"TUROW, SCOTT - THE BURDEN OF PROOF" - читать интересную книгу автора (Turrow Scott)

Stern, always ambivalent about religious formalities, had opened the
house to various heartsore friends who seemed to need to comfort
him-neighbors, two young lawyers from Stern's office, his circle from
the courthouse and the synagogue; Clara was an only child, but two
separate pairs of her cousins had arrived from Cleveland. Stern
received them all with as much grace as he could manage. At these
times, one responded according to the most deeply trained impulses. To
Stern's mother, gone for decades but still in his dreams, matters of
social form had been sacred.

But after the house had emptied and the family had trailed off to sleep,
Stern had closed himself up in the bathroom off the bedroom he had
shared with Clara, racked for the second time that evening by a
wrenching, breathless bout of tears. He sat on the toilet, from which
the filled skirting that Clara had placed there decades before still
hung, with a towel forced to his mouth, howling actually, uncontrolled,
hoping no one would hear him. 'What did I do?" he asked repeatedly in a
tiny stillborn voice as a rising storm of grief blew through him. Oh,
Clara, Clara, what did I do?

Now, examining himself in the bathroom mirrors, he found his face puffy,
his eyes bloodshot and sore. For the moment he had regained some
humbled remoteness, but he knew the limits of his strength. What a
terrible day this would become. Terrible. He dressed fully, except for
his suit coat, and made himself a single boiled egg, then sat alone,
watching the glint of the sunrise enlarge on the glossy surface of the
mahogany dining table, until he felt some new incision of grief
beginning to knife through him.

Desperately--futilely--he tried to calm himself.

'How, he thought again, how could he have failed to notice in the bed
beside him a woman who in every figurative sense was screaming in pain?
How could he be so dull, his inner ear so deafened? The signs were
such, Stern knew, that even in his usual state of feverish distraction
he could have taken note. Clam was normally a person of intense
privacy. For years, she had made a completely personal study of Japan;
he knew nothing about it except the rifles of the books that
occasionally showed up on her desk. At other moments, she would read a
musical score; the entire symphony would rage along inside her. Barely
perceptible, her chin might drop; but not a bar, a note was so much as
whispered aloud.

But this was something more. Two or three nights recently he had
returned home late, preoccupied with the case he was trying--a messy
racketeering conspiracy in to find Clara sitting in the dark; there was
no book or magazine, not even 'the TV's vapid flickering. It was her
expression that frightened him most. Not vacant. Absent. Removed. Her
mouth a solemn line, her eyes hard as agates. It seemed a contemplation
beyond words. There had been such spells before.