"Charles L. Harness-Child by Chronos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

Child by Chronos
by Charles L. Harness
This story copyright 1953 by Charles L. Harness.Reprinted by permission of Linn Prentiss.This copy
was created for Jean Hardy's personal use.All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the
copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


When my daughter Shan was a little girl and just starting to go to school I noted that she was
developing (copying?) many of her mother's mannerisms: a certain charming lift of the shoulder, a
disapproving clenching of the jaws, a beautiful grin. What do we have here, I wondered. Who's who?
And so the story popped out of my Freudian toaster.
***


You just lie here and listen. The sunshine will do you good, and anyhow the doctor said you weren't to
do much talking.
I'll get to the point.
I have loved three men. The first was my mother's lover. The second was my husband. The third...
I'm going to tell you all about these three men-- and me. I'm going to tell you some things that might
send you back to the hospital.
Don't interrupt.
As a child I never knew my father. He was declared legally dead several months before I was born.
They said he had gone hunting and had never returned. Theoretically you can't miss what you never had.
Whoever said that didn't know me. I missed my lost father when I was a brat and when I was a gawky
youngster in pigtails and when I was a young lady in finishing school in Switzerland.
Mother made it worse. There was never any shortage of males when mother was around, but they
wouldn't have anything to do with me. And that was her fault. Mother was gorgeous. Men couldn't stay
away from her. By the time I was ten, I could tell what they were thinking when they looked at her.
When I was twenty they were still looking at her in the same way. That was when she finally took a
lover, and when I fled from her in hate and in horror.
There's nothing remarkable about a daughter hating her mother. It's just that I did more of it than usual.
All the hate that I ever commanded, ever since I was in diapers, I saved, I preserved, and I vented on
her. When I was an infant, so they said, I wouldn't nurse at her breast. Strictly a bottle baby. It was as
though I had declared to the world that I hadn't been born in the way mortals are born and that this
woman who professed to be my mother wasn't really. As you shall see, I wasn't entirely wrong.
I always had the insane feeling that everything she had really belonged to me and that she as keeping
me from claiming my own.
Naturally, our tastes were identical. This identity of desire became more and more acute as I grew
older. Whatever she had, I regarded as really mine, and generally tried to confiscate it. Particularly men.
The irritating thing was that, even though mother never became serious about any of them (except the last
one), they still couldn't see me. Except the last one.
Mother's willingness to turn over to me any and all of her gentleman friends seemed to carry with it the
unrelated but inevitable corollary, that none of them (except that one exception) had any desire to be
turned over.
You're probably thinking that it was all a consequence of not having a father around, that I
subconsciously substituted her current male for my missing father, and hence put claims on him equal to