"Sheri S. Tepper - Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

shrubbery which spoke of old, flowering things needing to be
rescued from formlessness and thistle. "Sleeping Beauty," she
had said more than once. "A hundred years asleep." Though
it hadn't been a hundred years. Ten or fifteen, perhaps, since
someone had put a new roof on it. Forty, perhaps, since anyone
had painted or repaired otherwise. Both times someone, anyone
had run out of money, or time, or interest, and had given up
to let it stand half vacant, occupied on the lower floor by a
succession of recluses who had let the vines cover the windows
and the shrubs grow into a thicket.
Perhaps it hadn't been anything unique in this particular
house except that it stood only a block from the campus. From
her windows she could look across the lawns of the university
to the avenue, across acres of orderly green setting off rose-
ash walls of Georgian brick, a place of quiet and haven among
the hard streets. "Damn Harvey," she hummed to herself, mov-
ing toward sleep. This was part of the daily litany: at least a
decade of "mine's" and five or six "damn Harvey's."
It shouldn't have been necessary to sell all Mama's jewelry.
Harvey could have advanced her some of her own inheritance—
even loaned it to her at interest. The past two years of niggling
economies, the endless hours using the heat gun to strip paint
until her ears rang with the howl of it and her hands turned
numb.... "Carpal tunnel syndrome," the doctor had said. "Quit
whatever your're doing with your hands and the swelling will
stop. With what your papa left you, sweetie, what's this passion
for doing your own carpentry?" Dr. Brown was an old friend—
well, an old acquaintance—who believed his white hair gave
him license to call her sweetie. Maybe he called all the people
he had once delivered as babies sweetie, no matter how old
they got, but the familiar, almost contemptuous way he said it
didn't tempt her to explain.
"Look," she could have said. "Papa Zahmani was pure, old-
country macho to the tips of his toes. He didn't leave his little
girl anything. He left it all in half-brother Harvey's hands until
little Marianne either gets married—in which case presumably
her sensible husband will take care of it for her—or gets to be
thirty years old. I guess he figured if Marianne wasn't safely
married by thirty, she never would be and it would be safe to
let such a hardened spinster handle her own affairs. Until men,
however, Harvey controls the lot—half-brother Harvey who
treats every dime of Marianne's money as though it were a
drop of his own blood."
Anyhow, why explain? It wouldn't change anything. The
truth was simply that she hadn't the money to pay anyone to
paint the walls or strip the woodwork or reupholster the fur-
niture scrounged from secondhand shops. "Junk shops," she
reminded herself. "Not so damn junky anymore...."
"You can live on what I allow you," Harvey had said, off-
handedly. "If you get a cheap room somewhere. There's no