The Pagan House. David Flusfeder

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СКАЧАТЬ calmed the wild pumping of adrenaline by throwing sticks at a pine cone and then pine cones at a stick. He had triumphed in a staring contest with a glum red bird. He had paused on the bridge and tossed pine cones into the brown-stoned stream until a passing car slowed down and a bald man had snapped at him to stop what he was doing. He had killed time until it became a point of honour to kill more of it, to sicken himself back into boredom. And meanwhile his dad had phoned and he’d missed the call. Edgar scratched at the inside of his arm until he was alerted to the fact he was doing so by Warren’s curious, slightly concerned expression.

      ‘Does he want me to call him back?’

      ‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure where he is, actually. He says sorry and everything but he’s been delayed. Business to take care of. He’ll be arriving a bit later than he thought.’

      ‘Tomorrow evening?’

      That was Edgar’s furthest projection: the morning was unachievable, the evening made sense, his father driving through the day, birthday gifts carelessly scattered in the back seat of his open-top car, to stay overnight in his mother’s house, his house—they were always saying how much time had passed since his last visit. Edgar and his father wouldn’t want to begin their own drive until the morning, after breakfast: it was a long journey they would be making together.

      ‘Not quite, Eddie.’

      Warren was very good at breaking bad news. He should have had a job as one of those army men who stand at front doors and aren’t allowed to touch or hug the broken women who’ve just been told that their boys have died.

      ‘He’s been delayed. He won’t be able to make it tomorrow.’

      ‘The day after?’

      ‘Probably not till the end of the week. But I’m sure we can keep you entertained up till then. He says, sorry. So. I hope you’re hungry. Fay will be down just after she’s done her exercises.’

      At supper, after Warren had checked that Fay had taken her evening medication, he asked Edgar about his walk.

      ‘It was fine,’ Edgar said, and Fay, seeing something sad in Edgar’s eyes, had the delicacy to prevent Warren enquiring further.

      ‘These mushrooms are delicious,’ Fay said. ‘Is there garlic in them?’

      ‘I just stir them around from time to time while they’re cooking, with a fork that has a clove of garlic on its, you know, prongs.’

      ‘Tines,’ said Fay.

      ‘Excuse me?’ said Warren.

      ‘The prongs of a fork. They’re called tines.’

      ‘Oh yes, that’s right, of course they are.’

      Warren seemed to like being corrected by Fay, the passage of wisdom down the generations. Paintings hung on the white walls of the kitchen, most of them Fay’s own watercolours of riverside scenes executed when her sight was still largely intact.

      ‘Have you found the cat yet?’ Edgar asked.

      ‘How’s your ankle?’ Warren asked.

      ‘It’s a lot better. Edward was terrific looking after me. I didn’t miss you at all.’

      She dazzled Edgar with her smile.

      ‘That’s good to hear,’ Warren said. ‘How’s the rash?’

      ‘I think it’s getting better,’ Fay said, covering her throat and chin with a hand.

      ‘We should get Newhouse to take a look at it.’

      ‘No more medication. If you shook me I’d rattle. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll make it through till the Festival.’

      ‘May I leave the table?’ Edgar said.

      ‘Of course you can, my dear. I love your manners.’

      Edgar escaped to the Music Room, where he compiled a list of cat-napping suspects, which did not exclude his mother—was it accidental only that she had left on the day that Tom disappeared? And then he counted his money, which amounted to seven dollars and forty-nine cents, and went through the record albums, sorting them into separate piles according to likely interest. The interesting pile he further subdivided into those he thought belonged to his father and those to his uncle Frank. He imagined Frank to have a taste for flowery illustration and fanciful covers. His father he allowed all those simply designed albums with the group’s photograph glowering on the front. On the window-ledge, he arranged the ones with girls he wanted to look at on the covers, blocking out the shallow lights of the Mansion House opposite.

       8

      We believe that Kingdom now coming is the same that was established in heaven at the Second Coming of Christ [70 AD]. Then God commenced a kingdom in human nature independent of the laws of this world. We look for its reestablishment here, and this extension of an existing government into this world is that we mean by the Kingdom of God. I will put the question. Is not now the time for us to commence the testimony that the Kingdom of God has come?

      The Spiritual Moralist, John Prindle Stone, 1845

      Mary is gone, in zealous spirit, to accompany Captain Carter on a missionary visit to an infant Perfectionist congregation in Greencastle. Little Georgie is with Mary’s sister in Rochester. George spends his hermitry in work upon the land and studies of the Bible. He has never felt quite so lonely. His spirits and vitality are sinking. He can hardly rouse himself to go to the general store on Turkey Street. Even blind Jess grows peevish with lack of use. In compensation he feeds her too many turnips.

      He had not realized how dependent his energies are upon Mary’s. In the absence of his wife, he is without initiative, petulant and doltish. His beard grows. His clothes are dirty. Each day he resolves anew to abandon this place, to follow the missionaries to Greencastle, to join his child in Rochester, to visit John Prindle Stone in Vermont, or else return to New York City, where he might taunt his sluggish spirits with the sin he has left behind. Each night he falls sleepless into bed, the day ahead of him stretching out as empty and useless as the previous one. He sets himself small tasks that seem, in their midnight contemplation, manageable. Each morning he fails to accomplish or even begin any one of them. He has become accustomed to rising late, to sit out the lethargic death of the morning at the table in the parlour, still in his night-clothes and sleeping cap.

      He can play the violin, that at least he is capable of: the sounds he coaxes from it, the action of the strings beneath his fingers, bring the image of his wife closer.

      They had met for the first time on the Bowery. George was walking back to his lodgings from the newspaper office to wash and change before setting out for the weekly meeting of the Moral Reform League at Mr Green’s townhouse on Fifty-Third Street. An Irish urchin running pellmell through the crowd collided with George Pagan, who held him, looking for the purse in his pale hand, the pursuing robbed gentleman. The boy’s hands were empty and the only pursuer was a young lady, who smiled at George as she took hold of the urchin. The child twisted and struggled and wept and surrendered. George asked if he should fetch an officer. Her amused eyes reached straight into George to a place that he had no СКАЧАТЬ