"Paul Park - A Man on Crutches" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Paul)

stepmother had given me directions to the church It was a ten-minute walk. As I
came around the corner of Brown Street, I slowed down. I composed my face
My stepmother was waiting in a crowd of people. She was named Barbara:
younger than my father, a dark-haired woman in her fifties, a writer for a feminist
newsletter, In a previous decade she had been a lawyer, and she was still active in
environmental and leftist causes, all of which did not keep her from more domestic
accomplishments. She was a cook, a quiltmaker. in the crowd on the church steps
she stood out, sleek in a dark cape and black leather boots - clothes which, despite
their evident expense, nevertheless managed to bring some echo back from 1966,
when she had lived on a commune in Colorado. I walked up towards her, ignoring
everybody so that I could take my place with her at the top of the hierarchy of
bereavement. Tears glittered in her eyes; she reached out black-gloved hands and
grasped hold of my thumbs. What was there to say? Not for me some vain
condolence; I leaned down towards her, conscious of her smell - was it patchouli
oil? Her almost poreless skin.
тАЬJack,тАЭ she said. тАЬIтАЩm so happy youтАЩre here.тАЭ She pulled me aside under the
portal of the church. I shook my head. And it was lucky that my feelings were
beyond words. Otherwise I might have been tempted to admit so much. I had not
known, for example, that my father was a Lutheran.
тАЬIтАЩd like you to say something,тАЭ she said. тАЬThereтАЩll be a time when some of
the people who were closest to him ... I spoke to you about it over the phone.тАЭ
I remembered. I closed my eyes. тАЬYou probably brought something,тАЭ she
went on. тАЬBut I thought it would be nice if you could read a poem. You know that
poem he used to love - |Pied Beauty.тАЩ Hopkins always was his favorite poet.тАЭ
I nodded. Yet I felt cheated, too. The category of тАЬfavorite poetтАЭ was not one
I was aware had existed in my fatherтАЩs mind. Did this mean there might be other
poets also, only slightly below Hopkins in his estimation? Who were they? Sappho?
John Ashbery? Alexander Pope?
тАЬIтАЩd like that,тАЭ I said.
тАЬIтАЩm so glad you could come,тАЭ she said again.
Half an hour later I found myself at the pulpit reading a poem. Sometimes my
voice cracked with emotion - a reflex. Between the stanzas I looked out over the
pews. There was a big crowd. My father had produced industrial films. Mostly he
had worked as a consultant, and I guess he knew a lot of people. I guess he had a lot
of friends. I stared out at them.
Later, I thought about what I saw from that pulpit. It is disjointed in my
memory by the stanzas of the poem, and therefore it exists in my mind not as a
continuum, but as a series of independent images. I used to examine them, searching
for a clue. My father was a prominent man. There had been an obituary in the Los
Angeles Times. Surely Jean-Jacques would have had a chance to see it, even if he
hadnтАЩt called my fatherтАЩs office in the days after his death. How could he have kept
away? And so I used to examine those images in the church, over and over again as
if they were a series of photographs - the faces, the sad bodies, the rows of pews.
Surely he is there somewhere. For a while, when I was at my most compulsive, I did
remember a figure lurking at the back. Now I donтАЩt. Somebody once showed me
how, in different editions of a history textbook, the same photograph would appear,
but changed somewhat, retouched somewhat, to illustrate some subtle new idea. In a
crowd of men. skins would darken, and then grow white again. Hair would grow
longer, and then short again. Women would appear, then disappear. Memory is like
history. At one time it was imperative for me to see the figure of a man, hiding in the