"Marriage Mender" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

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THE MARRIAGE MENDER

Ray Bradbury



In the sun the headboard was like a fountain, tossing up plumes of clear light.
It was carved with lions and gargoyles and bearded goats. It was an
awe-inspiring object even at midnight, as Antonio sat on the bed and unlaced his
shoes and put his large calloused hand out to touch its shimmering harp. Then he
rolled over into this fabulous machine for dreaming, and he lay breathing
heavily, his eyes beginning to close.
"Every night," his wife's voice said, "we sleep in the mouth of a calliope."
Her complaint shocked him. He lay a long while before daring to reach up his
hard-tipped fingers to stroke the cold metal of the intricate headboard, the
threads of this lyre that had sung many wild and beautiful songs down the years.
"This is no calliope," he said.
"It cries like one," Maria said. "A billion people on this world tonight have
beds. Why, I ask the saints, not us?"
"This," said Antonio gently, "is a bed." He plucked a little tune on the
imitation brass harp behind his head. To his ears it was "Santa Lucia."
"This bed has humps like a herd of camels was under it."
"Now, Mama," Antonio said. He called her Mama when she was mad, though they had
no children. "You were never this way," he went on, "until five months ago when
Mrs. Brancozzi downstairs bought her new bed."
Maria said wistfully, "Mrs. Brancozzi's bed. It's like snow. It's all flat and
white and smooth."
"I don't want any damn snow, all flat and white and smooth! These springs - feel
them!" he cried angrily. "They know me. They recognize that this hour of night I
lie thus, at two o'clock, so! Three o'clock this way, four o'clock that. We are
like a tumbling act, we've worked together for years and know all the holds and
fails."
Maria sighed, and said, "Sometimes I dream we're in the taffy machine at
Bartole's candy store."
"This bed," he announced to the darkness, "served our family before Garibaldi!
From this wellspring alone came precincts of honest voters, a squad of
clean-saluting Army men, two confectioners, a barber, four second leads for Il
Trovatore and Rigoletto, and two geniuses so complex they never could decide
what to do in their lifetime! Not to forget enough beautiful women to provide
ballrooms with their finest decoration. A cornucopia of plenty, this bed! A
veritable harvesting machine!"
"We have been married two years," she said with dreadful control over her voice.
"Where are our second leads for Rigoletto, our geniuses, our ballroom
decorations?"
"Patience, Mama."
"Don't call me Mama! While this bed is busy favoring you all night, never once
has it done for me. Not even so much as a baby girl! "
He sat up. "You've let these women in this tenement ruin you with their