"Oates, Joyce Carol - The Fruit Cellar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)

Joyce Carol Oates - The Fruit Cellar

"'Peery.' Does the name mean anything to you?"

"Perry'? I don't think so."

"Peery."Lisa Peery."'

The voice, which was the telephone voice of Shannon's older brother Mark, sounded carefully neutral. So often had Shannon and her brother spoken on the phone during the past eight months-monitoring their father's illness, rapid decline, and death, the funeral arrangements, the funeral, and now the aftermath, in Shannon's numbed imagination a high-piled sludge like the muddy debris following a flood-it took her a moment to realize that Mark's voice was different this morning, somehow. For this was not one of their shared emotions, it was Mark's own, mysterious to her.

" 'Lisa Peery.' Now I remember, I think-that little girl? The abducted girl? From the park. I was in high school, my junior year." Shannon had begun to speak rapidly, nervously. She heard her voice with dismay and dislike yet could not restrain herself. "It was in-nineteen eighty-nine? Around this time of year. June."

In a rush of blurred images the banner headlines, the photographs of the ten-year-old child came to her. Memory underlaid with a sense of dread everywhere Shannon had looked, glaring-yellow borders and tall black captions like shouts.

MISSING MISSING

MISSING

It had been a nightmare season. No child had ever been abducted from Strykersville. Not in the known history of the small city south of Lake Ontario. No child had ever "vanished" from Myrtle Park, a stretch of hilly, partly wooded municipal land through which a deep ravine ran, abutting the rear of the large old properties along Highland Avenue where Shannon and Mark had grown up in the Leigh family house.

Mark said, "I think you'd better come over here, Shannon. Now."

There was no question what here meant.

Shannon, who was staying in Strykersville with relatives, drove across town to Highland Avenue, in the bright gusty air of early June in upstate New York. As recently as the other week, there had been frost on the ground in the early morning; in another week, there might be a heat wave. Returning to Strykersville from her present life was, for Shannon, a return to an unresolved past: Her mood was melancholy, elegiac. This had been true even before her parents' deaths and was doubly true now. She was thinking of how her father had insisted upon living alone for the past several, increasingly difficult years after her mother's death: stubbornly, grimly, yet with a kind of elation. He'd said he would die "on his own turf, on his own terms." He would leave them "everything"- "everything you can lay your hands on." It was a curious choice of language. But then, Mr. Leigh had always spoken, in private moments, in a curious way; he'd alarmed and exasperated and exhausted both his children yet they'd had to concede, he was a courageous, indomitable old man, he'd never lost his pride.

Until the past year Mr. Leigh had been the kind of stoutly energetic older man you call hale, hearty. Though a worry to his grown children he was an admired figure to others. The kind of man who swam laps several times a week at the YMCA before having breakfast at the Blue Point Diner where he'd cultivated a reputation as an acerbic "character" with strong opinions on contemporary America. The kind of man who made a show of "fast-walking" in the neighborhood with the buoyant air of an athlete in training, calling out "Good morning!" to everyone he met. Before retiring at the age of seventy Mr. Leigh had been an aggressively successful real-estate broker in Niagara County; he'd been an officer in the local Chamber of Commerce, and a deacon in the First Presbyterian Church of Strykersville; for four decades he'd been an avid Shriner, and had never missed one of the flamboyant Shriners conventions in Philadelphia. Abruptly after Mrs. Leigh's death he'd begun to lose interest in his public personality; the side of his personality he'd kept private, known only to his family, of secrecy, moodiness, cynicism, began to be predominant. Relatives reported to Shannon and Mark that he'd grown rude to them, refusing their invitations; he'd walked out of the funeral service for an elderly aunt, at which he'd appeared "unshaven, disheveled"; he was drinking; he was becoming something of a recluse in the house on Highland Avenue. Shannon and Mark, who lived, as if by design, in cities approximately equidistant from Strykersville, took turns dutifully visiting him and reported to each other afterward, in painstaking detail. The monitoring of an elderly ailing parent is a cerebral as well as an emotional challenge, like interpreting a tricky poem: You are obliged to decode his most casual remarks, for these are the remarks that are likely to reveal his heart. During Shannon's last visit before Mr. Leigh's final hospitalization, she'd hurriedly called Mark to tell him, "It's like Dad's body is caving in. Like his bones are shrinking and crumbling. He's always stood so tall, held his head so high, now he's shorter than I am. He asked me in this sarcastic voice, 'What are you wearing, stacked shoes?'"

Mr. Leigh was seventy-four at that time. Not really elderly by contemporary standards. Shortly he would learn that the chemotherapy treatments he'd endured for months were having no effect upon his cancer. Shannon had not wanted to tell her brother I hate him, I'm afraid of him. For perhaps that wasn't true, entirely. More likely she meant Why doesn't he love me? Why hasn't he loved me? I've waited so long.

Shannon turned into the familiar driveway at 38 Highland. It was jarring to see the front lawn overgrown, choked in dandelions. Water-stained newspapers and fliers had been tossed into the unpruned shrubs at the front of the house; each time Shannon saw these she made a note to retrieve them, and each time she forgot. When she and Mark were growing up, Highland Avenue near Myrtle Park was the most prestigious neighborhood in Strykersville. Now, the large old brick and colonial houses were distinctly less impressive. In bright, gusty air the heavy slate roofs and numerous bay windows, the soot-darkened chimneys, exuded an air of subtle dereliction. No one with money cared to live on Highland

Avenue any longer: The fashion was for newer suburban neighborhoods, houses as large as these but sleekly contemporary with cathedral ceilings, country kitchens that were self-contained apartments, indoor swimming pools. Mr. Leigh had been wittily contemptuous of these-"McMansions" they were called. But then, Mr. Leigh's real-estate agency had not brokered the land for these showy properties.

There was Mark waiting on a side porch, smoking a cigarette. Not sitting on the comfortable rattan sofa-swing where in early evening their mother often sat in warm weather, listening, as Mrs. Leigh said, to the birds' vespers, but on his feet, with a look of barely concealed impatience. "Is something wrong, Mark?"

Shannon stared at her brother's face. His expression was unreadable.

Mark led Shannon inside the house. Only the previous evening she'd been here, sorting things with Mark, labeling and ticketing things for Estates Managers, Inc. to haul away; she felt at once the familiar oppression like a dull ache behind the eyes; like a dream she'd imagined she had wakened from, but had not. The old brick colonial which had once belonged to Mr. Leigh's parents, dignified and stately from the street, was shabby close up, and would be marketed at a price that would have deeply insulted Mr. Leigh had he known. It smelled of dust and mice and that faint sour chemical odor Shannon didn't want to think was the odor of her father's dying body after months of his futile treatment. Most of the rooms were only partly furnished now yet seemed crowded, for there were cartons and movers' barrels amid the furniture, shade-less lamps, mirrors and wall hangings and stacks of leatherbound books unread for decades. Neither Mark nor Shannon had room for their parents' cherished belongings.

"We should each take something. As a memento at least," Shannon said. Mark had said, "Go ahead. Take whatever you want."

On the kitchen table was a chipped metal box, covered in dust and cobwebs, measuring about two feet by eighteen inches, and about twelve inches deep. Mark had found it in the cellar, he said, beneath their father's old workbench. Shannon approached the opened box dry-mouthed. She'd never seen it before, she was certain.

"What is it?"

"See for yourself." From boyhood Mark had tended to sobriety. Rarely did he joke, at least with Shannon; he wasn't one to exaggerate, or to dramatize. Shannon thought, Should I look? Should I peek? As a child she'd had a way of hiding her eyes with her hands but separating her fingers so she could peek through, giggling with shivery excitement. As an adult she had no choice but to look head-on.

Mark, smoking his cigarette, walked out onto the porch leaving Shannon to ponder the material inside their father's box by herself. She noted that Mark had taken nothing out of the box but had left it as he'd presumably found it, in layers like rock strata.