A Week as Andrea Benstock
- Автор: Блок Лоуренс
- Год: 1975
- Язык: английский
- Год: Arbor House
- ISBN: 978-0-87795-100-1
- Жанр: Романы для взрослых
Электронная книга - «A Week as Andrea Benstock». Краткое содержание книги:
He said, “Quite a welcome.”
“Well, I was a bitch on the phone. In fact I’ve been a pain lately, haven’t I?”
“Oh, not all that much of a pain.”
“The closest I can come to an excuse for this morning is I just talked to my mother before I called you, and on top of it being the anniversary she wanted to go to the cemetery. I don’t remember if I mentioned that or not.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Well, it rattled me a little.”
“I can understand that.” He put his arm around her waist and they walked to the kitchen where she had fixed herself a drink. She picked it up and they raised their glasses to each other and drank. In the living room he asked her how it had gone at the cemetery.
“It wasn’t really bad. I didn’t know it before, but this wasn’t her first visit. She went all by herself a few weeks ago and never told me.”
“She’s quite a gal, your mother.”
“Oh, more than you know.”
“I’m sure.”
“No, much more than you know, more than I ever knew. She told me the most extraordinary thing this afternoon.”
“Oh?”
“It’ll keep.” And, with a nod in Robin’s direction, “Little pitchers and all. Anyway, it’s a long story and I want to make sure I tell it right. Incidentally, if I seem a little odd, it’s probably because I’m still reacting to what she told me.”
“Now you’ve got me hooked.”
“Well, stay hooked. Right now I’ll get dinner on the table. No, stay where you are, you can read the paper if you want. It’ll be another few minutes.”
During dinner, and in the time between dinner and Robin’s bedtime, she kept going over what her mother had told her and trying to decide how she would recount it to Mark.
She was waiting in the living room when Mark finished tucking Robin in for the night. “That kid’s certainly morbid lately,” he said.
“Morbid? Oh, Lucinda.”
“And Lucinda’s friends and relations, all of whom seem to have come to a bad end. Maybe you could say something to Lucinda.”
“We don’t have a terribly verbal relationship. Robin’s the only one she talks to. And I was thinking, I’m not sure it’s Lucinda. What I mean is that Robin’s probably very eager for information on the subject of death and dying. Because of my father. She seems to be handling things well but kids are brilliant at reacting the way they think you want them to. And you know how close she was to Poppa David.”
“It’s a damn shame she has to learn about death at this age,” he said.
“Yes, but when’s a good time?”
“Well, that’s a point.” He was in his chair, an oversized Naugahyde recliner of the type Robin spoke of categorically as Daddy Chairs, and he leaned back in it and elevated his feet. “The goyim have it a lot easier. They can tell their kids that So-and-so went to heaven and leave it at that. They can even believe it themselves if they feel like it. I wonder if the whole concept of Heaven and Hell originated because some kid was making a pest of himself and some parent wanted to find an answer that would shut him up.”
“What a thought.”
“I wonder if many of them really believe it. Here I have two Catholic partners and I haven’t got the slightest idea what they really believe in. Kids in college talk about their beliefs but when you grow up you learn not to discuss them. What do Cass and Tony believe in? Now Tony doesn’t go to church and Cass does, but I’d be surprised if Cass even believes in God, while I would guess Tony does, at least on some level. But do they believe in heaven? Probably not, but they’ll tell their kids they do, whereas we can’t take that easy out with Robin.” He yawned. “Well, it’s supposed to be hard to be a Jew, isn’t it? Part of the game. You had something you wanted to tell me, or don’t you feel like talking about it?”
“No, I want to tell you. I thought it was so extraordinary, but maybe that’s just me.” She paused to light a cigarette. “I told you we went to the cemetery and that wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Not that it was a pleasure, but it could have been worse, and she’s really very good at keeping control of herself, and I think in a healthy way.
“But that’s not the point. I drove her back to her house — I almost said their house, I’m still doing that now and then. And I went inside for a minute, and we got to talking about Linda.”
“My sister Linda?”
“Yes. I don’t know how we got on the subject. Oh, I do, too. Your mother had called earlier and she mentioned that and got onto the subject of Linda from there. She wanted to know if there was any possibility of Linda and Jeff getting back together again.”
“About as much a possibility as there is that the sun will come up in the west tomorrow.”
“That’s more or less what I told her, but in a less colorful way. She thought this was terrible, and she had almost as much trouble using the word divorce as she has saying cancer, and she asked why didn’t Linda go out there so Jeff could see the children—”
“Oh, Christ. If that son of a bitch had the slightest interest in his kids.”
“That’s what I told her, and without saying so I tried to get across the idea that he is a son of a bitch. I explained what you’d gone through to get him to send child support on a regular basis, and I told her some of the stunts he’s pulled, and she still inclined toward the position that Linda ought to make an effort to keep the marriage together.”
It surprised her how easy it was to invent this part of the conversation. She felt that she could, if pressed, reconstruct the entire conversation about Linda, when indeed she and her mother had talked about Linda not at all. But she needed a suitable way of leading into what her mother had in fact told her, and this was better than anything else she could think of.
“So I told her she was just making a blanket defense of the institution of marriage because she had had an exceptionally fine marriage.”
“A point I would have made if you didn’t,” he said, nodding approval. “A very good point.”
“That’s what I thought, but wait. I told her how Jeff had been running around, and being very open about it, or at least that’s Linda’s story—”
“I don’t think there’s any question about it.”
“—and I asked her how she would have felt if Daddy had ever had an affair with another woman.”
“And?”
“Well, can’t you take it from there?”
“I think I know what you’re getting at but I’m not going to say it.”
“That’s it, all right, and now I’m having trouble saying it. But I’ll say it. By God, if that woman could say it I think I can. My father had an affair with another woman. No, there’s more. My father fell in love with another woman. And he wanted to get a divorce. He wanted to divorce my mother and marry another woman.”
He leaned forward, his expression thoughtful. “That’s hard to believe,” he said.
“Hard to believe? It’s impossible to believe, at least for me. But it’s the truth.”
“When did this happen, did she say?”
“Almost twenty years ago. Which means it happened after twenty years of marriage. I guess he was about forty-five at the time. I would have been, oh, I suppose I was a freshman in high school.”
“Thinking back, did you have any idea at the time?”
“Are you kidding? Of course not. God, all my life there’s been one thing I’ve always been absolutely certain of, and that’s that my parents’ marriage was made in heaven. That they had a perfect relationship and were completely devoted to each other.”