"The Double Bind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bohjalian Christopher A.)CHAPTER ONE Memory, she knew-especially when you were her age-was nothing if not eccentric. Consequently, when she thought of Robert, she did not recall a grown man. Instead, she thought instantly of the infant she would take from the nurse’s arms and show off to her parents’ guests as if he were her own. And, in some ways, he was. She was helping to change his diapers, she was helping to feed him. She would carry him out to the garden and hold his face up to the roses so he could breathe in their perfume. She would let him sniff the polo ponies, and the polo ponies sniff him. Her parents’ marriage grew considerably less turbulent in the first years after he was born, and it was the only period from Pamela’s childhood when she did not recall them fighting. They may even have been drinking less. Her mother was perhaps never happier than when her brother was cuddly and small and smelled of talcum; the myriad disappointments that already had marked Daisy’s life-and Daisy herself was still very young then-must have seemed considerably easier to shoulder when she cradled her baby. Unfortunately, it didn’t last. It couldn’t. The fissures that were the distinguishing feature of Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s marital landscape were far too wide for a baby to bridge. For any baby. Nevertheless, Pamela hoped and prayed and craved nothing less than a lightninglike miracle from that child. That toddler. That little boy. Pamela had read somewhere that infants only saw black and white when they were first born. They didn’t yet distinguish colors. She thought this was interesting for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of one of her earliest memories of her brother. It was a day the summer after he was born. Her father wasn’t home, but her mother had returned from a lunch with some lady friends just about the time that she and her brother were awakened by their nurse from their naps. They didn’t usually nap in the same room, but they did that humid August afternoon: They had rested together in the parlor that looked out upon the terrace because the nurse could open the French doors and a breeze would come in off the water. Daisy got out the album with the larger photographs and portraits, most from her adolescence in Louisville, and brought her two children with her to the couch. There she sat Robert upright in her lap as if he were one of his big sister’s teddy bears, while Pamela nuzzled beside her. She smelled of lemon and mint. Then she proceeded to tell her children-mostly Pamela, of course, since her brother was barely a season old-the stories of the people in each one. And while Pamela could no longer recall specifically what her mother had said that afternoon about her grandparents or cousins or aunts and uncles and suitors, she did remember this: Her brother would want to stare at the images long after she and her mother were ready to flip the page, and often he would reach out with his pudgy fingers and touch the black-and-white faces of the Fays from Louisville who had preceded them. As a toddler, he gravitated often to that album, and when he was only four and five years old he and Pamela would pore over the entire collection of their mother’s photo books. They treated them like fairy tales, and Pamela would use the pictures to craft bedtime stories for him. At some point, he began making up stories for her. They usually weren’t violent. And they were considerably less frightening than the traditional stories of giants and witches and fairies that children were spoon-fed back then. But they were strange and largely nonsensical. He was only nine and ten years old, but already Pamela could see that her brother was beginning to live in a boundary-less world wholly lacking in rigid cause and effect. It was a foreshadowing of what he would become. How he would live the vast majority of his life. Consequently, as soon as Pamela saw the newspaper ad, she called her attorney and asked him to contact the homeless shelter in Burlington. |
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