"Трумэн Капоте. The grass harp (Луговая арфа, англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

It was the day after the funeral that Verena came to the house. I
remember the terror of watching her move up the walk, a whip-thin, handsome
woman with shingled peppersalt hair, black, rather virile eyebrows and a
dainty cheekmole. She opened the front door and walked right into the house.
Since the funeral. Papa had been breaking things, not with fury, but
quietly, thoroughly: he would amble into the parlor, pick up a china figure,
muse over it a moment, then throw it against the wall. The floor and stairs
were littered with cracked glass, scattered silverware; a ripped nightgown,
one of my mother's, hung over the banister.
Verena's eyes flicked over the debris. "Eugene, I want a word with
you," she said in that hearty, coldly exalted voice, and Papa answered:
"Yes, sit down, Verena. I thought you would come."
That afternoon Dolly's friend Catherine Creek came over and packed my
clothes, and Papa drove me to the impressive, shadowy house on Talbo Lane.
As I was getting out of the car he tried to hug me, but I was scared of him
and wriggled out of his arms. I'm sorry now that we did not hug each other.
Because a few days later, on his way up to Mobile, his car skidded and fell
fifty feet into the Gulf. When I saw him again there were silver dollars
weighting down his eyes.
Except to remark that I was small for my age, a runt, no one had ever
paid any attention to me; but now people pointed me out, and said wasn't it
sad? that poor little Collin Fenwickl I tried to look pitiful because I knew
it pleased people: every man in town must have treated me to a Dixie Cup or
a box of Crackerjack, and at school I got good grades for the first time. So
it was a long while before I calmed down enough to notice Dolly Talbo.
And when I did I fell in love.
Imagine what it must have been for her when first I came to the house,
a loud and prying boy of eleven. She skittered at the sound of my footsteps
or, if there was no avoiding me, folded like the petals of shy-lady fern.
She was one of those people who can disguise themselves as an object in the
room, a shadow in the comer, whose presence is a delicate happening. She
wore the quietest shoes, plain virginal dresses with hems that touched her
ankles. Though older than her sister, she seemed someone who, like myself,
Verena had adopted. Pulled and guided by the gravity of Verena's planet, we
rotated separately in the outer spaces of the house.
In the attic, a slipshod museum spookily peopled with old display
dummies from Verena's drygoods store, there were many loose boards, and by
inching these I could look down into almost any room. Dolly's room, unlike
the rest of the house, which bulged with fat dour furniture, contained only
a bed, a bureau, a chair: a nun might have lived there, except for one fact:
the walls, everything was painted an outlandish pink, even the floor was
this color. Whenever I spied on Dolly, she usually was to be seen doing one
of two things: she was standing in front of a mirror snipping with a pair of
garden shears her yellow and white, already brief hair; either that, or she
was writing in pencil on a pad of coarse Kress paper. She kept wetting the
pencil on the tip of her tongue, and sometimes she spoke aloud a sentence as
she put it down: Do not touch sweet foods like candy and salt will kill you
for certain. Now I'll tell you, she was writing letters. But at first this
correspondence was a puzzle to me. After all, her only friend was Catherine
Creek, she saw no one else and she never left the house, except once a week