Дэймон Найт: Orbit 6

I nodded.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then were did this book come from?’

I muttered something; I don’t know what.

‘Is my daughter angry?’ said my father. ‘Is my daughter being rebellious?’

‘She told you all about it!’ I blurted out. My father’s face turned red.

‘Don’t you dare talk about your mother that way!’ he shouted, standing up. ‘Don’t you dare refer to your mother in that way!’

‘Now, Ben —’ said my mother.

‘Your mother is the soul of unselfishness,’ said my father, ‘and don’t you forget it, missy; your mother has worried about you since the day you were born and if you don’t appreciate that, you can damn well —’

‘Ben!’ said my mother, shocked.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and then I said, ‘I’m very sorry mother.’ My father sat down. My father had a moustache and his hair was parted down the middle and slicked down; now one lock fell over the part in front and his whole face was grey and quivering. He was staring fixedly at his coffee cup. My mother came over and poured coffee for him; then she took the coffee pot into the kitchen and when she came back she had milk for me. She put the glass of milk on the table near my plate. Then she sat down again. She smiled tremblingly at my father; then she put her hand over mine on the table and said:

‘Darling, why did you read that book?’

‘Well?’ said my father from across the table.

There was a moment’s silence. Then:

‘Good morning!’ and

‘Good morning!’ and

‘Good morning!’ said our guest cheerfully, crossing the dining room in two strides, and folding herself carefully down into her breakfast chair, from where her knees stuck out, she reached across the table, picked up The Green Hat, propped it up next to her plate and began to read it with great absorption. Then she looked up. ‘You have a very progressive library,’ she said. ‘I took the liberty of recommending this exciting book to your daughter. You told me it was your favourite. You sent all the way to New York City on purpose for it, yes?’

‘I don’t — I quite—’ said my mother, pushing back her chair from the table. My mother was trembling from head to foot and her face was set in an expression of fixed distaste. Our visitor regarded first my mother and then my father, bending over them tenderly and with exquisite interest. She said:

‘I hope you do not mind my using your library.’

‘No no no,’ muttered my father.

‘I eat almost for two,’ said our visitor modestly, ‘because of my height. I hope you do not mind that?’

‘No, of course not,’ said my father, regaining control of himself.

‘Good. It is all considered in the bill,’ said the visitor, and looking about at my shrunken parents, each hurried, each spooning in the food and avoiding her gaze, she added deliberately:

‘I took also another liberty. I removed from the endpapers certain — ah — drawings that I did not think bore any relation to the text. You do not mind?’

And as my father and mother looked in shocked surprise and utter consternation — at each other — she said to me in a low voice, ‘Don’t eat. You’ll make yourself sick,’ and then smiled warmly at the two of them when my mother went off into the kitchen and my father remembered he was late for work. She waved at them. I jumped up as soon as they were out of the room.

‘There were no drawings in that book!’ I whispered.

‘Then we must make some,’ said she, and taking a pencil off the whatnot, she drew in the endpapers of the book a series of sketches: the heroine sipping a soda in an ice-cream parlour, showing her legs and very chic; in a sloppy bathing suit and big grin, holding up a large fish; driving her Hispano Suiza into a tree only to be catapulted straight up into the air; and in the last sketch landing demure and coy in the arms of the hero, who looked violently surprised. Then she drew a white mouse putting on lipstick, getting married to another white mouse in a church, the two entangled in some manner I thought I should not look at, the lady mouse with a big belly and two little mice inside (who were playing chess), then the little mice coming out in separate envelopes and finally the whole family having a picnic, with some things around the picnic basket that I did not recognize and underneath in capital letters ‘I did not bring up my children to test cigarettes.’ This left me blank. She laughed and rubbed it out, saying that it was out of date. Then she drew a white mouse with a rolled-up umbrella chasing my mother. I picked it up and looked at it for a while; then I tore it into pieces, and tore the others into pieces as well. I said, ‘I don’t think you have the slightest right to—’ and stopped. She was looking at me with — not anger exactly — not warning exactly — I found I had to sit down. I began to cry.

‘Ah! The results of practical psychology,’ she said dryly, gathering up the pieces of her sketches. She took matches off the whatnot and set fire to the pieces in a saucer. She held up the smoking match between her thumb and forefinger, saying, ‘You see? The finger is — shall we say, perception? — but the thumb is money. The thumb is hard.’

‘You oughtn’t to treat my parents that way!’ I said, crying.

‘You ought not to tear up my sketches,’ she said calmly.

‘Why not! Why not!’ I shouted.

‘Because they are worth money,’ she said, ‘in some quarters. I won’t draw you any more,’ and indifferently taking the saucer with the ashes in it in one palm, she went into the kitchen. I heard her voice and then my mother’s, and then my mother’s again, and then our visitor’s in a tone that would’ve made a rock weep, but I never found out what they said.

I passed our guest’s room many times at night that summer, going in by the hall past her rented room where the second-floor windows gave out onto the dark garden. The electric lights were always on brilliantly. My mother had sewn the white curtains because she did everything like that and had bought the furniture at a sale: a marble-topped bureau, the wardrobe, the iron bedstead, an old Victrola against the wall. There was usually an open book on the bed. I would stand in the shadow of the open doorway and look across the bare wood floor, too much of it and all as slippery as the sea, bare wood waxed and shining in the electric light. A black dress hung on the front of the wardrobe and a pair of shoes like my mother’s, T-strap shoes with thick heels. I used to wonder if she had silver evening slippers inside the wardrobe. Sometimes the open book on the bed was Wells’s The Time Machine and then I would talk to the black glass of the window, I would say to the transparent reflections and the black branches of trees that moved beyond it:

‘I’m only sixteen.’

‘You look eighteen,’ she would say.

‘I know,’ I would say. ‘I’d like to be eighteen. I’d like to go away to college. To Radcliffe, I think.’

She would say nothing, out of surprise.

‘Are you reading Wells?’ I would say then, leaning against the door jamb. ‘I think that’s funny. Nobody in this town reads anything; they just think about social life. I read a lot, however, I would like to learn a great deal.’

She would smile then, across the room.

‘I did something funny once,’ I would go on. ‘I mean funny ha-ha, not funny peculiar.’ It was a real line, very popular. ‘I read The Time Machine and then I went around asking people were they Eloi or were they Morlocks; everyone liked it. The point is which you would be if you could, like being an optimist or a pessimist or do you like bobbed hair.’ Then I would add, ‘Which are you?’ and she would only shrug and smile a little more. She would prop her chin on one long, long hand and look into my eyes with her black Egyptian eyes and then she would say in her curious hoarse voice: