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

when she and Catherine went to River Woods where they gathered the
ingredients of a dropsy remedy Dolly brewed and bottled. Later I discovered
she had customers for this medicine throughout the state, and it was to them
that her many letters were addressed.
Verena's room, connecting with Dolly's by a passage, was rigged up like
an office. There was a rolltop desk, a library of ledgers, filing cabinets.
After supper, wearing a green eyeshade, she would sit at her desk totaling
figures and turning the pages of her ledgers until even the street-lamps had
gone out. Though on diplomatic, political terms with many people, Verena had
no close friends at all. Men were afraid of her, and she herself seemed to
be afraid of women. Some years before she had been greatly attached to a
blonde jolly girl called Maudie Laura Murphy, who worked for a bit in the
post office here and who finally married a liquor salesman from St. Louis.
Verena had been very bitter over this and said publicly that the man was no
account. It was therefore a surprise when, as a wedding present, she gave
the couple a honeymoon trip to the Grand Canyon. Maudie and her husband
never came back; they opened a filling station nearby Grand Canyon, and from
time to time sent Verena Kodak snapshots of themselves. These pictures were
a pleasure and a grief. There were nights when she never opened her ledgers,
but sat with her forehead leaning in her hands, and the pictures spread on
the desk. After she had put them away, she would pace around the room with
the lights turned off, and presently there would come a hurt rusty crying
sound as though she'd tripped and fallen in the dark.
That part of the attic from which I could have looked down into the
kitchen was fortified against me, for it was stacked with trunks like bales
of cotton. At that time it was the kitchen I most wanted to spy upon; this
was the real living room of the house, and Dolly spent most of the day there
chatting with her friend Catherine Creek. As a child, an orphan, Catherine
Creek had been hired out to Mr. Uriah Talbo, and they had all grown up
together, she and the Talbo sisters, there on the old farm that has since
become a railroad depot Dolly she called Dollyheart, but Verena she called
That One. She lived in the back yard in a tin-roofed silvery little house
set among sunflowers and trellises of butterbean vine. She claimed to be an
Indian, which made most people wink, for she was dark as the angels of
Africa. But for all I know it may have been true: certainly she dressed like
an Indian. That is, she had a string of turquoise beads, and wore enough
rouge to put out your eyes; it shone on her cheeks like votive taillights.
Most of her teeth were gone; she kept her jaws jacked up with cotton
wadding, and Verena would say Dammit Catherine, since you can't make a
sensible sound why in creation won't you go down to Doc Crocker and let him
put some teeth in your head? It was true that she was hard to understand:
Dolly was the only one who could fluently translate her friend's muffled,
mumbling noises. It was enough for Catherine that Dolly understood her: they
were always together and everything they had to say they said to each other:
bending my ear to an attic beam I could hear the tantalizing tremor of their
voices flowing like sapsyrup through the old wood.
To reach the attic, you climbed a ladder in the linen closet, the
ceiling of which was a trapdoor. One day, as I started up, I saw that the
trapdoor was swung open and, listening, heard above me an idle sweet
humming, like the pretty sounds small girls make when they are playing