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

The fingers dropped from my face. "That's one of my rules. This isn't Baltimore,
Jake. I'm not your father. He was a good boy, and I'm sure he was a fine man,
but it strikes me that young people today are too lenient with their children. I
will not tolerate disrespect."

"No, ma'am."

"Good." She smiled and smoothed her dress across her thighs. "I'm glad you've
come to me, Jake," she said. "I hope we can be friends."

Before I could speak, she stood and left the room, closing the door behind her.
I went around the bed and lifted the window. The breeze swept in, flooding the
room with that alien smell of green things growing. I threw myself on the bed
and drew my father's picture to my breast.

Among the photographs that are important to me number three relics of my youth.
They are arranged across my desk like talismans as I write.

The first photograph, which I have already described to you, is that of my 'aunt
as she must have looked in 1918 or '19, when she was a girl.

The second photograph is of my mother as she was in the days when my father knew
her; aside from the photograph I have nothing of her. Perhaps my father felt
that in hoarding whatever memories he had of her, he could possess her even in
death. Or perhaps he simply could not bring himself to speak of her. I know he
must have loved her, for every year on my birthday, the anniversary of her
death, he drew into himself, became taciturn and insular in a way that in
retrospect seems atypical, for he was a cheerful man, even buoyant. Beyond that
I do not know; he was scrupulous in his destruction of every vestige of her.
When he died, I found nothing. No photographs, but the one I still possess. No
letters. Not even her rings; I suppose she wore them to the grave.

The third photograph I have mentioned also. It is of my father and me, when I
was eleven, and it captures a great irony. Though it was taken in a ballpark --
Baltimore's Memorial Stadium -- my father did not love baseball. I don't
remember why we went to that game -- perhaps someone gave him the tickets -- but
we never attended another. That was when I felt it first, my passion for the
sport; immediately, it appealed to me -- its order and symmetry, its precision.
Nothing else in sports rivals the moment when the batter steps into the box and
faces the pitcher across sixty feet of shaven green. The entire game is
concentrated into that instant, the skills of a lifetime distilled into every
pitch; and no one, no one in the world but those two men, has any power to alter
the course of the game.

In those days, of course, I did not think of it in such terms; my passion for
the sport was nascent, rudimentary. All I knew was that I enjoyed the game, that
someday I would like to see another. That much is my father's due.

The rest, indirectly anyway, was the resurrection man's gift, his legacy. But I
have no photograph of him.