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

hers. You can explain it any way you want to. Anyway, except at the last, it always turned out the same.
The more willing she was to get rid of him, the less willing he was to have anything to do with me.
But I never got mad at them; only at her. Sometimes, if the brush-off was particularly brusque, I
wouldn't speak to her for days. Even the sight of her would make me sick to my stomach.
When I was seventeen, on the advice of her psychiatrist, she sent me to school in Switzerland. This
psychiatrist said I had the worst Electra complex with the least grounds for it of any woman in medical
history. He said he hoped that my father was really dead, because if he should ever turn up alive... Well,
you could just see him rubbing the folds of his cerebrum in brisk anticipation.
However, the superficial reason they gave for sending me to Switzerland was to get an education.
There I was, seventeen, and didn't even know the multiplication table. All I knew was what mother called
"headline history." She had yanked me out of public school when I was in second grade and had hired a
flock of tutors to teach me about current events. Nothing but current events. Considering that she made
her living by predicting current events before they became current, I suppose her approach was
excusable. It was her method of execution that made the subject utterly dull-- then. Mother wouldn't
stand for any of the modern methods of history teaching. No analysis of trends and integration of
international developments for mother. My apologetic tutors were paid to see that I memorized every
headline and caption in every New York Times printed since Counterpoint won the Preakness in 1957--
which was even several months before I was born. That and nothing more. There were even a couple of
memory experts thrown in, to wrap each daily pill in a sugar-coated mnemonic.
So, even if the real reason for sending me to Switzerland was not to get an education, I didn't care. I
was glad to stop memorizing headlines.
But I'm getting ahead of my story.
One of the earliest memories of my childhood was a big party mother held at Skyridge, our country
lodge. I was six years old. It was the night after James Roosevelt's re-election. Of all the public opinion
diagnostics, only mother had guessed right, and she and the top executives of the dozen-odd firms that
retained her prophetic services congregated at Skyridge. I was supposed to be upstairs asleep, but the
laughter and singing woke me up, and I came down and joined in. Nobody cared. Every time a man put
his arm around mother and kissed her, I was there clutching at his coat pockets, howling, "He's mine!"
My technique altered as the years passed; my premise didn't.
Do you think it bothered her?
Ha!
The more I tried to take from her, the more amused she became. It wasn't a wry amusement. It gave
her real belly laughs. How can you fight that? It just made me madder.
You might think I hadn't a shred of justice on my side. Actually, I did.
There was one thing that justified my hatred: she didn't really love me. I was her flesh and blood, but
she didn't love me. Perhaps she was fond of me, in a lukewarm way, but her heart had no real love in it
for me. And I knew it and hated her, and tried to take everything that was hers.
We must have seemed a strange pair. She never addressed me by my name, or even by a personal
pronoun. She never even said such things as, "Dear, will you pass the toast?" Instead it was "May I have
the toast?" It was as though she considered me a mere extension of herself, like another arm, which had
no independent identity. It was galling.
Other girls could keep secrets from their mothers. I couldn't hide anything important from mine. The
more I wanted to conceal something, the more certain she was to know it. That was another reason why
I didn't mind being shipped off to Switzerland.
I'm sure she wasn't reading my mind. It wasn't telepathy. She couldn't guess phone numbers I had
memorized, nor the names of the twenty-five boys on the county high school football team. Routine things
like that didn't generally "get through." And telepathy wouldn't explain what happened the night my car
turned over on the Sylvania Turnpike. The hands that helped pull me through the car were hers. She had
been parked by the roadside, waiting. No ambulance; just mother in her car. She had known when and
where it would happen, and that I wouldn't be hurt.