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

Wouldn't it be comical if it wasn't so sad: this beat-up hag imagining any man in his right mind, black or white or whatever, would look with lust upon her.

Persia says with a sigh, "Oh, all right! Where do you want to go? Oh, I guess I know where you live: a ways down Gowanda Street? By the Loblaw's?"

Mrs. Garlock grunts an eager assent. She doesn't seem to know the name of her street; like the neighborhood dogs she makes her way around by unerring instinct. But Loblaw's Groceries is a landmark.

So they set off in that direction, no more than three blocks out of Persia's way, Persia conscious of people on the street staring at them.

Staring at Vesta Garlock, and staring at her Persia Courtney with her gorgeous red-blond hair, "strawberry" blond as it's called, her black and white polka-dot silk dress, her spike-heeled black patent leather pumps... the pretty outfit she wears in her position (Persia does not refer to it as a "job") as hostess at Lambert's Tea Room downtown.

Persia Courtney, wife of Duke Courtney, and the hillbilly Garlock woman, who is ranting in her ear about nigras: their animal ways, the "mark of Satan" on their foreheads. Why the other day, Mrs. Garlock says, this big black buck poked her toes in the park where she'd fallen asleep on the grass... another time, right upstairs in her bedroom, changing Dolly's baby's diaper, she looks up and sees in the mirror a wicked black face like the devil himself. And the way they send their thoughts to you... so its impossible you can't know what they're thinking. And what they'd like to do to you.

"Down home we don't hardly have them at all," Mrs. Garlock says excitedly, "or if we do, they keep to themselves. You can go for miles and miles, I swear, all the way across the state...

never see a nigra face. Not a one.

Persia says, "Me, I'm crazy for Billy Eckstine. I'd drive across the state, to hear him sing."

Mrs. Garlock isn't listening. She's hanging on to Persia like a child both scared and willful.

Persia sniffs and sighs. She is good-hearted enough to see the humor in all this. Such episodes can be transformed into one of her stories, to be told to Duke and their little girl that evening.

You won't believe what happened to me, on the way home! You won't believe, you two, how come I'm late!

And Duke Courtney will gaze at her with that look of... that melting prideful this-beautiful-girl-is-my-wife look of his.

Summer 1953. Persia hasn't yet asked Duke Courtney to move out of their Holland Street flat ("Just so I can think, not always just feel, like some sixteen-year-old girl doesn't know which end is up"); she has just begun her brief tenure at Lambert's Tea Room, that elegant place with its black marble floor like a glimmering pool and its Irish-crystal chandeliers aglow at all times in its churchly interior and its beautifully dressed and impeccably polite lady customers who smile so sweetly and pay Persia such compliments and leave behind such meager tips.

This summer, Duke Courtney is "in sales" (in the home appliances department at Montgomery Ward, that store's top department) and doing very well, though his work is several notches downward from his connection with Jacky Barrow, now ex-mayor of Hammond... who kept Duke Courtney on his payroll as speechwriter, political and budgetary consultant, friend and aide, jack-of all-trades... until it all came to an end. (The less said of that end, the better. As Persia observed, at least Duke's name appeared only a few times in the newspaper, in the most lengthy fact-filled articles.) And now Duke complements his income with speculation, as he calls it: shrewd bets at the racetrack, carefully plotted poker games.

"Speculation" is not the same as "gambling"; gambling is for fools.

Over the years, Duke has developed a complex theory of luck based upon laws (of averages) and factors (specific and concrete): for instance, a simple harness race can be broken down into a set of mathematical figures, arranged in columns, having to do with the horse's former performances of course but also with the quality of the driver, the condition of the track, the weather, and other miscellaneous factors, which in themselves are constantly being altered.

On the most basic level, if one always bets on the favorite, doubling the size of the bet with each subsequent race (regardless of whether any, all, or no bets have been won), the possibility of walking away with a sizable purse is considerable. One day in Cleveland, arriving with $40 in his pocket, he'd walked away with $6,000; another time, when Persia first visited a track with Duke, at Batavia Downs, he began with $50 and walked away with $8,300. It's the point at which laws and material factors come together, Duke says, that the human will can seize control of its destiny.

Persia's handsome, ambitious husband is also contemplating becoming part owner of a Standardbred (harness-racing) horse.

though perhaps it would be better for him to go into partnership with a friendly acquaintance who owns a Hammond supper club where he and Persia might work together... might, in fact, perform: they are superb ballroom dancers, in the mode of the Castles, the legendary dance team of Vernon and Irene Castle who earned, at the peak of their fame decades ago, as much as $30,000 a week. "The Incomparable Courtneys," they call themselves, Duke with his patrician features, Persia with her beautiful face and naturally wavy naturally red-gold hair and tireless ebullient manner. For why not?

This being the United States of America, and the Courtneys so talented, so gifted, so attractive, so eager to please, why not?

Like Fred Astaire, Duke Courtney is clearly the sort of long-legged lean limber man who cannot fail to age gracefully; and Persia, though now a bit past thirty (Persia's birth date is a family secret but after her death Iris, her daughter, will discover it was March 4, 1922; thus on this midsummer day of 1953 she is thirty-one years old): why not?

Persia says uncertainly, "I guess... I guess we're here."

The Garlocks' eyesore of a house on Gowanda Street, which Persia enters that day for the first and only time in her life, is in Lowertown (as the poor section of Hammond is obliquely called); up the block from a storefront church SECOND CALVARY ZION BAPTIST, around the corner from the notorious juice joint POF'PA D's. The house has been built flush with the sidewalk, not an inch of grass, children's toys and household trash spilling out into the gutter.

"Mrs. Garlock? Vesta? What is wrong?"