"Трумэн Капоте. The grass harp (Луговая арфа, англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

never saw her myself, people say she was a beautiful woman until she started
wearing glasses; she was rich too, having received a large inheritance from
her grandfather. When she came back from China she brought Riley, then five,
and two younger children, both girls; they lived with her unmarried brother.
Justice of the Peace Horace Holton, a meaty spinsterish man with skin yellow
as quince. In the following years Rose Henderson grew strange in her ways:
she threatened to sue Verena for selling her a dress that shrank in the
wash; to punish Riley, she made him hop on one leg around the yard reciting
the multiplication table; otherwise, she let him run wild, and when the
Presbyterian minister spoke to her about it she told him she hated her
children and wished they were dead. And she must have meant it, for one
Christmas morning she locked the bathroom door and tried to drown her two
little girls in the tub: it was said that Riley broke the door down with a
hatchet, which seems a tall order for a boy of nine or ten, whatever he was.
Afterwards, Rose was sent off to a place on the Gulf Coast, an institution,
and she may still be living there, at least I've never heard that she died.
Now Riley and his uncle Horace Holton couldn't get on. One night he stole
Horace's Oldsmobile and drove out to the Dance-N-Dine with Mamie Curtiss:
she was fast as lightning, and maybe five years older than Riley, who was
not more than fifteen at the time. Well, Horace heard they were at the
Dance-N-Dine and got the Sheriff to drive him out there: he said he was
going to teach Riley a lesson and have him arrested. But Riley said Sheriff,
you're after the wrong party. Right there in front of a crowd he accused his
uncle of stealing money that belonged to Rose and that was meant for him and
his sisters. He offered to fight it out on the spot; and when Horace held
back, he just walked over and socked him in the eye. The Sheriff put Riley
in jail. But Judge Cool, an old friend of Rose's, began to investigate, and
sure enough it turned out Horace had been draining Rose's money into his own
account. So Horace simply packed his things and took the train to New
Orleans where, a few months, later, we heard that, billed as the Minister of
Romance, he had a job marrying couples on an excursion steamer that made
moonlight cruises up the Mississippi. From then on, Riley was his own boss.
With money borrowed against the inheritance he was coming into, he bought a
red racy car and went skidding round the countryside with every floozy in
town; the only nice girls you ever saw in that car were his sisters-he took
them for a drive Sunday afternoons, a slow respectable circling of the
square. They were pretty girls, his sisters, but they didn't have much fun,
for he kept a strict watch, and boys were afraid to come near them. A
reliable colored woman did their housework, otherwise they lived alone. One
of his sisters, Elizabeth, was in my class at school, and she got the best
grades, straight A's. Riley himself had quit school; but he was not one of
the pool-hall loafs, nor did he mix with them; he fished in the daytime, or
went hunting; around the old Holton house he made many improvements, as he
was a good carpenter; and a good mechanic, too: for instance, he built a
special car hom, it wailed like a train-whistle, and in the evening you
could hear it howling as he roared down the road on his way to a dance in
another town. How I longed for him to be my friendl and it seemed possible,
he was just two years older. But I could remember the only time he ever
spoke to me. Spruce in a pair of white flannels, he was off to a dance at
the clubhouse, and he came into Verena's drugstore, where I sometimes helped