"George R. R. Martin - Portraits of His Children" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

and she used to love the water, the sea, the river, the lake. Cantling consulted realtors, considered a big
place on the coast of Maine, and finally settled on an old steamboat gothic mansion high on the bluffs of
Perrot, Iowa. He supervised every detail of the move.

Little by little, recovery began.

She was like a small child again, curious, restless, full of sudden energy. She did not talk, but she
explored everything, went everywhere. In spring she spent hours up on the widow's walk, watching the
big towboats go by on the Mississippi far below. Every evening they would walk together on the bluffs,
and she would hold his hand. One day she turned and kissed him suddenly, impulsively, on his cheek. "I
love you, Daddy," she said, and she ran away from him, and as Cantling watched her run, he saw a
lovely, wounded woman in her mid-twenties, and saw too the gangling, coltish tomboy she had been.

The dam was broken after that day. Michelle began to talk again. Short, childlike sentences at first, full of
childish fears and childish naivete. But she matured rapidly, and in no time at all she was talking politics
with him, talking books, talking art. They had many a fine conversation on their evening walks. She never
talked about the rape, though; never once, not so much as a word.

In six months she was cooking, writing letters to friends back in New York, helping with the household
chores, doing lovely things in the garden. In eight months she had started to paint again. That was very
good for her; now she seemed to blossom daily, to grow more and more radiant. Richard Cantling didn't
really understand the abstractions his daughter liked to paint, he preferred representational art, and best
of all he loved the self-portrait she had done for him when she was still an art major in college. But he
could feel the pain in these new canvases of hers, he could sense that she was engaged in an exorcism of
sorts, trying to squeeze the pus from some wound deep inside, and he approved. His writing had been a
balm for his own wounds more than once. He envied her now, in a way. Richard Cantling had not written
a word for more than three years. The crashing commercial failure of ByeLine, his best novel, had left him
blocked and impotent. He'd thought perhaps the change of scene might restore him as well as Michelle,
but that had been a vain hope. At least one of them was busy.

Finally, late one night after Cantling had gone to bed, his door opened and Michelle came quietly into his
bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed. She was barefoot, dressed in a flannel nightgown covered with
tiny pink flowers. "Daddy," she said, in a slurred voice.

Cantling had woken when the door opened. He sat up and smiled for her. "Hi," he said. "You've been
drinking."

Michelle nodded. "I'm going back," she said. "Needed some courage, so's I could tell you."

"Going back?" Cantling said. "You don't mean to New York? You can't be serious!"

"I got to," she said. "Don't be mad. I'm better now." "Stay here. Stay with me. New York is
uninhabitable, Michelle."

"I don't want to go back. It scares me. But I got to. My friends are there. My work is there. My life is
back there, Daddy. My friend Jimmy, you remember Jimmy, he's art director for this little paperback
house, he can get me some cover assignments, he says. He wrote. I won't have to wait tables anymore."

"I don't believe I'm hearing this," Richard Cantling said. "How can you go back to that damned city after
what happened to you there?"