Happy New Year, Herbie and other stories
- Автор: Хантер Эван
- Год: 1963
- Язык: английский
- Год: Simon and Schuster
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «Happy New Year, Herbie and other stories». Краткое содержание книги:
“Come on, Beck,” I said. “We’re going home.”
She looked at me for a long time, searching my face with her dark solemn eyes while the rain came down around us. I knew that word of the beating had traveled across the lake, but I didn’t know whether she was looking for cuts and bruises or for something else.
“Are you all right?” she said at last.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said. “Becky, please go pack your things.” And then, as she turned to go, I said, “Becky?”
She stopped in the center of the road with the rain streaming on her face and she looked at me curiously, her eyebrows raised, waiting.
“As soon as we get back,” I said, “today, this afternoon, I’m going to talk to your father.”
She stared at me a moment longer, her eyes very serious, and then she gave a small nod, and a smile began forming on her face, not the usual fast-breaking smile, but a slow steady smile that was somehow very sad and very old, even though she was only nineteen.
“All right, Donald,” she said.
That afternoon I went to see her father at his dental office on Fordham Road in the Bronx. It was still raining. When he heard who was calling, he told his receptionist he didn’t want to see me, so I marched right in and stood beside his chair while he was working on a patient, and I said, “Dr. Goldblatt, you had better see me, because you’re going to see a lot of me from now on.”
He didn’t want to make a very big fuss because a patient was sitting in the chair with her mouth open, so he walked over to his receptionist and quietly asked her to get the police, but I just kept standing by the chair very calmly. He didn’t know it, but I had been through the hysteria bit before, in spades, and this mild case didn’t faze me at all. Finally, when he realized I wasn’t going to leave, he again left his patient sitting in the chair, and he told his receptionist to never mind the police, and he led me to a private little office where we sat on opposite sides of a desk.
He looked at me with dark solemn eyes, almost as black as Rebecca’s, and he said, “What the hell do you want from my life?”
“Dr. Goldblatt,” I said, “I don’t want anything from your life.”
“Except my daughter,” he said sourly.
“Yes, but that’s not from your life, that’s from hers.”
“No,” Dr. Goldblatt said.
“Dr. Goldblatt,” I said politely, “I didn’t come here to ask your permission to see her. I came here to tell you that we’re getting engaged, and as soon as we graduate we’re going to get married.”
“No,” Dr. Goldblatt said. “You’re a Gentile, she’s a Jewish girl, it would never work. Don’t you know the trouble you’re asking for? Different religions, different cultures, how will you raise the children, what will you...?”
“Dr. Goldblatt,” I said, “that’s only marbles.”
“What?”
“I said it’s only marbles.”
The office went very silent, just the way the camp had when I’d shouted those words the day before. Dr. Goldblatt looked at me for a long time, his face expressionless. Then, all he said was “Marbles.”
“Yes,” I said, “marbles. Dr. Goldblatt, I’m going to pick up Becky at the house tonight at eight o’clock. At the house. Dr. Goldblatt. I’m not going to meet her in some dark alley any more.”
Dr. Goldblatt said nothing.
“Because she’s too nice to be meeting in dark alleys,” I said, “and I love her.”
Dr. Goldblatt still said nothing.
“Well,” I said, “it was nice talking to you.”
I got up and offered my hand to him, which he refused. I shrugged and started for the door. I had my hand on the knob when I heard him say behind me, “Marbles. This is what my daughter picked. Marbles.”
I didn’t let him see me smile. I walked downstairs to the street. The rain had tapered off to a fine drizzle. The gutters ran with water, and large puddles had formed in the hollows near the curb. I could remember sticking my hand into puddles just like those long ago when I was a kid, when the loss of a hundred immies had meant a great deal to me.
I called Becky from a telephone booth in the corner drugstore.
The nut — she cried.
The Tourists
The giant brown pods of the royal poincianas were motionless on the still hot air. Like huge, closed straight-razors, they hung lifelessly from the trees against a sky of baked blue enamel. In a few months they would bloom, but they hung in ugly limpness now in a Jamaica forsaken by the trade winds, an island aflame with tropical heat, persistent, relentless, as still as death itself.
The taxi wound its way down through the heat, the sun reflecting dizzily from its polished hood and top. The native driver honked his horn incessantly and pedestrians along the side of the road inched closer to the curb each time the horn sounded, balancing bundles on their heads, walking with the straight proud walk Michael had found absent in Nassau.
His wife sat beside him in the back of the taxi, both of them rendered mute by the intense heat. She wore a white blouse and white tapered slacks, a young blond woman, evenly tanned but still carrying on her face and in her eyes the lacquered look of the native New Yorker. The cab came down out of the hills, the bay on its right resplendently blue under the brilliant sun. Michael thought of asking the driver to stop for a moment so that he could take a picture of the curving bay. And then the moment passed, the idea seemed to require too much energy. He slouched on the back seat, squinting his eyes against the sunshine which drenched the interior of the cab, wondering why he was always forgetting his sunglasses back at the hotel. He was a tall, thin man with bright blue eyes, narrowed now in an angular face. He wore a white shirt open at the throat, and he was consciously aware of his lean good looks, imagining himself somehow as a white hunter in the heart of darkest Africa, a fantasy he knew to be absurd. And yet, not totally absurd. There was a primitive smell to the island and its people, a feeling that civilization was worn by the tropics as haphazardly as a badly made suit.
“I hate this town,” Diane said suddenly.
He turned to look at her. Or rather, his eyes shifted toward her. He did not move his head or change his position. “It’s not a bad town,” he said.
“It’s awful. I think we ought to go on to Haiti.”
“No. I can’t stand beggars.”
“There are beggars here, too.”
“Not like Haiti,” he said. “In Haiti, they’re all over the streets.”
“A beggar or two might be exciting.”
“No, thank you. That’s not my idea of a vacation.”
“What is your idea of a vacation?” she asked. “Never mind, don’t bother. I know. You want a rest.”
“Exactly.”
“We’ve been resting for two weeks. When do we take a rest from resting?”
“It’s not really that dull, Diane. Actually, this is a pretty interesting town. Plenty to buy here.”
“I’m not interested in the business structure of Montego Bay. And if another native urges me to buy a straw hat when any damn fool can see I’m already wearing one, I think I’ll scream.”
Michael laughed suddenly, a humorless laugh that rang emptily in the silent cab.
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” she said. “I’m trying to tell you I’m bored.”
“You were bored in New York, too.”