Faerie Tale. Raymond E. Feist

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       • Chapter Eight •

      ‘What’s your mother doing?’ asked Jack.

      ‘I don’t know. Last I heard she was off someplace in Central or South America, writing about another civil war or revolution.’ Gabbie sighed. ‘I don’t hear from her a lot, maybe three letters in the last five years. She and my dad split up when I was less than five. That’s when she got caught up doing the book on the fall of Saigon.’

      ‘I read it. It was brilliant.’

      Gabbie nodded. ‘Mom is a brilliant writer. But as a mother she’s a totally lost cause.’

      ‘Look, if you’d rather not talk about it …’

      ‘That’s okay. Most of it’s public record. Mom tried writing a couple of novels before she and my father moved to California. Neither of my folks made much money from writing, but Mom hated Dad’s getting critical notice while she was getting rejection slips. Dad said she never showed much resentment, but it had to be one of the first strains on their marriage. Then Dad got the offer to adapt his second book, All the Fine Promises, and they moved to Hollywood. Dad wrote screenplays and made some solid money, and Mom had me. Then she got politically active in the antiwar movement, like, in ’68, right after the Tet Offensive. She wrote articles and pamphlets and then a publisher asked her to do a book, you know, Why We Resist.

      ‘It was pretty good, if a little heavy on polemics.’

      Gabbie steered her horse round a fallen dead tree surrounded by brush. ‘Well, she might have written bad fiction, but her nonfiction was dynamite. She got her critical notice. And a lot of money. Things were never very good for them, but that’s when trouble really began and it got worse, fast. She’d get so involved in writing about the antiwar movement, then later the end of the war, that she’d leave him hanging all the time. Poor Dad, he’d have some studio dinner to go to or something and she’d not come home, or she’d show up in a flannel shirt and jeans at a formal reception, that sort of stuff. She became pretty radical. I was too young to remember any of it, but from what my grandmother told me, both of them acted pretty badly. But most folks say the breakup was Mom’s fault. She can get real bitchy and she’s stubborn. Even her own mother put most of the blame on her.

      ‘Anyway, Dad came home one night and found her packing. She’d just got special permission from the Swiss Government to take a Red Cross flight to Vietnam, to cover the fall of Saigon. But she had to leave that night. Things hadn’t been going well and Dad told her not to bother coming back if she left. So she didn’t.’

      Jack nodded. ‘I don’t mean to judge, but it seemed a pretty special opportunity for your mother, I mean with Saigon about to fall, and all.’ He left unsaid the implication that her father had been unreasonable in his demand that his wife remain at home.

      ‘Ya. But I was in the hospital with meningitis at the time. I almost died, they tell me.’ Gabbie looked thoughtful for a while. ‘I can hardly remember what she looks like, except for pictures of her, and that’s not the same. Anyway, she became the radicals’ darling, and by the time the war was over she’d become a pretty well-respected political writer. Now she’s the grande dame of the Left, the spokesperson for populist causes all over the world. The only journalist allowed to interview Colonel Zamora when the rebels held him captive, and all that junk. You know all the rest.’

      ‘Must have been rough.’

      ‘I guess. I never knew it any different. Dad had to put in pretty rugged hours at the studio and travel on location and the rest, so he left me with my grandmother. Anyway, she raised me until I was about twelve, then I went to private school in Arizona. My father wanted me to come live with him when he married Gloria, but my grandmother wouldn’t allow it. I don’t know, but I think he tried to get me back and she threatened him.’ She fixed Jack with a narrow gaze. ‘The Larkers are an old family with СКАЧАТЬ