"Madeliene E Robins - Somewhere In Dreamland Tonight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robins Madeleine E)

MADELEINE E. ROBINS

SOMEWHERE IN DREAMLAND TONIGHT

THE DRESS, WHEN SHE FINDS it, is pink. It smells richly of lavender, slightly of
camphor, an uneasy mixture in the stifling heat of the attic. Ruth sits back on
her heels and holds the thing out before her wonderingly. From the style, it
would be from before she was married, when she was still living with Aunt Min,
the summer she was wild, going out to Coney on the weekends with that girl from
her office. She imagines herself in the dress, poised before a mirror.

A door slams downstairs. Peg, on her way out to God knows where. On the surface
of the cloth Ruth sees the argument an hour before, her daughter standing in the
attic doorway shouting that she is old enough to run her own life. "I bring home
my pay, don't I? I'm entitled to a little fun. You just don't know the way
things are." Sees herself, all the love and worry she feels turning to hard
little words in her mouth when she tries to caution her only child, her baby.
The headache that began an hour ago dances hotly behind Ruth's eyes. Her eyes
and throat itch.

Ruth shakes the dress out brusquely. Why did I keep it, she wonders. There is
yellowed lace at the collar; on one side there is a small brown stain, almost
invisible. When she looks at the dress Ruth feels a frisson of fear and
something she almost doesn't recognize: a sudden unnerving sexual pang. That was
the summer that . . . she begins, then cannot finish the thought. Memories of
that summer are immediate, but something eludes her. Did something happen? She
tries hard, going beyond the heat and dust in the attic, beyond the pain that
makes her vision jump with each pulse; Ruth knows the dress means something, but
cannot recall what.

The summer when she was wild, she calls it in her memory. But what we thought
was wicked then. . . . I always went home with -- what was her name? Leda McHale
-- back to Leda's to sleep on the trundle in Leda's own bedroom, as chaste as a
nun. I should go downstairs now, she thinks. But downstairs will be empty of
Peg, gone off to a football party at college with one of those boys. Downstairs
will be full of Peg's discarded stockings and teddies, the purple cloche hanging
off the newel post, the scent of Peg's too strong, too suggestive perfume. Peg
doesn't understand, doesn't know what she's doing, how dangerous it is to tempt
those boys. She's too young -what's eighteen years? She doesn't know how men can
be. Ruth knows.

The dress, when she found it, was pink. It hung in the window of Hooley's Dry
Goods and Ladies' Furnishings and cost Ruth almost a week's wage from her job as
a type-writer. The bodice draped to a short waist, the sleeves teardrop-shaped
with lace at the wrists; the collar was ivory lace and rose high, high on the
throat, to just under her chin. In it Ruth, with her soft, rounded chin and
strawberry blonde hair, looked like an illustration from the Home Journal. The
mirror and the salesgirl both told her so. She bought it knowing that Aunt Min