"Bowes-ShadowAndGunman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bowes Richard)

The first thing I did when I got in the door was to turn off the fire under a
pot in the kitchen. Tay still worked as secretary to professors over in
Cambridge. That day she was helping one of them sort his papers.

My grandmother was present but not totally accounted for. She sat in the living
room in the midst of boxes of photos and papers. With a bright smile she said,
"Here's one of you, Jamey." From a faded photo taken before the turn of the
century, a baby stared wide-eyed in the midst of a vast christening gown.

"Nah, this is me, Gramny." I was in a snapshot of my mother, my grandfather, and
myself on the front steps of the house. My mother stood looking up proudly at
Terrible Tom Malloy, saloon owner, ward heeler, legendary terror. He looked like
a meaner, smarter version of his sons.

He stared right at the camera with clever, cold eyes. One arm he had around my
mother. I was a blurry bundle in the other. I remembered when I was about ten my
mother telling me about her father. "Your uncles are still afraid of Daddy. If
the old man came back and told them to, they'd all line up to get hit."

We sped off from a family gathering like it was a getaway. She had suddenly
pulled me away from my cousins and loaded me in the car as her brothers stood
looking stunned. "When I want, I make them afraid of me too." She laughed. "I
just did it now." The laugh scared me more than the driving. It meant that my
mother was drunk and her Shadow was at the wheel.

The next picture I found was a familiar one of my parents' wedding. It was
wartime. In the background girls with flowers, guys in uniforms smiled at the
couple walking arm in arm. In a spring dress and wide hat my mother, beautiful
as some half-remembered forties movie star, leaned on my father's shoulder and
smiled at the camera.

My father in his navy blues stared bewildered and adoring only at her. He came
from New Jersey, met and married my mother while waiting to go overseas. With
hundreds of others, he died when the cruiser LaSalle went down in the South
Pacific. He had almost no family. Once I had imagined 1 was secretly the son of
a hero, the Lone Ranger, maybe, or Ted Williams. Now I saw too much of myself in
him to fantasize.

"Poor lamb," said my grandmother, looking at my father. "He hadn't a piece of
meanness in him." She put out her hand and I helped her upstairs for a rest.

Back on the couch, I found photos of my mother from childhood up to the time of
her second marriage. For a long while there was nothing. As she got older she
hated to have her picture taken.

Then at the bottom of the box was one I had never seen. A few years before, Aunt
Alice had taken candid photos with her new flash camera. Alice was no artist,
the pictures were unfocused, feet and heads were cut off, radiators were centers
of attention.