"Thomas M. Disch - The Businessman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

for a quarter at the airport in Las Vegas. He had left Vegas ruined and was buried two weeks
later in the Minnesota Veterans' Cemetery by a widow with enough money not only to rescue
the mortgage from foreclosure but to purchase an annuity that paid out $8,000 a year! That,
together with Dewey's Social Security survivor benefits, had seen the surviving Ankers
through the rest of the '60s in comfortable indigence. Bing had gone to Cretin, Giselle to Our
Lady of Mercy. Joy-Ann had stayed home and cooked quick, starchy meals from recipes in
_Family Circle_. Each year she became a little fatter, a little more querulous, but in her soul
she was as happy as a pig in mud. She was getting exactly what she wanted out of life, a
free ride.
 Now the ride was coming to an end just as inflation had whittled her annuity and
benefits down to the point where grocery shopping was once again a source of anxiety. She
had been faced with the necessity of having to sell the house. Two real estate agents,
independently of each other, had valued it at $80,000, maybe more: four times what she and
Dewey could have got for it in 1954 when it had passed to them on the death of her
father-in-law, the senior Mr. Anker. A gold mine! All these years she'd lived in it she'd put it in
the category of water, air, and sunlight - something necessary but omnipresent. With its
shabby back yard and ancient wallpaper, who'd have supposed it wasn't the residential
equivalent of the secondhand clothes at the Salvation Army? Eighty thousand dollars for a
corner lot on Calumet Avenue? Money was becoming meaningless!

The neighborhood around Calumet had been one of Joy-Ann's longest-standing
grievances. First it had got decrepit, then blacks moved in. Then, without her ever noticing,
that process had gone into reverse. Houses were painted (except her own) and lawns tidied.
Children reappeared on the sidewalks. Though some of them were black, they did set a
general tone of prosperity as they pedaled their tricycles and pulled their wagonloads of
symbolic sand, since one knew that not even automobiles require as large and constant a
cash outlay as children. The Roman matron who said that her children were her jewels was
not exaggerating.

Eighty thousand dollars: to be sitting on top of a pile of money like that and to know
that it would all go to waste - that was no happy thought. Not literally to waste, of course.
Literally it would go to her son-in-law, Robert Glandier. Joy-Ann didn't like him, but he'd always
been a dutiful rememberer of Christmases and birthdays. After the tragedy of Giselle, and even
more after her own spell in the hospital, he'd been as thoughtful as anyone who was basically
inconsiderate could be expected to be. He phoned a couple of times a week and came around
on Sunday mornings to take her to church if she felt up to it. Or, more usually, to join her in a
Sunday brunch of waffles and bacon. Joy-Ann loved waffles. It didn't make any difference
that a few minutes after she ate them she'd have to go into the bathroom to throw up;
waffles remained a major satisfaction.

"Are you sure," he had asked her one such Sunday morning, "you don't want to go to
eleven o'clock mass? It wouldn't be any trouble."

"No, really. Do you want another waffle?"

"Mmf," he said, nodding his head.

She poured batter onto the two grills and covered them. "The thing is, it doesn't seem
so important to me any more. I mean, I don't see any reason why God should be there in
church any more than somewhere else. Do you?"