The Cigarette Girl. Caroline Woods

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to touch the vase,” said Maisy.

      “The vase?”

      “She means the urn,” Everett whispered.

      For a moment Janeen couldn’t look at them. Everett slid Maisy to the ground, and Janeen felt his arm go stiffly around her, then drop. At least he seemed genuinely sad, unlike the others in the room, who appeared anxious to make their tee times.

      “A shame your daddy isn’t here to give you comfort. Ironic, I guess.”

      “Ironic?” She looked down; Maisy had pressed a tea tassie into her hand. “Ironic how?”

      “Maybe that’s not the right word.” He tugged his collar. “I meant because the same thing happened to him, you know, and he just a little older than you.”

      The pecans in Janeen’s mouth turned to stones. “I didn’t know he was that young when Granddad died.”

      “Well, sure. His daddy had the same thing, early cancer of the prostate. Runs in the family. I’m lucky it’s my mother who was a Moore . . .”

      Janeen half-listened, watching Anita. Her hair had grayed significantly in the past year. She wore it as short as Mia Farrow’s in Rosemary’s Baby and dressed in men’s shirts and trousers, never a bra. Her flat chest, she quipped, helped her “support” women’s lib. She had her hand on Mr. Beecham’s shoulder—the owner of the restaurant where Remy had worked for twenty years.

      “Did my mother know about this? About Granddad having prostate cancer, too?”

      “Uh, I’d think so.” Poor Everett seemed to know he’d stepped in something. “Your father would’ve told her, right? When they talked about their families?”

      “My mother wouldn’t have told him about her family.” Anita acted as though she had no history, as if she’d washed up on the shores of America fully formed, like Aphrodite, or a piece of sea glass, broken and beaten but remade into something better. “And she tells me nothing.”

      She left poor Everett in midsentence and strode toward her mother. She didn’t even acknowledge Mr. Beecham. “I’m walking home,” she announced, drowning out his platitudes.

      “Liebchen.” Anita lifted a damp, dark curl off Janeen’s forehead. Now that they were close, Janeen could see red at the corners of her brown eyes and around the rims of her nostrils. But when had she wept? She’d been stiff and erect as a lightning rod throughout the service. “Do not run off alone. We have been invited to Charlotte’s for supper. They will close the restaurant tonight in honor of your father, so that we who knew him might dine together, reminisce . . .”

      “I’m sorry,” Janeen said in Mr. Beecham’s direction, without meeting his eyes. As she fled her mother managed to grab her fingertips, calling her name. Eyes closed, lashes wet, Janeen wrenched herself free, knuckle by knuckle.

      • • •

      A few mornings after Remy’s funeral, Anita went back to work.

      “I do not think I need explain, Liebchen, why I must return so soon to the library,” she’d said the night before as they watched television. “We need money, for one. Also it will be good for me to have my hands busy. You will see, when you return to lifeguarding. It is a shame you aren’t in school right now.”

      “Yeah. Would’ve been nicer of Daddy to die in the fall.” Janeen stuffed her mouth with the last of her TV dinner.

      “Janeen, for hell’s sake!”

      “Mutti, it’s ‘for heaven’s sake.’ No one says ‘for hell’s sake.’” A newspaper lay on the ottoman in front of Janeen; she tented it in front of her so that her mother wouldn’t see she was about to cry. Anita would only act dismissive. “Chaneen,” she would croon in her accent, “it will all be okay.” It was not supposed to all be okay. They were supposed to be sad. To be angry. To throw things.

      “Heaven, hell, whatever it is. You know what I mean.” Anita got to her feet, the long bones in her toes cracking, and went to adjust the rabbit ears. Onscreen, Marlo Thomas had her toe stuck in a bowling ball. The laugh track echoed. “You have been acting as if your father’s death is my fault. And I think it is a bit unfair, considering I am mourning him too.”

      Janeen said nothing, staring with glazed eyes at the U.S. section of the paper. On the third page was a photograph of a father and daughter on a beach. The man was swinging his little girl by the arms, and the girl’s head was thrown back, her mouth open in adoring laughter.

      “If you become lonely tomorrow, Janeen, have lunch with me in Shortleaf Park.” Anita ran her hand over her head, leaving rake marks in her short, sweaty hair.

      Janeen said nothing. She took a second look at the man and his lucky daughter. They’d been photographed from a distance, and the image was grainy. Then she noticed the second photo that accompanied the article, one of a fair, hawk-nosed young man in a black cap and gray jacket, silver bars on his collar. A swastika on his sleeve.

      She sat up, knocking her fork to the carpet; she ignored her mother’s squawk. “Neighbor Claims Missing Man Is Former Nazi,” the headline declared. Henry Klein, the man in the beach photo, had been missing for over a month. Before his disappearance, a woman had reported she recognized him as Klaus Eisler, a former officer in the SS intelligence service.

      “Huh. Look at this.” Janeen spread the newspaper down on the ottoman. “A Nazi was living in Florida.”

      “Psst,” Anita replied, pretending to spit. “May they catch him and string him up by the little hairs.” Her eyes flitted briefly toward the article. Then she did a double-take. She brought Janeen’s arm closer, her fingers cold and rigid. In the blue light from the television, her face seemed drained of color.

      “Mutti,” Janeen murmured, “did you know this man?”

      “Did I know him!” Anita rolled her eyes and snorted, horselike, but Janeen noticed that the hand holding her tumbler of schnapps seemed to shake.

      “It says he grew up in Berlin, like you.”

      “Berlin is a large city, Liebchen, didn’t you know?” Anita squeezed her dark eyes shut once, twice, as though she were using her lids to erase what she’d just seen. Her mouth set itself in a hard line. “It is time for me to fall asleep, and so should you. Stop reading this nonsense.”

      “Okay,” Janeen said, her eyes on the page.

      “And it would not hurt if you would take a minute to clean out the refrigerator in the morning.” With that, she’d gone to bed. Janeen had stayed on the sofa for hours, waking only when faint light began to creep under the drapes. The newspaper lay over her lap like a blanket. Her fingers and the side of her face were stained with black ink.

      That morning, alone in the house for the first time in she didn’t know how long, she opened the refrigerator. It smelled terrible. Casseroles wrapped in aluminum foil or plastic were shoved in every which way, behind which she and her mother had let fruit and vegetables molder, a carton of milk turn lumpy. A hastily wrapped block of Cheddar bore green spores. Science experiments, her father would have called them.

      At the back of the top shelf, Janeen saw why her mother couldn’t СКАЧАТЬ