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

The same joy she had seen him giving another girl in the shadows cast by the
lights of Dreamland, the blood a black smear across his lips.

She woke early the next morning. The sunlight was white on the counterpane,
unavoidable. Carefully folded on the chair by her wardrobe was the pink dress.
For a moment on waking, Ruth remembered it all, everything. Then, as if it were
blood seeping from an unseen wound, the memory began to leach out of her.
Finally her recollection of Coney, of the whole summer, was as white and
stainless as a bone.

When fall came Aunt Mfn packed the summer clothes away with lavender, as if to
pack it all away. She never asked Ruth about what had happened that night, but
it took weeks for the grim, suspicious look to fade entirely from her eyes. In
the spring, sorting through the clothes, Ruth saw the pink dress, shook her
head, put it back in the trunk. Not a style that wore well.

That winter, in December of '09, she met Peg's father. Dreamland burned down in
'11 and all that was left were the Coney Island waltzes she danced at her
wedding: "I'll see you somewhere in Dreamland, somewhere in Dreamland, tonight.
. . ." Ruth became a wife, then a mother. The Great War came and went. She had a
home, a family, a good life. If it was not an exciting life, that was all right.
The past shimmered in her mind as elusively as the lights of Coney Island and
were lost in the safe, sunlit now.

A CRASH FROM downstairs. Startled from her reverie, alarmed by the series of
thuds and crashes that are Peg making her way up the stairs, crying out
wordlessly for her mother's attention, Ruth hurriedly bundles the dress up and
shoves it back in the chest. She blinks in the light of the upstairs hall and
closes the attic door behind her.

"Peggy?" she calls down urgently. A slurring voice answers, tells her to go
away. Ruth follows the voice to the bathroom, where Peg is angrily scrubbing at
her collar.

"Don't start with me, Ma." Peg refuses to meet her eye, stares resolutely at the
mirror as she pokes angrily at a red stain on her collar.

Ruth stands for a moment, transfixed, the bottom dropping out of the world,
everything. everything coming back to her in a flooding rush of memory. "What
happened, baby?" she asks like a prayer. Trembling. she brushes Peg's hair back,
away from her face and away from her throat; sees the white, unmarred flesh. The
memory is replaced by a surge of relief so powerful she wants to cry. Ruth does
not pursue the memory but gathers her daughter into her arms, rocking silently.

Peg resists briefly. "Don't start with me, Ma! You were right, all right? He got
drunk, he started grabbing at me. I hate him, all right? Isn't that what you
want me to say?"

"No, baby, no," she says. "Hush, hush, it's all right now." Every hard thing Peg
says is forgiven. Ruth thinks, You don't understand. You can't understand. You