"Wilhelm,_Kate_-_Symbiosis(1)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

"What are you talking about? You've never failed yet and you know it."
"Yeah, that was different. I've got a headache. You don't know how they're pressuring me now. You just don't know. I'd just like to get away from everything, everyone."
We had a blizzard a week before Thanksgiving that year, catching everyone unprepared; the department of roads didn't have the plows out yet, the school didn't have its snow shovels out. Instant chaos. The school closed early for the Thanksgiving holiday.
"Come home with me," Laura said, sitting on her bed, packed, ready to leave. Billy Washburn was coming for her.
"Can't. I told Dad I'd be in Chicago."
"That's silly. You'd have to sit in this dump for the next three or four days until they get everything unsnarled. Come on. Call him up and tell him. He'll say it's the smartest thing to do,"
Actually it was. We had a ride. Billy said the roads to Beacham were all right, but it didn't really matter, we all had driven in snow up to the windows of the car practically.
When I still hesitated, Laura said, "Please do. I'm worried about Mother. I keep thinking it's my imagination, but then I see her, and I know it isn't."
"What's wrong?"
"That's just it. I don't know. Come see if you think there's anything."
So I packed to go to the country instead of to the city. When Billy got there it was snowing again. Laura sat beside Billy in the front seat and I had the back seat to myself. Her hair and the mink coat blended until it was hard to tell where one left off and the other began. She baited him all the way home. Billy didn't respond to her thrusts at all. He simply drove with concentration, and a scene from the past spring came to mind. It had been one of those times when a crusading editor, or reporter, or trustee decides to stir up a hornet's nest by announcing that the women's dorm is a den of iniquity. There had been investigations and visits by the local firemen of the administration and all that. And in our room one night, lights out, Laura and I had talked about it, laughing, but with undercurrents of self-mockery. We were both still virgins, although we would have died before telling any of the investigators that.
"If I do decide to go all the way," Laura said, "it'll be with Pretty Billy."
"For heaven's sake! Why that creep?"
"Because I can wind him around my finger. He'd do exactly what I told him to do. Like the knight whose lady told him he had to quit defending her, all that crap. He had to obey and he couldn't, so there was no way out except suicide."
"Good God, Laura, pick on someone your own size!"
"I mean it," she said. "If you let someone that you care about too much, it'll lead to nothing but trouble. I ought to know." Stephen Rodman had become engaged to a Bryn Mawr girl suddenly, after almost going steady with Laura for a couple of years.
I watched her head, and the back of Billy's head, and I knew she had done it. Neither of us had brought it up again when we got back to the dorm in September. When we got very near the sort of conversation that would have led to confessions, we both had scrambled to change the subject simultaneously. I hadn't been willing to let her know that she had been right. I had cared, and it had led to trouble. She obviously had not cared.
Beacham had become stranger and stranger to me, and seeing it that day, springing up out of the blinding snow, was like glimpsing an alien landscape. No humans would have huddled their hideous buildings together like that with so much open country around them. They couldn't have chosen to crowd into such a small area. There must have been monsters out there for them to guard against. The monster was the silence and the emptiness, I thought as we went through town and out again, back into the empty farm country.
Then we were at the farm and Mr. and Mrs. McInally were bustling about helping us off with boots, coats, putting hot toddies into our hands, everyone talking, laughing, and it felt like a homecoming. Morris stood against the wall grinning, saying nothing. Later I studied Mrs. McInally and I knew that there was something wrong. She had lost a lot of weight, but it was more than that. Two days later I realized that she no longer was pretty and tidy and gay. Her clothes were subtly wrong, not starched, or not ironed fastidiously, or not matched with her aprons just so. Little things here and there. Hard in themselves to find and label wrong, but with a cumulative effect of strangeness. And Mr. McInally was nervous. I wondered if he was what was wrong with his wife. He fidgeted with his pipe, he couldn't sit still, he started at a loud noise, and twice he got up to go to the barn because he was afraid the roof had blown down, or that a cow was bawling, or something.
Then one night when Laura was out with Billy, Mrs. McInally sat down by me and took out her crocheting and said, "I guess she'll marry him, won't she?"
"Billy?"
"Yes. Has she said anything about it to you?"
"No. Not a word."
"That's funny. She always was like that, closemouthed when it came to her own plans."
I stared at the page before me, but I wasn't reading. And later when Laura and I were in our room and everyone else was sleeping, I asked her.
"Marry Pretty Billy! You're off your nut!"
"That's what I thought, but your mother seems to think you will."
"Damn it. She probably knows to the minute when I lost my wonderful state of innocence," We both heard footsteps in the hall then and became quiet. I heard those steps during the night all the time that I was there.
On Sunday night, before we left, Mrs. McInally said to me, "It's such a shame that your father left us. We all miss him so much."
"Are you sick?" I asked before I thought.
"No!" She said it so quickly that it became a self-contradiction. Mr. McInally took a step to her side unconsciously, his hand out, reaching for her arm. Laura came in then and there was nothing else. We all kissed each other and Laura and I left with Billy.
"She is sick," I said to Laura late that night.
"She says she isn't. She says it's the change, that the doctor is giving her something. And Dad says she's fine."
Three weeks later Mrs. McInally tried to kill herself and her husband.
I came back to the dorm at ten. Laura was hysterical, trying to get some clothes into her suitcase. "Mother's sick. They took her to the hospital. I have to go. Goddamn it, where's my other shoe?"
"Laura, sit down. Let me do it. What happened?"
So we both began to throw things into the suitcase, because she couldn't sit down. Finally I got out the emergency bottle and gave her a drink of bourbon and Coke and she lighted a cigarette and let me finish.
"Do you have a ride arranged?"
"Billy. He's on his way. He'll take me ...."
"I'll come too, Laura. You might need me. Your father might need someone there while you two are at the hospital. How serious is it? Was it a heart attack? What happened?"
She shook her head. "I don't know. You can't come, not now. She's in ... she's in intensive care. We can't even see her yet. Dad told me. I'll be with him." She put out her cigarette and began rummaging in her purse for another one. She wouldn't look at me.
"Laura, there must be something I can do. I'll make coffee and keep it hot. Something."
"No! You can't come! Mind your own business!" Then she burst into tears. "Don't you understand anything? She's in Hillside Hospital."
Then I understood. Hillside Hospital was in Indianapolis. It was for mental patients. I must have stood shaking my head for a long time.
"She had a breakdown," Laura said, after a while. "She turned on the stove and tried to kill them both." She laughed shrilly. "In that old house she would have had to leave it on for a month for enough gas to accumulate to do any harm."
She didn't have her sunglasses on. Her face was red from crying, her eyes bulging and red-rimmed. I gave her another drink, and had one myself. "When Dad woke up, she tried to hit him with whatever she could pick up. She was throwing everything not nailed down. I think he's cut up a little. He said something about stitches. He yelled for Morris to call the doctor and he got her and held her on the floor until the doctor got there and gave her a shot." She looked at me with a hopeless expression. "We knew, didn't we? Dad knew. He lied to me about her. This has been coming on for a long time. And we all knew something was wrong. And no one did anything at all."
There wasn't anything I could say. She left with Billy and I didn't hear from her again until after the Christmas vacation. I started to go to the hospital a dozen times, but I didn't. It would have been an intrusion, I knew. I tried to call the farm every day, thinking maybe they were home again, but no one was. After I came back from Chicago, Laura turned up. She was pale and thin and haunted-looking.
They're giving her shock treatments," she said. She was trembling. That was all she would say about it. She took her finals and did brilliantly, as expected. Then she went home for midterm, and again I was excluded. No one could see Mrs. McInally, there was no point in my being there.
I didn't think Laura would come back for the second semester, but she did. Gray-faced, haggard, she studied fiercely, and each weekend Billy came to fetch her home. Her mother was being allowed visitors finally.
In March Laura said I could go with her to the hospital. I had my car by then, so I drove, and she smoked continually all the way, and said nothing.