Who'll Save the Plowboy? (by Frank D. Gilroy). The husband, Albert, guzzles false courage out of beer cans. The wife, Helen, darns his socks and whines testily, "When was the last time you cut your toenails?" She is not so much asking a question as emitting a fixed tone signal, an S 0 S of day in, day out desperation. "Death or a new stove, I'll settle for either one," she says. The shabby New York apartment is like a tank of formaldehyde preserving the couple's dead marriage, dead hopes, and dead selves.
A...
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