[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.23As for Felix, he returns to the house and picks up the evening mail from the hall table.There is a letter from his mother’s dressmaker Polly among all the usual run of business.The house is quiet except for Prudencia in the kitchen.There is no evidence of his mother’s having been down that day.But this is not surprising.His mother is shriveling up, as she has been all through 1929.Now a gap has opened between the collar of her bedclothes and her narrowing neck, and her hands shake when she pours out the afternoon tea and carries the saucer and cup to her extended, monkeyish lips.Her eyes swim in a pool of excess liquid, not tears but some thicker fluid, which dries unbecomingly on her drooping lids.Felix mentions none of this.He does not, for official purposes, take notice of his mother’s body.And yet he notices; and she observes him noticing, and her jaw firms and she sips defiantly and affects not to care as the tea slops onto her lap.She is old.Dr.Yost visits on occasion and slips out of the house without giving anything away, but Felix is sure she is in a steep decline.It is terrible to think of.Largely he avoids it.Still, they have lasted this long.They outlasted first the terrible bitter winter and then the hot dry summer, and they have discovered the pleasures of the in-between seasons, February and now October.“There’s a note here saying your dress is ready,” he tells her from the doorway.“Oh!” she starts, and slaps the bed gently.“Well, all right, that’s good news.Would you get Prudy up here, I want to go try it on.It’s my special occasion dress that didn’t fit because I’m shrinking.”He flushes at this and says, “I’ll just go get it, mama.”“Well, you can’t try it on for me, I hope,” she scolds.“I’d like to see you do that.And Polly’s such a useless thing, she’ll never come here.You just wait.” Prudencia passes him in the hall, and he changes his own duds and stirs the fire until his mama comes downstairs wearing fur, carrying a ghost of her old bearing.“Now,” she says, greeting him.“That’s more like it,” he tells her.She sighs, then draws a long, shuddering breath.“Out we go,” she flutes sadly.She peps up in the October chill.They pass the Pure Food Bakery and the Black Cat, where the observatory people have their midday meal, and the Power Hat Shop (“everything guaranteed a year out of fashion at least,” his mother comments), Dr.R.O.Raymond’s medical office (“he’s a very very old man”), and the New York Store (“they have some all right things in the area of household goods and a few clothes”), and the Black Bar (“I think Prudy goes in there sometimes; I believe they serve coloreds”).“Connie Lowell is here,” he mentions.“Oh, I know it,” she answers.“I already got the letter in the noon mail.Well, the summons.”“We’ll go up together.”“I suppose we must.She’s a very strange woman, Felix.Ninny Larch spent a weekend with that bunch twenty years ago and she still talks about it.You know why they had their honeymoon in a hot air balloon? Because she thought they could really go to the moon in one.”“Oh, stop.”“It’s quite true.Ninny was there at the wedding.”They walk along meditatively for a minute, avoiding horse apples.“Do you know what else the widow Lowell is known for, Felix?” his mother continues.“She is known for being very unforgiving toward people who try to put one over on her.I mean you come to expect a certain amount of chicanery from people when you’ve got money, but she takes it all very personally.She doesn’t like to be tricked.In fact I think that’s finally what made her fight so hard to keep all of her husband’s money.Mr.Slipher thinks it’s only greed, you know, but I think she felt affronted.Not only that someone was trying to fleece her, she felt it was as though her husband had played a trick on her, leaving it all to the observatory.” She grips his arm as they step up onto the next sidewalk.“Really a double trick, after dying in the first place, then to cheat her out of her inheritance.”He cannot say much about dying without feeling he is entering strange territory; she still remembers his remark from Christmastime.“It is like a trick, isn’t it?” she prods.“I mean when somebody goes and dies.”“A disappearing act,” he offers.“Now you see them,” she sniffs, satisfied for the moment, “and now you don’t.”They enter Miss Polly’s, a small brick storefront, where she will run you up something presentable if you don’t mind waiting two weeks, and if you don’t mind the way she does things, with the in-stitching of an industrial strength, as though you are going to mine gold in the thing.“Take this, for example,” his mama says, whisking a sleeve from under her fur in the light of the shop.“You see that.She couldn’t do anything like that, how the seam is just invisible there.That’s from Welch’s.But she’s all we’ve got.You’re lucky; you can just throw any old thing on, and people think you’re a cowboy.”At this dark end of the afternoon the shop is quiet.Bolts of fabric are shelved on one wall.Along another wall stand two long tables overhung with electric lights, where two young women are cutting and sewing, their heavy steel scissors producing a violent slicing sound.“Good afternoon,” his mother calls boldly.Miss Polly—young, fat, hangdog, hair awisp—comes forward reluctantly.“Mrs.DuPrie.”“You have it done, finally.”Miss Polly sighs, turns away with a bovine docility, and returns in a minute with an orange dress and Mary’s old scarf that served as the color match.“Oh, where did you get that scarf?” his mother had exclaimed months ago.And Mary had snaked the thing off her neck and mentioned Hardeur.“Well, it’s just exactly the color I’ve been looking for,” his mama had insisted, some turn of flattery or ingratiation.But then she had had the dress made in fact, in just that color orange.“I don’t know what took you so long.”“It’s the tricky bits in the back,” Polly answers.“We had to take it all apart and put it all back together again.We had it right the first time, but then you wanted it smaller.”“Indeed,” his mama returns, “it must have been terrible to have to do some real fashioning for once.Felix, would you mind waiting for me just a minute, dear
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]