"Bradbury, Ray - October Game, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

than that.
Louise had managed to be in every other room save the room he was
in today. It was her very fine way of intimating, Oh look Mich, see
how busy I am! So busy that when you walk into a room I'm in there's
always something I need to do in another room! Just see how I dash
about!
For a while he had played a little game with her, a nasty childish
game. When she was in the kitchen then he came to the kitchen
saying, 'I need a glass of water.' After a moment, he standing,
drinking water, she like a crystal witch over the caramel brew
bubbling like a prehistoric mudpot on the stove, she said, 'Oh, I must
light the pumpkins!' and she rushed to the living room to make the
pumpkins smile with light. He came after, smiling, 'I must get my
pipe.' 'Oh, the cider!' she had cried, running to the dining room.
'I'll check the cider,' he had said. But when he tried following she
ran to the bathroom and locked the door.
He stood outside the bathroom door, laughing strangely and
senselessly, his pipe gone cold in his mouth, and then, tired of the
game, but stubborn, he waited another five minutes. There was not a
sound from the bath. And lest she enjoy in any way knowing that he
waited outside, irritated, he suddenly jerked about and walked
upstairs, whistling merrily.
At the top of the stairs he had waited. Finally he had heard the
bathroom door unlatch and she had come out and life below-stairs and
resumed, as life in a jungle must resume once a terror has passed on
away and the antelope return to their spring.
Now, as he finished his bow-tie and put his dark coat there was a
mouse-rustle in the hall. Marion appeared in the door, all skeletons
in her disguise.
'How do I look, Papa?'
'Fine!'
From under the mask, blonde hair showed. From the skull sockets
small blue eyes smiled. He sighed. Marion and Louise, the two silent
denouncers of his virility, his dark power. What alchemy had there
been in Louise that took the dark of a dark man and bleached the dark
brown eyes and black hair and washed and bleached the ingrown baby all
during the period before birth until the child was born, Marion,
blonde, blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked? Sometimes he suspected that Louise
had conceived the child as an idea, completely asexual, an immaculate
conception of contemptuous mind and cell. As a firm rebuke to him she
had produced a child in her own image, and, to top it, she had somehow
fixed the doctor so he shook his head and said, 'Sorry, Mr Wilder,
your wife will never have another child. This is the last one.'
'And I wanted a boy,' Mich had said eight years ago.
He almost bent to take hold of Marion now, in her skull mask. He
felt an inexplicable rush of pity for her, because she had never had a
father's love, only the crushing, holding love of a loveless mother.
But most of all he pitied himself, that somehow he had not made the
most of a bad birth, enjoyed his daughter for herself, regardless of
her not being dark and a son and like himself. Somewhere he had missed