Annulment

Annulment On a varnished table, in a flat in Evansville, Ind., a girl was writing a letter: "If you don't give me $100 to get the marriage annulled . . ." the pencil moved scratchily over the cheap paper. Two weeks ago this girl, one Gladys Hines, 19, white, married William Idi, a young Japanese waiter. She was not very pretty; she wanted a man; Waiter Idi was all right, as Japs went. ". . . I'll kill myself. Father says that if I married a Japanese, he would send both of us to jail. I don't want you to go to jail, sweetheart, and would die by inches if I had to go. . . . The girl went out and left the letter there. In a little while a man came in. Idi was short and slight and he stood quite still for a moment, breathing softly in the dim room. When he found that the room was really empty, he looked around with a quick, frightened turn of his head, as if to make sure that he hadn't got into the wrong flat, and in that glance he saw the letter on the varnished table. He read it and went into his room and shut the door. Pretty soon there was a new smell in the flat, the smell of gas, and then, a long while later, another smell still, fetid and dark, a breath from underground. The girl did not come back. Nobody came--for ten days.

Fortnight ago, near Kansas City, Misaji Kawahara, Japanese truck-gardener hanged himself to tend his storm-killed horse in another world (TIME, July 12).