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

alone. I would have turned back, but the humming stopped, and a voice said:
"Catherine?"
"Collin," I answered, showing myself.
The snowflake of Dolly's face held its shape; for once she did not
dissolve. "This is where you come-we wondered," she said, her voice frail
and crinkling as tissue paper. She had the eyes of a gifted person, kindled,
transparent eyes, luminously green as mint jelly: gazing at me through the
attic twilight they admitted, timidly, that I meant her no harm. "You play
games up here-in the attic? I told Verena you would be lonesome." Stooping,
she rooted around in the depths of a barrel. "Here now," she said, "you can
help me by looking in that other barrel. I'm hunting for a coral castle; and
a sack of pearl pebbles, all colors. I think Catherine will like that, a
bowl of goldfish, don't you? For her birthday. We used to have a bowl of
tropical fish-devils, they were: ate each other up. But I remember when we
bought them; we went all the way to Brew-ton, sixty miles. I never went
sixty miles before, and I don't know that I ever will again. Ah see, here it
is, the castle." Soon afterwards I found the pebbles; they were like kernels
of corn or candy, and: "Have a piece of candy," I said, offering the sack.
"Oh thank you," she said, "I love a piece of candy, evea when it tastes like
a pebble."
We were friends. Dolly and Catherine and me. I was eleven, then I was
sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.
I never brought anyone home with me, and I never wanted to. Once I took
a girl to the picture show, and on the way home she asked couldn't she come
in for a drink of water. If I'd thought she was really thirsty I would've
said affl right; but I knew she was faking just so she could see inside the
house the way people were always wanting to, and so I told her she better
wait until she got home. She said: "All the world knows Dolly Talbo's gone,
and you're gone too." I liked that girl well enough, but I gave her a shove
anyway, and she said her brother would fix my wagon, which he did: right
here at the comer of my mouth I've still got a scar where he hit me with a
Coca-Cola bottle.
I know: Dolly, they said, was Verena's cross, and said, too, that more
went on in the house on Talbo Lane than a body cared to think about. Maybe
so. But those were the lovely years.
On winter afternoons, as soon as I came in from school, Catherine
hustled open a jar of preserves, while Dolly put a foot-high pot of coffee
on the stove and pushed a pan of bis" cuits into the oven; and the oven,
opening, would let out a hot vanilla fragrance, for Dolly, who lived off
sweet foods, was always baking a pound cake, raisin bread, some kind of
cookie or fudge: never would touch a vegetable, and the only meat she liked
was the chicken brain, a pea-sized thing gone before you've tasted it. What
with a woodstove and an open fireplace, the kitchen was warm as a cow's
tongie. The nearest winter came was to frost the windows with its zero blue
breath. If some wizard would like to make me a present, let him give me a
bottle filled with the voices of that kitchen, the ha ha ha and fire
whispering, a bottle brimming with its buttery sugary bakery smells-though
Catherine smelled like a sow in the spring. It looked more like a cozy
parlor than a kitchen; there was a hook rug on the floor, rocking chairs;
ranged along the walls were pictures of kittens, an enthusiasm of Dolly's;