"Pohl, Frederik - Best of Frederik Pohl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

Possibly that sounds silly to you. She wasn't even there, and I'd only known her for a few hours, and when a man begins to push thirty without ever being married, you begin to think he's a hard case and not likely to fall slambang, impetuously in love like a teenager after his first divorce. But it's true, all the same.
I almost called her up. I trembled on the brink of it, with my hand on the phone. But it was close to midnight, and if she wasn't home getting ready for bed I didn't want to know it, so I went home to my own bed. I reached under the pillow and turned off my dreamster before I went to sleep; I had a full library for it, a de luxe model with five hundred dreams that had been a present from the finn the Christmas before. I had Haroun al Rashid's harem and three of Charles Second's favorites on tape, and I had rocketing around the moon and diving to Atlantis and winning a sweepstakes and getting elected king of the world; but what I wanted to dream about was not on anybody's tape, and its name was Lilymary Hargreave.

Monday lasted forever. But at the end of forever, when the tip of the nightingale's wing had brushed away the mountain of steel and the Shipping personnel were putting on their hats and coats and powder-
ing their noses or combing their hair, I stepped right up to Lilymary Hargreave and asked her to go to dinner with me.
She looked astonished, but only for a moment. Then she smiled. I have mentioned the sweetness of her smil~. "It's wonderful
of you to ask me, Mr. Martin," she said earnestly, "and I do appreciate it. But I can't."
"Please," I said.
"I am sorry."
I might have said please again, and I might have fallen to my knees at her feet, it was that important to me. But the staff was still in the shop, and how would it look for the head of the department to fall at the feet of his newest employee? I said woodenly, "That's too bad." And I nodded and turned away, leaving her frowning after me. I cleared my desk sloppily, chucking the invoices in a drawer, and I was halfway out the door when I heard her calling after me:
"Mr. Martin, Mr. Martin!"
She was hurrying toward me, breathless. "I'm sorry," she said, "I didn't mean to scream at you. But I just phoned my father, and-"
"I thought you didn't have a phone," I said accusingly.
She blinked at me. "At the rectory," she explained. "Anyway, I just phoned him, and-well, we'd both be delighted if you would come and have dinner with us at home."
Wonderful words! The whole complexion of the shipping room changed in a moment. I beamed foolishly at her, with a soft surge at my heart; I felt happy enough to endow a home, strong enough to kill a cave bear or give up smoking or any crazy, mixed-up thing. I wanted to shout and sing; but all I said was: "That sounds great." We headed for the subway, and although I must have talked to her on the ride I cannot remember a word we said, only that she looked like the angel at the top of our tallest Christmas tree.

Dinner was good, and there was plenty of it, cooked by Lilymary herself, and I think I must have seemed a perfect idiot. I sat there, with the six-year-old on one side of me and Lilymary on the other, across from the ten-year-old and the twelve-year-old. The father of them all was at the head of the table, but he was the only other male. I understood there were a couple of brothers, but they didn't live with the others. I suppose there had been a mother at some time, unless Morton Hargreave stamped the girls out with a kind of cookie-cutter; but whatever she had been she appeared to be deceased. I felt overwhelmed. I wasn't used to being surrounded by young females, particularly as young as the median in that gathering.
Lilymary made an attempt to talk to me, but it wasn't altogether successful. The younger girls were given to fits of giggling, which she had to put a stop to, and to making what were evidently personal remarks in some kind of a peculiar foreign tongue-it sounded like a weird aboriginal dialect, and I later found out that it was. But it was disconcerting, especially from the lips of a six-year-old with the giggles. So I didn't make any very intelligent responses to Lilymary's overtures.
But all things end, even eating dinner with giggling girls. And then Mr. Hargreave and I sat in the little parlor, waiting for the girls to- finish doing the dishes? I said, shocked, "Mr. Hargreave, do you mean they wash them?"
"Certainly they wash them," he boomed mildly. "How else would they get them clean, Mr. Martin?"
"Why, dishwashers, Mr. Hargreave." I looked at him in a different way. Business is business. I said, "After all, this is the Christmas season. At the Emporium we put a very high emphasis on dishwashers as a Christmas gift, you know. We-"
He interrupted good-humoredly. "I already have my gifts, Mr. Martin. Four of them, and very fine dishwashers they are."
"But Mr. Hargreave-"
"Not Mister Hargreave." The six-year-old was standing beside me, looking disapproving. "Doctor Hargreave."
"Corinne!" said her father. "Forgive her, Mr. Martin. But you see we're not very used to the-uh, civilized way of doing things. We've been a long time with the Dyaks."
The girls were all back from the kitchen, and Lilymary was out of her apron and looking-unbelievable. "Entertainment," she said brightly. "Mr. Martin, would you like to hear Corinne play?"
There was a piano in the corner. I said hastily, "I'm crazy about piano music. But--"
Lilymary laughed. "She's good," she told me seriously. "Even if I do have to say it to her face. But we'll let you off that if you like. Gretchen and I sing a little bit, if you'd prefer it?"
Wasn't there any TV in this place? I felt as out of place as an Easterbunny-helper in the Santa Claus line, but Lilymary was still looking unbelievable. So I sat through Lilymary and the twelve-yearold named Gretchen singing ancient songs while the six-year-old named Corinne accompanied them on the piano. It was pretty thick. Then the ten-year-old, whose name I never did catch, did recitations; and then they all looked expectantly at me.
I cleared my throat, slightly embarrassed. Lilymary said quickly,
"Oh, you don't have to do anything, Mr. Martin. It's just our custom, but we don't expect strangers to conform to it!"
I didn't want that word "stranger" to stick. I said, "Oh, but I'd like to. I mean, I'm not much good at public enfertaining, but-" I hesitated, because that was the truest thing I had ever said. I had no more voice than a goat, and of course the only instrument I had ever learned to play was a TV set. But then I remembered something from my childhood.
"I'll tell you what," I said enthusiastically. "How would you like something appropriate to the season? 'A Visit from Santa Claus,' for instance?"
Gretchen said snappishly, "What season? We don't start celebrating-"
Her father cut her off. "Please do, Mr. Martin," he said politely. "We'd enjoy that very much."
I cleared my throat and started:

'Tis the season of Christmas, and all through the house
St. Nick and his helpers begin their carouse.
The closets are stuffed and the drawers overflowing
With gift-wrapped remembrances, coming and going.
What a joyous abandon of Christmastime glow!
What a making of lists! What a spending of dough!
So much for- "Hey!" said Gretchen, looking revolted. "Daddy, that isn't how--"
"Hush!" said Dr. Hargreave grimly. His own expression wasn't very delighted either, but he said, "Please go on."
I began to wish I'd kept my face shut. They were all looking at me very peculiarly, except for Lilymary, who was conscientiously studying the floor. But it was too late to back out; I went on:

So much for the bedroom, so much for the bath,
So much for the kitchen-too little by half!