Дэймон Найт: Orbit 6

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

If a man can resist the influences of his townsfolk, if he can cut free from the tyranny of neighbourhood gossip, the world has no terrors for him; there is no second inquisition.

John Jay Chapman

I often watched our visitor reading in the living room, sitting under the floor lamp near the new, standing Philco radio, with her long, long legs stretched out in front of her and the pool of light on her book revealing so little of her face: brownish, coppery features so marked that she seemed to be a kind of freak and hair that was reddish black but so rough that it looked like the things my mother used for scouring pots and pans. She read a great deal, that summer. If I ventured out of the archway, where I was not exactly hiding but only keeping in the shadow to watch her read, she would often raise her face and smile silently at me before beginning to read again, and her skin would take on an abrupt, surprising pallor as it moved into the light. When she got up and went into the kitchen with the gracefulness of a stork, for something to eat, she was almost too tall for the doorways; she went on legs like a spider’s, with long swinging arms and a little body in the middle, the strange proportions of the very tall. She looked down at my mother’s plates and dishes from a great, gentle height, remarkably absorbed; and asking me a few odd questions, she would bend down over whatever she was going to eat, meditate on it for a few moments like a giraffe, and then straightening up back into the stratosphere, she would pick up the plate in one thin hand, curling around it fingers like legs, and go back gracefully into the living room. She would lower herself into the chair that was always too small, curl her legs around it, become dissatisfied, settle herself, stretch them out again — I remember so well those long, hard, unladylike legs — and begin again to read.

She used to ask, ‘What is that? What is that? And what is this?’ but that was only at first.

My mother, who disliked her, said she was from the circus and we ought to try to understand and be kind. My father made jokes. He did not like big women or short hair — which was still new in places like ours — or women who read, although she was interested in his carpentry and he liked that.

But she was six feet four inches tall; this was in 1925.

My father was an accountant who built furniture as a hobby; we had a gas stove which he actually fixed once when it broke down and some outdoor tables and chairs he had built in the back yard. Before our visitor came on the train for her vacation with us, I used to spend all my time in the back yard, being underfoot, but once we had met her at the station and she shook hands with my father — I think she hurt him when she shook hands — I would watch her read and wish that she might talk to me.

She said: ‘You are finishing high school?’

I was in the archway, as usual; I answered yes.

She looked up at me again, then down at her book. She said, ‘This is a very bad book.’ I said nothing. Without looking up, she tapped one finger on the shabby hassock on which she had put her feet. Then she looked up and smiled at me. I stepped tentatively from the floor to the rug, as reluctantly as if I were crossing the Sahara; she swung her feet away and I sat down. At close view her face looked as if every race in the world had been mixed and only the worst of each kept; an American Indian might look like that, or Ikhnaton from the encyclopaedia, or a Swedish African, a Maori princess with the jaw of a Slav. It occurred to me suddenly that she might be a Negro, but no one else had ever seemed to think so, possibly because nobody in our town had ever seen a Negro. We had none. They were ‘coloured people’.

She said, ‘You are not pretty, yes?’

I got up. I said, ‘My father thinks you’re a freak.’

‘You are sixteen,’ she said, ‘sit down,’ and I sat down. I crossed my arms over my breasts because they were too big, like balloons. Then she said, ‘I am reading a very stupid book. You will take it away from me, yes?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘You must,’ she said, ‘or it will poison me, sure as God,’ and from her lap she plucked up The Green Hat: A Romance, gold letters on green binding, last year’s best-seller which I had had to swear never to read, and she held it out to me, leaning back in her chair with that long arm doing all the work, the book enclosed in a cage of fingers wrapped completely around it. I think she could have put those fingers around a basketball. I did not take it.

‘Go on,’ she said, ‘read it, go on, go away,’ and I found myself at the archway, by the foot of the stairs with The Green Hat: A Romance in my hand. I turned it so the title was hidden. She was smiling at me and had her arms folded back under her head. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Your body will be in fashion by the time of the next war.’ I met my mother at the top of the stairs and had to hide the book from her; my mother said, ‘Oh, the poor woman!’ She was carrying some sheets. I went to my room and read through almost the whole night, hiding the book in the bedclothes when I was through. When I slept I dreamt of Hispano-Suizas, of shingled hair and tragic eyes; of women with painted lips who had Affairs, who went night after night with Jews to low dives, who lived as they pleased, who had miscarriages in expensive Swiss clinics; of midnight swims, of desperation, of money, of illicit love, of a beautiful Englishman and getting into a taxi with him while wearing a cloth-of-silver cloak and a silver turban like the ones shown in the society pages of the New York City newspapers. Unfortunately our guest’s face keep recurring in my dream, and because I could not make out whether she was amused or bitter or very much of both, it really spoiled everything.

My mother discovered the book next morning. I found it next to my plate at breakfast. Neither my mother nor my father made any remark about it; only my mother kept putting out the breakfast things with a kind of tender reluctant smile. We all sat down, finally, when she had put out everything, and my father helped me to rolls and eggs and ham. Then he took off his glasses and folded them next to his plate. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. Then he looked at the book and said in a tone of mock surprise, ‘Well! what’s this?’

I didn’t say anything. I only looked at my plate.

‘I believe I’ve seen this before,’ he said. ‘Yes, I believe I have.’ Then he asked my mother, ‘Have you seen this before?’ My mother made a kind of vague movement with her head. She had begun to butter some toast and was putting it on my plate. I knew she was not supposed to discipline me; only my father was. ‘Eat your egg,’ she said. My father, who had continued to look at The Green Hat: A Romance with the same expression of unvarying surprise, finally said:

‘Well! This isn’t a very pleasant thing to find on a Saturday morning, is it?’

I still didn’t say anything, only looked at my food. I heard my mother say worriedly, ‘She’s not eating, Ben,’ and my father put his hand on the back of my chair so I couldn’t push it away from the table, as I was trying to do.

‘Of course you have an explanation for this,’ he said. ‘Don’t you?’

I said nothing.

‘Of course she does,’ he said, ‘doesn’t she, Bess? You wouldn’t hurt your mother like this. You wouldn’t hurt your mother by stealing a book that you knew you weren’t to read and for very good reason, too. You know we don’t punish you. We talk things over with you. We try to explain. Don’t we?’