"Plain, Belva - Harvest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Plain Belva)

But you are intruding, Iris said silently.

On the lawn a swooping crow startled the feeding flock, which rose and scattered. Feigning interest in the birds, Iris blinked and, before tears could start, turned in her seat to watch them.

"I'm fine. I'm just feeling quiet. You know how I am."

"You'll work everything out. All in good time. Believe me, you will. Be patient. A woman must make a home for her husband. Life is hard for men, struggling for a place in the world. A woman must be his refuge."

And where does the woman find refuge? Iris asked herself, resenting the trite, simplistic counsel.

"You are of your time," she said only, as they rose to go.

"And you, I think you are ahead of yours," Anna replied.

They walked to the parking lot. A vivid girl in a pleated tennis dress, with red ribbons on her long black ponytail, waved to Iris.

"Who's that?" asked Anna.

"She plays doubles with Theo at the club. He thinks she's stunning."

"Well, she is very striking."

Anna stood for a moment at the window of the station wagon before Iris put it into gear.

"Iris, darling. Just remember Theo loves you." Very care-

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fully, Anna looked away. "You must forget that old business. I do hope you're over that nonsense. You remember what I told you then? Jealousy can eat you up."
Canny woman! She had guessed that more than a teaching career was troubling her daughter today. But whatever could Mama know about jealousy? Papa wasn't a flirt. Papa wasn't out riding around town with another woman at noon.
"Don't worry, Mama. Please, I'm fine. And I have to rush. The kids will be home any minute."
The car sped back through the main streets of town and out through its fringes. It passed the Reform temple to which the family belonged, a handsome modern structure of brown brick set in an evergreen garden. On the highway it passed a desolate string of bowling alleys, pizza parlors, strip malls, and gas stations before turning off on a side road into another world. There, through a tunnel of old trees, it rolled on curving roads flanked by large colonial houses, with here and there a French provincial, or what passed for French provincial in suburbia, and slowed at the blunted tip of a quiet dead-end drive.
The house was framed by an autumn splendor of maples, still partially in emerald leaf but tipping now into gold. Built almost entirely of glass and slender redwood pillars, the house seemed almost to float on a lake of sunlight. Or else it was a crystal box lying lightly on a table of grass.
While it was building, and for a few years afterward, people had come by to look at it, some to marvel and some to scoff at the strange new "modern" structure. Under mild bewildered protest Papa had built it to his daughter's taste. Theo had truly never liked it, either, that she knew. The mullioned Elizabethan windows and nooks that he had lived with in England or the overstuffed central European comfort with which he had grown up were far more to his liking, although he did appreciate the very evident cost of this house. Ironically, its cost was the one thing about the house that bothered Iris. It could have been just as airy and modern, it could have given her just as much
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pride and joy, if it had been half the size. The enormous rooms, some of which were still being furnished, were almost grandiose, as was the enormous yard with its elaborate ornate shrubbery and garden. Long walls called for paintings, and while it was certainly delightful to make selections at the galleries on Madison Avenue or on Fifty-seventh Street, she always had a sinking sensation while Theo wrote out another check and blithely carried yet another costly treasure to the car. It was he who had failed to object, indeed had encouraged her father when he had increased the scale of the house plan. It was he who had added the terrace and the tennis court, he who had brought in the expensive landscape designer. A simple lawn and the natural woodland would have been pleasing enough, she reflected again.
Steve and Jimmy, with three of their sixth- and seventh-grade friends, were shooting baskets in the side yard. They gave their mother a second's pause for greeting as they whirled.
For a minute she stood watching her boys. Such nice kids, they were. Naked to the waist, sweating in the heat, brown from their summer at camp, they were the products of their parents' —and their grandparents'—care and good fortune. Lucky kids. They couldn't know how lucky they were. God bless them, she thought suddenly. She would have liked to hug them both right there in front of everyone.
There were only ten and a half months between the two. In the first year of marriage Theo and she hadn't been careful at all; he had been a passionate, careless lover, and she on her part hadn't minded. A little smile touched her mouth at the recollection. Indeed, she had not minded at all.
Now here were the brothers, close and in most ways quite alike. Neither was yet, she thought, as strikingly handsome as Theo, but they would become so. The shape of the men to be was already clear, and those men were manly, supple and tall, broad of shoulder and narrow of waist. Their eyes were clear
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and honest. Steve's, gold-brown and large, were filled with light.
They both did well at sports, at friendships, and in the classroom. Jimmy, the younger, had to work much harder to accomplish what Steve did fast and easily. Perhaps that was why Jimmy could sometimes seem to be the older, the more sober, of the two. Sometimes he could even be protective of Steve; Steve retreated from physical fights—never out of cowardice, but only because of some deep-seated horror of violence that Jimmy, although he did not share it, understood. Jimmy, if need be, used his fists, while Steve's weapon was his tongue. Filled with ideas, he would argue to the death for them. So curious about the world, so alive, Iris thought now, that he almost sparkles!
And, leaving the boys to their game, she went into the house.