Mothers and Daughters
- Автор: Хантер Эван
- Год: 1961
- Язык: английский
- Год: Simon and Schuster
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «Mothers and Daughters». Краткое содержание книги:
Surely she was in the here and now. The Julia Regan who opened the house at the lake again in the summer of 1953 was a flesh-and-blood person who cleaned out bathtubs and straightened cupboards and aired mattresses. I am growing old, she thought, where is 1939? Where is the girl who was born in 1939? Memory is too cruel, she thought. I would abolish years. I would trample time. I want to be in Rome again. I want to be alive again. I want to be loved.
Oh, all I want is to be loved.
The lake held no menace.
David sat on the back porch of the summer house, his hands folded on his naked chest, and looked out over the still water. August sunshine caught at his yellow swimming trunks, reflected from the signet ring on the pinkie of his right hand. A man in a rowboat was fishing in the middle of the lake. He watched the man sleepily, half dozing. The pines were almost motionless. A faint breeze stirred the midsummer air. He could hear his mother inside the house, preparing lunch.
Saturday, he thought. Lake Abundance.
All the Saturdays of his early life, all the summer Saturdays at Lake Abundance, and that Saturday in September — he felt no pain. He sat watching the calm surface of the killer lake, and he felt no real pain, only an inestimable sense of loss. Something more than his father had died on that day in 1939. Something more. I seem to lose people, he thought. I seem to have a knack for losing people.
He listened to his mother humming inside the house.
A screen door opened. He turned his head.
The people next door. He had met them last weekend. Cocktails in his mother’s living room. “This is my son, David.”
“How do you do, Mr. Bridges? Mrs. Bridges?”
“Matthew and Amanda,” the man corrected. Tall, grinning, mustached. David did not trust men with mustaches. The woman — how old? Thirty? Blond, sun-tanned, restless somehow, she tucked her skirts around her too efficiently, she smoked too much.
“This is their first summer at the lake,” his mother said. “I talked them into it.”
“You’ll like it here,” David said.
“We’ve been going up to the Vineyard,” Matthew told him.
“That’s a long haul, isn’t it?”
“Well, not so bad. There’s plane service, you know.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yes. The trip’s not bad at all. I didn’t enjoy the people very much, though.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“Well, it’s a strange crowd,” Matthew said. “Everyone performs.”
“Matthew doesn’t like people,” Amanda said. “That’s his trouble.” She smiled at David. She lighted another cigarette.
“I didn’t like those people, that’s for sure,” Matthew said. “I hate people who ask ‘What do you do?’ That annoys me. Everyone there did something. Everyone had a label and a profession. I’m a sculptor, I’m a photographer, I write children’s books, I composed the music for this-and-this Broadway hit, what do you do? I always felt I should recite a brief or something. Everyone performed. It was like an out-of-town tryout for autumn conversation.”
“Oh, Matthew, it wasn’t that bad,” Amanda said.
“It was, honey. You went to a party, and the party was divided into the entertainers and the appreciators. The entertainers played bongo drums badly, or Spanish guitar, or sang songs they wrote in 1920, or recited their newest poem for the Atlantic Monthly, or told dialect jokes, or exhibited the latest piece of sculpture with holes in it. And the appreciators were supposed to applaud and make noises of approval. I guess I’m not the appreciative type. I guess I just hate people who ask ‘What do you do?’”
“What do you do?” David asked, and Matthew burst out laughing.
“I’m a lawyer,” he said. “How about you?”
“Television.”
“Acting?”
“Producing.”
“That must be exciting work,” Amanda said.
“I like it,” David answered.
Cocktails and small talk in July. The new lake-front neighbors, Matthew and Amanda Bridges. The visiting son from the city. Julia cool in blue cotton. Matthew in dungarees and a T shirt, powerful arms and chest. Amanda in slacks and a full white blouse. July and small talk.
The screen door clattered shut.
August.
“Hi!” she called.
“Hello,” he answered. He lifted his arm and waved.
“Have you been in yet?”
“No.”
“I’ll bet it’s freezing.”
She was wearing a green tank-suit, a soft round girl who walked quickly to the dock before the cottage, as if she would dive instantly into the lake. He watched her appreciatively. She moved in a beautifully fluid, totally female way, and she was pleasant to watch. She shook her head suddenly, walked back the length of the dock and abandoned it, stepping onto the mud bank and walking gingerly to the waterfront, apparently having decided to enter the lake in slow progressive stages. She went into the water delicately and gently, holding her hands up near the full globes of her breasts, shrieking girlishly when the icy water touched the first mound of her body beneath the green tank-suit. The screen door opened and clattered shut again. Matthew.
“Hi, David. Going in?”
“Not just yet.”
“It’s freeeeeezing!” Amanda called to him. She was standing in water to her waist, slightly bent, delicately dipping her fingers into the lake the way David had seen it done by grandmothers and little girls.
He decided he liked Amanda Bridges.
The sounds on the lake were good sounds, summer sounds. Matthew grinned and ran past Amanda, plunging into the water recklessly. He surfaced instantly and said “Wow!” and then plunged beneath the surface again. There was a sudden silence during which the distant sound of the spillway seemed very close, all the whispering sounds of summer seemed very close and very loud, the soughing sad song of the mild breeze high in the tops of the lakeside pines and oaks, the languid rustle of heavy leaves against a heat-pale sky, and carried on the stifled breeze, echoing down the rolling bank from the Bridges’ cottage, the laughter of ten-year-old Kate playing with her younger brother, and Matthew suddenly surfacing and advancing on his wife, “Matthew, don’t! Don’t you daaaaare!” the words hanging on the water and the sky, the near buzz of yellow jackets in the close-cropped clover, the lap of the water against the dock pilings, the creak of oarlocks on the rowboats, the boats bobbing near the dock, yellow, red, yellow, and a telephone ringing someplace on the lake, the sounds of summer, sticky-slow and dreamlike, far away the hum of automobile tires on a road that rushed against the belly of the lazy countryside.
Amanda darted a frightened happy excited glance at her approaching husband and then dove into the water and broke into a powerful crawl for the raft. She climbed aboard, panting. Matthew followed her, and they both laughed short little laughs of contentment and lay back against the canvas. The lake was still again. David could hear the laughter of the children in the cottage. “No,” Kate said in her clear childish voice, “you’re supposed to be the milkman, Bobby.” He closed his eyes. The sun was hot. He began to doze.
Crackling.
A strange crackling sound.
His eyelids flickered, closed again.
Smell. Thick. Nostrils and throat. The crackle. What...