"Rusch-BeautifulDamned" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

KRISTINE KATHRY RUSCH

THE BEAUTIFUL, THE DAMNED

CHAPTER 1

I Come From The Middle West, an unforgiving land with little or no tolerance for
imagination. The wind blows harsh across the prairies, and the snows fall thick.
Even with the conveniences of the modem age, life is dangerous there. To lose
sight of reality, even for one short romantic moment, is to risk death.

I didn't belong in that country, and my grandfather knew it. I was his namesake,
and somehow, being the second Nick Carraway in a family where the name had a
certain mystique had forced that mystique upon me. He had lived in the East
during the twenties, and had grand adventures, most of which he would not talk
about. When he returned to St. Paul in 1928, he met a woman-- my grandmother
Nell -- and with her solid, common sense had shed himself of the romance and
imagination that had led to his adventures in the first place.

Although not entirely. For when I announced, fifty years later, that I intended
to pursue my education in the East, he paid four years of Ivy League tuition.
And, when I told him, in the early '80s, that, despite my literary background
and romantic nature, I planned a career in the securities business, he regaled
me with stories of being a bond man in New York City in the years before the
crash.

He died while I was still learning the art of the cold call, stuck on the
sixteenth floor of a windowless high rise, in a tiny cubicle that matched a
hundred other tiny cubicles, distinguished only by my handprint on the phone set
and the snapshots of my family thumbtacked to the indoor-outdoor carpeting
covering the small barrier that separated my cubicle from all the others. He
never saw the house in Connecticut which, although it was not grand, was
respectable, and he never saw my rise from a cubicle employee to a man with an
office. He never saw the heady Reagan years, although he would have warned me
about the awful Black Monday well before it appeared. For despite the computers,
jets, and televised communications, the years of my youth were not all that
different from the years of his.

He never saw Fitz either, although I knew, later that year, when I read the
book, that my grandfather would have understood my mysterious neighbor too.

My house sat at the bottom of a hill, surrounded by trees whose russet leaves
are-- in my mind-- in a state of perpetual autumn. I think the autumn melancholy
comes from the overlay of hindsight upon what was, I think, the strangest summer
of my life, a summer which, like my grandfather's summer of 1925, I do not
discuss, even when asked. In that tiny valley, the air always had a damp chill
and the rich smell of loam. The scent grew stronger upon that winding dirt path
that led to Fitz's house on the hill's crest -- not a house really, but more of