"Oates, Joyce Carol - Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)

She regards the black girl, ugly as sin, from beneath compassionate eyebrows. It is part of Mrs. Rudiger's teacherly strategy at such times to suggest how authority is tempered with mercy.

Lucille Weaver, staring at her feet, mumbles something inaudible.

"Lucille, please don't lie," Mrs. Rudiger says calmly. "Of all things in heaven and earth do not lie."

Lucille stands as if paralyzed. No one wants to look at her, yet there is nowhere else to look. Mrs. Rudiger is shaking Lucille's test paper as if the very paper gives offense. She says in a voice of fair mindedness, "If you insist you did not cheat, will you demonstrate your mathematical ability? On the blackboard? Right now? I will read off the problem to you, andLucille begins suddenly to cry. It is not an admission of having cheated but, being larger and more shameful, seems to contain an admission. The class shifts in their seats; there is a collective misery and relief: now it is over, now Lucille can sit down.

Mrs. Rudiger scolds them for many minutes as Lucille sits hunched and weeping at her desk... no one even wants to look at her, especially not the good colored girls who are Mrs. Rudiger's favorites and who stare at their white lady teacher with terrified unblinking eyes.

By the clanking steaming radiators Iris Courtney feels pure cold.

Doesn't look at Lucille either. Thinking if she'd been brave she'd have said she cheated... but she isn't brave. Just sits there, shivering.

And that afternoon on the way home from school Lucille and two of her friends shove Iris Courtney off a curb, knock her into a gutter of filthy rushing water, her saddle shoes soaked, knee scraped raw and bleeding, the palms of both hands; they shriek "white bitch, white asshole bitch" and cuff and kick and then they're gone, running down the street laughing, and Iris picks herself up, biting her lip not to cry, not to give them that satisfaction. "Dirty nigger bitches!

Dirty!"

And she says nothing to her mother, not a word.

And next time she sees Lucille Weaver and her friends she surprises them with the ferocity of her attack, her sudden wild anger. You'd think the skinny white girl would be fearful but, no, she's mad as hell, has Persia's hot quick temper, and though it's surely a mistake to cross the playground to start a fight Iris rushes straight at Lucille and strikes her with her schoolbooks, and the girls scream, and scuffle, and punch, and kick, and another time Iris is knocked to the ground hard on her bottom stunned and breathless and her nose bleeding, but she sees that the black girl's nose too is rimmed in blood.

And bright red blood it is, sweet to behold. Just like her own.

1etters in official-looking envelopes, sometimes stamped REGISTERED MAIL: RETURN RECEIPT REQUESTED, come for "Cornelius Courtney, Jr."

Follow him from one address to another, one season to another.

Bills.

.. or the second notices of bills... or Internal Revenue, Washington, D.C. Duke cringes, seeing that name. That name!

But snatches up the envelope, rips it open with a jaunty thumbnail, walks out of the room humming. Quickly, before Persia appears.

Atop the bureau in Persia and Duke's bedroom is a photograph of Private First Class Duke Courtney, aged twenty, framed in silver, brown-toned, taken by Duke's brother, Leslie. In it, Duke has an angel's face.

.

. a truly beautiful face. A mere boy. The fact of this photograph of Iris Courtney's father before he was Iris Courtneysf'ther might terrify Iris if she allows herself to consider it.

Like bones, bones, blood, pulsing muscle-hearts, walking erect in envelopes of skin like sausage.

In a gay mood, her boogie-woogie mood as she sometimes calls it, Persia covers the glass, the boy's face, with damp luscious kisses.

"My old honey," she says. "Yummy-honey. Better-looking any damn day than Errol Flynn."

Duke runs an embarrassed hand through his thinning wavy hair.

"Jesus! Wasn't he!"