On, Off. Colleen McCullough

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      “Aren’t they all?” Keith asked, and laughed.

      

      Professor Bob Smith, home with his wife, Eliza, after dinner was finished and the boys sent to do homework.

      “It’s going to make life difficult.”

      “The Board, you mean?” she asked, pouring him more coffee.

      “Yes, the Board, but more the work, dear. You know just how temperamental they can be! The only one who doesn’t bug me is Addison. He’s grateful to be alive, his ideas on anticonvulsants are as pleasing to him as they are to me, and provided none of his equipment breaks down, he’s content. Though how anybody can jog five miles a day and be content, I don’t know. Lazarus complex.” He grinned, which did wonders for his already striking face. “Oh, how upset he was when I told him jogging to work in the mornings was not going to happen! But he managed to sit on his rage.”

      She giggled, an attractive sound. “You’d think it would occur to the jogger that having to smell his B.O. after he jogs doesn’t make him an ideal work companion.” She sobered. “It’s his poor wife I feel sorriest for.”

      “Robin? That nonentity? Why?”

      “Because Addison Forbes treats her like a servant, Bob. Yes, he does! The lengths she has to go to to find food he’ll eat! And washing smelly clothes—she has no kind of life.”

      “That sounds rather petty to me, dear.”

      “Yes, I suppose it does, but she’s—well, not the world’s brightest person, and Addison makes her feel it. Sometimes I’ve caught him looking sideways at her and had the heeby-jeebies—I swear he hates her, really hates her!”

      “It can happen when a medical student has to marry a nurse to get through,” Smith said rather dryly. “There’s no intellectual equality, and after he makes his mark, she’s an embarrassment.”

      “You’re such a snob.”

      “No, a pragmatist. I’m right.”

      “So okay, maybe you do have a point, but it’s a pitiless attitude just the same,” Eliza said valiantly. “I mean, even in their own home he locks her out! There they have this gorgeous turret with a widow’s walk overlooking the harbor, and he won’t let her up there! What is it, Bluebeard’s chamber?”

      “Evidence of her untidiness, and his obsession with order. I lock you out of the basement, don’t forget.”

      “You’ll get no complaints from me about that, but I do think you’re too hard on the boys. They’re way past the destructive age now. Why not let them go down?”

      His jaws clamped, hardening his face. “The boys are barred from the basement permanently, Eliza.”

      “Then it isn’t fair, because you spend every free second you have down there. You ought to spend more time with the boys, so let them share your folly.”

      “I wish you wouldn’t refer to it as a folly!”

      She changed the subject; he had that obdurate look now, he wasn’t about to listen. “Is this murder really such a problem, Bob? I mean, it can’t possibly have anything to do with the Hug.”

      “I agree, dear, but the police think otherwise,” said Smith mournfully. “Would you believe that we’ve been fingerprinted? Lucky we’re a research lab. The ink came off in xylene.”

      

      Walt Polonowski, to his wife, his tone ungracious.

      “Have you seen my red checkered jacket?”

      She paused in her rounds of the kitchen, Mikey straddling her hip, Esther clinging to her skirt, and looked at him in mingled scorn and exasperation. “Christ almighty, Walt, it can’t be the hunting season yet!” she snapped.

      “Just around the corner. I’m going up to the cabin this weekend to get it ready—and that means I need my jacket—and I can’t find it because it isn’t where it ought to be.”

      “Nor are you.” She put Mikey in his high chair and Esther on a chair with a fat cushion, then hollered for Stanley and Bella. “Dinner’s ready!”

      A boy and a girl galloped into the room, whooping that they were starving. Mom was a great cook who never made them eat things they didn’t like—no spinach, no carrots, no cabbage unless she’d made it into coleslaw.

      Walter sat at one end of the long table, Paola at its other end where she could spoon slop into Mikey’s mouth, open like a bird’s, and correct Esther’s table manners, still far from perfect. “The other thing I can’t stand,” she said as soon as everyone was eating, “is your selfishness. It would be great to have somewhere to take the kids on a weekend, but no! It’s your cabin, and we can whistle—Stanley, that is not permission to whistle!”

      “You’re right when you say the cabin is mine,” he said coldly, cutting his very good lasagna with a fork. “My grandfather left me the cabin, Paola—to me, and me alone. It’s the one place where I can get away from all this mayhem!”

      “Your wife and four children, you mean.”

      “Yes, I do.”

      “If you didn’t want four children, Walt, why didn’t you tie a knot in the goddam thing? It takes two to tango.”

      “Tango? What’s that?” asked Stanley.

      “A sexy dance,” said his mother curtly.

      An answer that for some reason inexplicable to Stanley caused Dad to roar with laughter.

      “Shut up!” Paola growled. “Shut up, Walt!”

      He wiped his eyes, put another piece of lasagna on Stanley’s empty plate and then replenished his own plate. “I am going up to the cabin on Friday night, Paola, and I won’t be home until dawn on Monday. I have a mountain of reading to do, and as God is my witness, I cannot read in this house!”

      “If you’d only give up this stupid research and go into a good private practice, Walt, we could live in a house big enough for twelve kids without destroying your peace!” Her big brown eyes sparkled with angry tears. “You’ve gotten this fantastic reputation for dealing with all those weird and wonderful diseases that have people’s names—Wilson, Huntington, don’t ask me to remember all of them!—and I know you get offers to go into private practice in much better places than Holloman—Atlanta, Miami, Houston—warm places. Places where house help is cheap. The children could have music lessons, I could go back to college—”

      His hand came down on the table violently; the children went still, shivered. “Just how do you know I’ve had offers, Paola?” he asked dangerously.

      Her face paled, but she defied him. “You leave the letters lying around, I find them everywhere.”

      “And read them. Yet you wonder why I have to get away? My mail is private, do you hear me? Private!”

      Walt threw his fork down, shoved his chair away from СКАЧАТЬ