"Bailey-Legacy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bailey Dale)

possessed a beauty that seemed to radiate color through the black and white
print. She wore an androgynous flat-busted dress and her eyes blazed from above
sharpened cheek bones with such unnerving intensity that, even in the
photograph, I could not meet them for more than a moment.

The photograph had been taken forty years before my father's death, but I knew
her instantly when I saw her on the platform.

"Jake Lamont?" she said.

I nodded, struck speechless. Tall and lean, she wore a billowing white frock and
a white hat, like a young bride. The years had not touched her. She might have
been sixteen, she might have been twenty. And then she lifted the veil that
obscured her face, shattering the illusion of youth. I saw the same high, sharp
cheek bones, the same intense eyes --blue; why had I never wondered? -- but her
flesh was seamed and spotted with age.

"Well, then," she said. "So you're a boy. I don't know much about boys." And
then, when I still did not speak, "Are you mute, child?"

My fingers tightened around the handle of my traveling case. "No, ma'am."

"Well, good. Come along, then."

Without sparing me another glance, she disappeared into the throng. Half-fearful
of being left in the noisy, crowded station, I lit out after her, dragging my
suitcase behind me. Outside, in the clear midwestern heat, we loaded the
suitcase into the trunk of a weary '53 Cadillac, one of those acre-long cars
that Detroit began to produce in the fat years after the war.

We drove into farming country, on single-lane blacktop roads where you could
cruise for hours and never see another car. We did not speak, though I watched
her surreptitiously. Her intense eyes never deviated from the road, unswerving
between the endless rows of corn. I cracked the window, and the car filled with
the smell of August in Missouri --the smell of moist earth and cow manure, and
green, growing things striving toward maturity, and the slow decline into
September. That smell was lovely and alien, like nothing I had ever smelled in
Baltimore.

At last, we came to the town, Stowes Corners, situated in a region of low, green
hills. She took me through wide, tree-shadowed streets. I saw the courthouse,
and the broad spacious lawn of the town square. On a quiet street lined with
oak, my aunt pointed out the school, an unassuming antique brick, dwarfed by the
monstrous edifice I had known in the city.

"That's where your father went to school when he was a boy," my aunt said, and a
swift electric surge of anger --

-- how could he abandon me? --