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

In the kitchen Laura, wearing a borrowed apron that fell almost to her ankles, was cutting out ginger cookies. She bent over the dough with a concentrated expression, her underlip tucked in. Her russet hair fell loosely over her cheeks; she was a replica of Anna. Even strangers remarked about it whenever the two were together. The model had simply skipped a generation.
At the far end of the counter Ella Mae was shelling peas.
"All the cooking going on around here this afternoon! I'll make a good cook out of this girl yet," she said fondly.
Laura was domestic already. Anna's genes again! Her room was a pink chintz nest; for her ninth birthday this year she had asked to have her room redecorated, and Theo, to Iris's dismay, had agreed to start from scratch with new furniture, carpet, lamps, and curtains. Theo would give Laura the moon if she were to ask for it. Laura had a dressing table with a perfume tray. When I was nine, Iris thought, what did I know about perfume? And she marveled about the variety of human experience. Thank heaven, Laura also had a mind, though, and shelves of books that she really read.
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"Laura was a big help with the apple pie, Mrs. Stern. A big help."
"I peeled half the apples," Laura said, looking important.
"Pie? What's the occasion?"
"Nothing special. Just, Dr. Stern is awful fond of pie."
Even Ella Mae adored the man! And Iris said suddenly, "You're so good to us."
"Why not? You're good to me. You're my family."
Ella Mae had two children who lived with their grandmother in South Carolina. At Christmas she visited them for two weeks, and that was all the contact she had. So she could call these strangers "family." This touched Iris in the heart of her heart.
At the first interview Iris had addressed Ella Mae as "Miss Brown." But Ella Mae had corrected her.
"She calls me Mrs. Stern," Iris had told Theo that night. "It doesn't seem right not to do the same to her."
Theo had been a little amused. "That's the way things are. You can't change the world. And anyway, if she doesn't mind, why should you?"
"Philip's at his friend's house," Ella Mae now reminded Iris. "They phoned to say you needn't go get him. They'll bring him home later. And your mail's on the hall table."
On a narrow marble slab in the hall lay schoolbooks, Jimmy's new sweater, torn already, and a pile of bills at the base of a vase of red anthuriums. Their stiff-angled branches and flat red petals were repeated in the mirror above the table, but her face, mirrored as it was between the angled branches, was fragmented as in some cubist painting, the features nervously separated and disjointed. And abruptly, a memory seized her, a startling recollection of her own familiar childhood's face, and then a recall of fragrance, the same as that which now came from the kitchen, the salty smell of roasting meat that had filled the apartment on that winter evening when she had stood
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outside a door and heard her mother's soft, pitying voice: "But you must admit, she isn't a pretty child, Joseph."
She turned away from the mirror and, crossing the hall into the living room, stood still there, drawing a deep breath as if to fill her lungs with something pure and calming.
The room was hers, of her, spare as a Japanese graveled garden, gray and cream and still. The blond Danish furniture stood on dove-colored carpet. The draperies were of crisp, self-patterned linen. Tall lamps of Swedish crystal caught the afternoon light and threw it back in rainbow colors onto the floor. A red lacquered screen—how well the Scandinavian and the Oriental went together!—drew the eye as to a point of fire toward the courtyard where, on the other side of the glass wall, a Norfolk pine grew in a large stone tub. In October it would be brought indoors to flourish over the winter.
In a far corner stood the piano, the Steinway baby grand that she had brought from home when she married. On the wall, facing her when she played, hung two rows of etchings, also brought from her room in her parents' house; there were sandpipers running along an empty beach at low tide; there were far, cloudy hills; there was a hemlock under snow.
The contemplation of all these things was comforting.
She ran her hand now over the keys. Their tinkle was loud in the silent room. Philip's lesson book stood open on the rack. Last year, when he was four, he had stood next to her watching her play, and this year she had begun to teach him. As fast as she could teach, he could learn.
"Like mother, like son," Theo had said just last Sunday afternoon when Philip had played for them. She had been happy last Sunday afternoon, and ever since then until this morning, until old fears had come back to plague her.
She walked down the hall toward her bedroom. At the end, where the light could fall upon it, hung a photograph in an ornate frame. Mama had bought the frame and Theo had put the picture in this place of prominence.
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"What a wonderful face your brother had!" he had remarked. "I'd like to have known him. Blond. That must be the strain from your mother's side."
The golden child, she thought now. That's what Mama had always said; the neighbors on the block had given that title to Maury. Iris had seen the street on which they had lived when her parents were poor. The women brought their camp chairs to the sidewalk, rocked their babies, and watched the older ones play.
"He was the most popular boy in school," Iris had told Theo, holding nothing back. Poor dead Maury. Give him all the credit he deserved. "He was on the basketball and the tennis teams."
"Ah! I would have had a tennis partner in the family," Theo had replied.
And she had thought, Yes, I know I'm clumsy at games. I know.
She stood before the picture. The eyes were radiant, eager, as though they were looking out at something new and wonderful. And then it struck her: That's Steve!
Faces and voices merged and overlapped the generations, dissolving and reappearing. All, all a mystery, why we are who we are. What made a person grow to be like Maury, the golden child, or Steve, or Theo? Or me?
There was a heaviness upon her, dragging her down. And the morning had begun so normally, so brightly.
The heat in the house was oppressive. Maybe Theo was right about wanting to air-condition the house. So many people were having it done these days, and the newest houses were having it built in. But it would cost so much. Last year he had added on a small conservatory, although he almost never had time to use it. He did a good deal of free clinic work; he'd even gone to Japan to treat victims of the Hiroshima blast—and incidentally had brought back a necklace of black pearls, whose price he wouldn't tell her; but she had seen the appraisal for insurance and been shocked. He prided himself on his charity
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work, on keeping his fees reasonable, which was right and honorable and ethical. Still, they never got ahead, in spite of all he earned, and it frightened her. They had four children, and suppose he were to fall ill? Her mind began adding a familiar column of figures: property taxes, insurance—
The telephone rang. "We'll pick you up for dinner at the club." It was a neighbor's voice. "Will seven be okay?"
"Oh, yes," Iris said. "Seven. And thanks."
She had forgotten. A club again, somebody else's country club this time, where few people knew them. When strangers don't know I'm Theo's wife, she thought, they give me a cool stare, but as soon as they see that I belong to him, ah, then, that's different. His reputation goes before him; he does everything so well, whether it's tennis or bridge, and all of them with his European gallantry. I am compelled to be vivacious alongside of him, which is not my nature.
And where was he going with that woman in the car this noon ?
"Oh, stop it!" She was furious with herself. "Go take a bath, take a nap, read a book, lay out your clothes, do anything, but stop this and get hold of yourself."