"Judith Merril - Shadow on the Hearth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

schoolbooks. The girl was getting more careless every day. She was so busy telling
other people how to take care of other people's babies and get along in other people '
s houses that she didn't even have time to pick up after herself any more. That would
have to stop. It had seemed like a good thing when Barbara first organized the baby
sitters' club, but even a good thing could be carried too far.
Gladys piled things up and put them away—dirty dishes in the kitchen, pencils
and papers in the desk drawer; the knitting she was trying—for the fourth time—to
learn, she stuffed regretfully into the sideboard. There wouldn't be any time for that
today.
Washing up the breakfast dishes, she opened the casement win-dow over the sink.
She could never look out this way, across the clean green sweep of the broad back
yards, hers and her neighbor's, without a sharp contrasting memory of crowded
dim-lit fiats and furnished rooms in the city. There had been a time when Tom and
Barbie were young, and before they were born, when Jon was not "Mitchell
Associates, Consultants in Civil Engineering, " but a junior partner in a small
struggling firm; when every penny that wasn't spent for necessities went into clean
shirts and ties for Jon, or into the bank, to build the dreams that had since come true
. . . this house among them. Now, looking up over the breakfast dishes, she could
see out across the lawns, where the bread wagon was working its way along between
the double row of houses. The un-named road was too pretty, with its white gravel
set against green lawns, to be called an alley. She could see the Grahams'
three-year-old boy playing across the way, digging a hole smack in the middle of the
early garden his father had been planting. How was Annie Graham going to explain
that one tonight? And if she kept on ex-plaining things away to Tod, Sr., what was
going to become of the child anyway?
Impatiently she cut off the train of thought and moved her eyes past the play pen
in the next yard, letting them linger on the baby buggy out back of the Turners'.
Peggy had finally had the baby she
wanted; after three years of trying, and four solid months flat on her back, she'd
done it. Now with little Meg already six weeks old, Peggy wasn't out of bed yet, and
so far there was no sign that she would be. But with Jim back from the most recent
of his "business trips," things should be easier for Peggy. . . .
Annoyed at herself again, Gladys bent sternly over the dishes; other people's
troubles were easy to think about, she told herself, when you had none of your own.
Everything's almost too good. That was superstitious and silly, she knew, but she
couldn't help it. How long could things go on, getting better all the time?
Scouring the last pot, she thought she heard her name called. Across the yard her
next-door neighbor, Edie Crowell, was clipping the hedge against the budding of the
first spring leaves, a tall grace-ful figure in tailored slacks, floppy hat, and worn
gardening gloves, perfectly in place in the well-planned flower garden back of the big
white colonial house.
"Good morning," Edie called across. Her polished voice carried clearly across the
grass and arrived pleasant and well modulated, as if she were carrying on a tea-table
conversation. By comparison, Gladys' own hearty hail always sounded to her like a
fishwife's cry. But she couldn't go out; she wasn't dressed yet. She waved a reply to
the greeting and Edie promptly left her hedge and started over.
Groaning inwardly and apologizing out loud for the wrapper she still wore, Gladys
opened the kitchen door and stood talking to her neighbor on the back porch.
"
I was just wondering," Edie explained, "if you'd mind terribly going to the