To Paradise
- Автор: Yanagihara Hanya
- Год: 2022
- Язык: английский
- Год: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «To Paradise». Краткое содержание книги:
In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist's damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him--and solve the mystery of her husband's disappearances.
These three sections are joined in an enthralling and...
For a while he sat on the sofa in the darkened living room, holding the envelope in both hands. This was his last moment of ignorance, of pretending, and he didn’t want it to end. But finally, he turned on the lamp, and removed the sheet of paper, and read what it said.
He woke to the sound of his name and Charles’s palm on his cheek, and when he opened his eyes, he knew from the clarity of light that filled the room that it was snowing again. Before him, on the ottoman, sat Charles, wearing his robe and what they called his old-man pajamas, striped blue cotton with his initials stitched in black on the breast pocket. Charles never came downstairs until he had combed his hair, but now it stood about his head in clumps, so that David could see the white of his scalp where the hair had become thin at the crown.
“He’s gone,” Charles said.
Oh, Charles, he said. When?
“About an hour ago. His nurse called me. I woke up, and looked over, and you weren’t next to me”—he began to apologize, but Charles put his hand on his arm, stopping him—“and I was disoriented. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. But then I remembered: I was in my house, and it was the day after the party, and I had been waiting for this call—I knew what it would be. I had just thought it would be tomorrow, not today. But it wasn’t—he never even made it to the airport.
“So I didn’t answer it. You didn’t hear it ring? I just lay there and listened to the phone ringing and ringing and ringing: six, ten, twenty times—I’d turned the answering machine off last night. It was so loud. Such an insistent, rude noise: I never realized. Finally, it stopped, and I sat up, on the edge of the bed, and listened.
“I found myself in that moment thinking of my brother. Oh, right—you don’t know. Well, when I was five, my mother gave birth to another son. My brother, Morgan. She and my father had been trying to have a child for years, I later learned. Ten weeks before her due date, she went into labor.
“Back then—this would have been 1943—there was nothing you could do for such a premature baby: There was no such thing as neonatal care; the incubators were primitive compared to what we have now. It was extraordinary he was alive at all. The doctor told my parents he would die within forty-eight hours.
“No one told me this, of course. These days, I’m always shocked by how much information parents give their children, information those children aren’t yet equipped to understand. When I was a child, I knew nothing, and the people who looked after me were charged with keeping me ignorant. What I learned I gathered from whispers and eavesdropping. And yet I don’t remember feeling frustrated; I would never have considered my parents’ lives part of mine. My world was the fourth floor, with my toys and books. My parents were visitors; the only adults who belonged were my nanny and my tutor.
“But even I knew that something was wrong—I knew from the way the adults whispered in the hallway, falling silent when they spotted me; the way even my nanny, who loved me, seemed distracted, looking toward the door when the maid came in with my lunch, raising her eyebrows inquiringly at her, tightening her mouth when she shook her head in response. Downstairs, everything was silent. The servants—this was long before Adams’s time—spoke in low voices, and for three days, I went to bed without being taken downstairs to be presented to my parents first.
“On the fourth day of this, I decided I was going to sneak downstairs and figure out what was happening. And so I pretended to be asleep when Nanny came to check on me that night, and then I waited and waited, until I heard the last maid walking upstairs toward her bedroom. And then I got out of bed and tiptoed down to my parents’. As I did, I noticed a faint light, candlelight, coming from the parlor next door to their room, and as I noticed that light, I also heard a small, strange sound that I couldn’t identify. I crept closer to the parlor. I was so careful, so quiet. Finally, I was at the door, which was ajar, and I looked inside.
“I saw my mother, sitting on a chair. There was a candle on the table by her side, and in her arms, she held my brother. The thing I remember thinking later was how beautiful she looked. She had long, reddish hair that she always wore pinned up, but now it hung about her like a veil, and she was wearing a lilac-colored silk robe and a white nightgown beneath it; her feet were bare. I had never seen my mother look like this—I had never seen my parents in any way other than how they wanted me to see them: fully dressed, capable, competent.
“In her left arm, she was cradling the baby. But in her right hand she was holding an odd instrument, a clear glass dome, and she would fit the dome over the baby’s mouth and nose and then squeeze the rubber bulb attached to it. That was the sound I’d heard, the rubber bulb wheezing as it filled and emptied with air, air she was giving to Morgan. She kept up a steady rhythm, and she didn’t rush: not too fast, not too much. Every ten squeezes or so she would stop for a second, and I could hear, barely, the baby’s breath, so quiet.
“I don’t know how long I stood there, watching her. She never looked up. The expression on her face—I can’t describe it. It wasn’t despairing, or sorrowful, or desperate. It was just—nothing. But not blank. Attentive, I suppose. As if there were nothing else in her life—no past, no present, no husband or son or house—as if she existed only to try to pump air into her baby’s lungs.
“It didn’t work, of course. Morgan died the next day. Nanny told me about it at last: that I’d had a brother, and that his lungs had been faulty, and that he had died, and that I wasn’t to be sad because he was now with God. Later, when my mother was dying, I learned that my parents had fought; that my father had disagreed with her trying, that he had forbade her from using that instrument. I don’t know where she got it from. I don’t know that she ever forgave him: for not believing, for dissuading her from trying. My father, I learned, hadn’t even wanted to bring him home from the hospital, and when my mother fought to do so—they donated so much to the place that they wouldn’t deny her—he had disapproved of that as well.
“My mother wasn’t a sentimental woman. She never spoke of Morgan, and after he died, she eventually recovered herself. Over the decades, she ran charities, she hosted dinners, she rode horses and painted, she read and collected rare books, she volunteered at a home for unwed young mothers; she made a life in this house for me and my father.
“I never considered myself much like her, and neither did she. ‘You’re just like your father,’ she’d sometimes say to me, and she always sounded a little rueful. And she was right—I was never one of those gay men who found an affinity with their mothers. Except for the fact that we never discussed who I loved, I did have a kinship with my father. For a long time, I was able to pretend that we never talked about who I was, or part of who I was, because we had so many other things to talk about. The law, for example. Or business. Or biographies, which we both liked to read. By the time I stopped pretending, he was already dead.
“But lately, I’ve been thinking about that night more and more. I wonder if I’m actually more like her than I knew. I wonder who will hold that little air pump for me when it’s my turn. Not because they think it’ll revive me, or save me. But because they want to try.
“I was sitting there, thinking all of this, when the phone rang again. This time I got up and answered it. It was Peter’s new day-shift nurse—a nice guy. I’d met him a few times. He told me Peter had died, and that it had been peaceful, and that he was very sorry for my loss. And then I hung up and I went looking for you.”
He was quiet, and David realized that it was the end of his story. As Charles had talked, he had looked out the window, which had become a screen of white, and now he turned to David again, and David pressed his back into the sofa’s cushions and beckoned to Charles, who lay down next to him.