Galilee. Clive Barker

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СКАЧАТЬ to her own story, well she didn’t talk about it much at first. If people asked about her background, she’d keep the answers vague. But as she began to trust her confidence more, she talked more openly about life in Dansky, and about her family. There was a certain percentage of people whose eyes started to glaze over once she mentioned anywhere west of the Hudson, but there were far more who seemed eager for news from a world less sealed, less smothering than their own.

      “You will have noticed,” Garrison’s garish and acidic wife Margie—whose tongue was notoriously acidic—remarked, “that you keep seeing the same sour old faces wherever you go. You know why? There’s only twenty important people left in New York, twenty-one now you’re here, and we all go to the same parties and we all serve on the same committees. And we’re all very, very bored with one another.” She happened to make the remark while she and Rachel stood on a balcony looking down at a glittering throng of perhaps a thousand people. “Before you say anything,” Margie went on, “it’s all done with mirrors.”

      Inevitably on occasion a remark somebody would make would leave her feeling uncomfortable. Usually such remarks weren’t directed at her, but at Mitchell, in her presence.

      “Wherever did you find her?” somebody would say, meaning no conscious offense by the question but making Rachel feel like a purchase, and the questioner fully expected to go back to the same store and pick up one for themselves.

      “They’re just amazed at how lucky I am,” Mitchell said, when she pointed out how objectionable she found that kind of observation. “They don’t mean to be rude.”

      “I know.”

      “We can stop going to so many parties, if you like.”

      “No. I want to know all the people you know.”

      “Most of them are pretty boring.”

      “That’s what Margie said.”

      “Are you two getting on well?”

      “Oh yes. I love her. She’s so outrageous.”

      “She’s a terrible drunk,” Mitchell said curtly. “She’s been okay for the last couple of months, but she’s still unpredictable.”

      “Was she always…?”

      “An alcoholic?”

      “Yes.”

      “Maybe I can help her,” Rachel said.

      He kissed her. “My Good Samaritan.” He kissed her again. “You can try but I don’t hold out much hope. She’s got so many axes to grind. She doesn’t like Loretta at all. And I don’t think she likes me much.”

      Now it was Rachel who offered the kiss. “What’s not to like?” she said.

      Mitchell grinned. “Damned if I know,” he said.

      “You egotist.”

      “Me? No. You must be thinking of somebody else. I’m the humble one in the family.”

      “I don’t think there’s such a thing—”

      “—as a humble Geary?”

      “Right.”

      “Hm.” Mitchell considered this for a moment. “Grandma Kitty was the nearest, I guess.”

      “And you liked her?”

      “Yeah,” Mitchell said, the warmth of his affection there in his voice. “She was sweet. A little crazy toward the end, but sweet.”

      “And Loretta?”

      “She’s not crazy. She’s the sanest one in the family.”

      “No, I meant, do you like her?”

      Mitchell shrugged. “Loretta’s Loretta. She’s like a force of nature.”

      Rachel had met Loretta only two or three times so far: this was not the way the woman seemed at all. Quite the contrary. She’d seemed rather reserved, even demure, an impression supported by the fact that she always dressed in white or silvery gray. The only theatrical touch was the turbanish headgear she favored, and the immaculate precision of her makeup, which emphasized the startling violet of her eyes. She’d been pleasant to Rachel, in a gentle, noncommittal sort of way.

      “I know what you’re thinking,” Mitchell said. “You’re thinking: Loretta’s just an old-fashioned lady. And she is. But you try crossing her—”

      “What happens?”

      “It’s like I said: she’s a force of nature. Especially anything to do with Cadmus. I mean, if anyone in the family says anything against him and she hears about it she tears out their throats. ‘You wouldn’t have two cents to rub together without him,’ she says. And she’s right. We wouldn’t. This family would have gone down without him.”

      “So what happens when he dies?”

      “He isn’t going to die,” Mitchell said, without a trace of irony in his voice. “He’s going to go on and on and on till one of us drives him out to Long Island. Sorry. That was in bad taste.”

      “Do you think about that a lot?”

      “What happened to Dad? No. I don’t think about it at all. Except when some book comes out, you know, saying it was the Mafia or the CIA. I get in a funk about that stuff. But we’re never going to really know what happened, so what’s the use of thinking about it?” He stroked a stray hair back from Rachel’s brow. “You don’t need to worry about any of this,” he said. “If the old man dies tomorrow we’ll divide up the pie—some for Garrison, some for Loretta, some for us. Then you and me…we’ll just disappear. We’ll get on a plane and we’ll fly away.”

      “We could do that now if you want to,” Rachel said. “I don’t need the family, and I certainly don’t need to live the high life. I just need you.”

      He sighed; a deep, troubled sigh. “Ah. But where does the family end and Mitchell begin? That’s the question.”

      “I know who you are,” Rachel said, drawing close to him. “You’re the man I love. Plain and simple.”

      ii

      Of course it wasn’t that plain and it wasn’t that simple.

      Rachel had entered a small and unenviable coterie: that group of people whose private lives were deemed publicly owned. America wanted to know about the woman who had stolen Mitchell Geary’s heart, especially as she’d been an ordinary creature so very recently. Now she was transformed. The evidence was there in the pages of the glossies and the weekly gossip rags: Rachel Pallenberg dressed in gowns a year’s salary would not have bought her six months before, her smile that of a woman happy beyond her wildest dreams. Happiness like that couldn’t be celebrated for very long; it soon lost its appeal. The same readers who were entranced by the rags-to-riches story in February and March, and astonished by the way the shop girl had been СКАЧАТЬ