold out, you had to keep looking, you had to keep guessing what they would be apt to be like with one and then with another and if they wouldn’t be apt to be enough, you had to wait some more.
    Whoever they were to be, they were entitled to the best mother their father could find, because they werestuck with him. He was the only father they’d ever have. It was him or nobody at all.
    There was the actress who had been famous but wasn’t any more and was drinking all the time because she wasn’t but said she could have a lot of them, surely three, she had started acting when she was just a kid, she was thirty but thirty wasn’t so much. (Dubious.) She had something for them: but she couldn’t get to sleep unless she was drunk or took sleeping pills and she looked bad until five in the afternoon and seemed to be trembling a little all the time until then. That might not be so good for them. She had plenty, though: she was deeply funny and clean and had an innocence you had to love, for she had had affairs with half a dozen known playboys and surely half a dozen unknown ones. She was slim, too, and had a way of talking you couldn’t resist because