"Libra" - читать интересную книгу автора (DeLillo Don)

In Fort Worth

Even coming back he was a military man. His father was a veteran. His brothers were in the service. My own brother was a navy man. We were a serviceman family. He sent me a regular allotment every month out of his pay and when he heard about my injury, which I said in a letter, he put in for a hardship discharge, as I was disabled from work and trying for six months to collect on my claim. He was stationed in California then and they let him go early in order to help his mother. This is the injury of a candy jar falling off a shelf that four doctors have taken x-rays of my nose and face and there is travel time and carfare and the store is still holding tight to their cash. I am a disabled woman who can't collect. It is like the days of Mr. Ekdahl, a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year man with an expense account who fixed it so my welfare was ignored.

I am leaving out Lee had a beautiful voice and sang beautifully at age six in Covington, Louisiana. He sang a solo in the Lutheran church, "Silent Night," and that can be verified.

Now this boy comes home from the service and says he will work on a cargo ship and send money home to me. That was our only conversation over three days where he slept on a cot in the kitchen, which was the only place I had for him, plus he told me that he passed his high-school-level tests, Mother, which I don't know why you need this to lift crates on a boat. He was here only parts of three days before packing a bag and leaving. Then I received a letter postmarked New Orleans that he has booked passage on a ship to Europe. It is painful to accept, your honor. There is nothing in the letter that says cargo. There is nothing about he will work his way for a certain time until I have found a larger place for us to live. It is, "I have booked passage." It is, "My values are very different from Robert's or yours." It is, "I did not tell you about my plans because you could hardly be expected to understand."

It is the struggle hanging over my life that made him go away.

Postcard #3. Aboard the freighter SS Marion Lykes bound for Le Havre. The oddball loner has little to say to the three other passengers on the sixteen-day crossing. Gray seas, high swells, missed meals. He tells them he is going to school in Switzerland but doesn't mention the name of the institution or the course of study he plans to follow. He avoids a passenger's friendly attempts to take his picture. She is a nice enough lady whose husband is a lieutenant colonel, U.S. Army, retired. You'd think in the middle of the ocean he'd be able to sit on deck without answering questions from some clear-eyed military type. He talks least of all to the fourth passenger, his cabin mate, a boy just out of high school and on his way to France to study French. He is a Texas boy and just close enough to Lee outwardly to be the world's preferred version of the type.

It is like the shadow of his own life keeps falling across his path.

He watches them at dinner in the officers' mess and he thinks he knows why they look so satisfied with themselves. They have begun to feel the bond of being American. They almost glow with self-awareness, headed for foreign shores, surrounded and attended by a partly foreign and mainly dark-skinned crew, delighting in their own straightforward and affirmative ways, their democratic values, their moral strength, the way they hold their knife and fork, smiling over the glitter, and this is why he will not eat with them or share their conversation.

The spiral rind of a tangerine sits in a white saucer in front of him. He thinks of the nine months he spent at the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro in California, after Japan. He continued his Russian studies, learned some Spanish (it was the time of Fidel Castro) and developed a neat little deception for the venture he was now engaged in.

At the base library he found a catalogue listing the names of colleges abroad. He scanned the list for obscure schools in certain locations, then wrote away for an application. Albert Schweitzer College. Churwalden, Switzerland. He needed to invent a reason to travel abroad because a Marine has two years in the reserve after active duty.

On the application form he listed under special interests: Philosophy, Psychology, Ideology, Football, baseball, tennis, Stamp collecting.

Vocational interest (if decided upon): To be a short story writer on contemporary American life.

In certain light the sea goes green, a slow dullish tumble he watches from the deck. When he goes below again he lies on his bunk, aware of the great slow creaking of the ship, like a mind stirring around him. Hawsers are ropes for mooring.

On the Albert Schweitzer application he made it a point to mention that after the term was completed he planned to attend the summer session of the University of Turku-Turku, Finland.

Hidell creeps closer to the East.