"Bailey-Legacy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bailey Dale)

-- jolted along my spine. I closed my eyes, and pressed my face against the cool
window. The engine rumbled as the ear pulled away from the curb, and when I
opened my eyes again, we had turned into a long gravel drive. The caddy mounted
a short rise topped by a stand of maples, and emerged from the trees into
sunlight and open air. My aunt paused there -- in the days to come I would learn
that she always paused there, she took a languorous, almost sensual delight in
the land -- and in the valley below I saw the house.

It had been a fine old farmhouse once, my aunt would later tell me, but that had
been years ago; now, the surrounding fields lost to creditors, the house had
begun the inevitable slide into genteel decay. Sun-bleached and worn, scabrous
with peeling paint, it retained merely a glimmer of its former splendor. Even
then, in my clumsy inarticulate fashion, I could see that it was like my aunt, a
luminous fragment of a more refined era that had survived diminished into this
whirling and cacophonous age.

"This is your home now," my aunt said, and without waiting for me to respond --
what could I say? -- she touched the gas and the car descended.

Inside, the house was silence and stillness and tattered elegance. The
furnishings, though frayed, shone with a hard gloss, as if my aunt had
determined, through sheer dint of effort, to hold back the ravages of years. A
breeze stirred in the surrounding hills and chased itself through the open
windows, bearing to me a faint lemony scent of furniture polish as I followed my
aunt upstairs. She walked slowly, painfully, one hand bracing her back, the
other clutching the rail. She led me to a small room and watched from the
doorway as I placed my suitcase on the narrow bed. I did not look at her as she
crossed the room and sat beside me. The springs complained nastily. I opened my
suitcase, dug beneath my clothes, and withdrew the photograph I had brought from
Baltimore. It was the only picture I had of my father and me together. Tears
welled up inside me. I bit my lip and looked out the window, into the long
treeless expanse of the back yard, desolate in a cruel fall of sunshine.

Aunt Rachel said, "Jake."

She said, "Jake, this isn't easy for either of us. I am an old woman and I am
set in my ways. I have lived alone for thirty-five years, and I can be as ugly
and unpleasant as a bear. I don't know the first thing about boys. You must
remember this when things are hard between us."

"Yes, ma'am."

I felt her cool fingers touch my face. She took my chin firmly, and we stared
into each other's faces for a time. She pressed her mouth into a thin
indomitable line.

"You will look at me when I speak to you. Do you understand?"

"Yes, ma'am."