False to Any Man. Leslie Ford

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СКАЧАТЬ of her?” Jeremy cried. “Fond of her? I hate her. I’ve always hated her—when she was going to Briar Hill and Sandy and I were wearing our cousins’ made-over clothes and going to the cheapest schools in Virginia, and you working like a dog to pay for that even. I’ve got a right to hate her! You’ve always loved her better than you did us—when you were sick it was her future you were worried about, not Sandy’s and Billy’s and mine! Ours was accidental—you didn’t know that old stock was going to be worth anything. You thought it was all right for me to get a job, but the idea of Karen getting one was unthinkable.”

      “I thought you wanted to get a job.”

      “I did!” Jeremy cried. “I wanted it so we could fix up the house a little, and Billy could ride, and do things other kids do, and so you wouldn’t have to bother about my clothes, and his—but I didn’t know you were still giving Karen her allowance every month. I didn’t mind giving up the rent we got from the carriage house. I didn’t mind your taking care of her when she was left without anything. But I do mind now! I won’t give that stock back. It isn’t hers, it’s Billy’s and mine, and we’ve got a right to it. She can’t have everything that belongs to us! She’d never have dared ask for it if——”

      “Jeremy!” Judge Candler’s voice came down like the Chief Justice’s gavel in a babbling court room. “That will do. I’m asking you to turn back Karen’s stock. I expect you to do it. The papers will be ready tomorrow.”

      There was a long stunned silence. Out of it at last I heard Jeremy’s voice, strangled but deadly calm.

      “You’re asking something I can’t do, Father. It isn’t right—and if it were anybody else but——”

      “I said that will do, Jeremy. The papers will be ready tomorrow.”

      For a moment I heard nothing. Then the door into the hall closed, and I heard sharp light feet on the wide pine boards and saw Jerry’s plaid skirt flash by, and heard the front door slam, and in a moment the engine of a car cough violently a couple of times and start. In the next room I heard the creak of a swivel chair as Judge Candler settled down at the desk. Then, like Miss Isabel Doyle, I gathered up my bag and gloves and hurried out as quietly as I could.

      3

      It had started to snow again as I drove slowly back home along the Memorial Highway. Across the dark stretches of the Potomac, Washington lay like a star-spangled city in fairyland. The white dome of the Capitol and the tall shaft of the Monument with its red cyclops eye shone through the flurrying snow, fabulous beacons of light. I crossed the river under the shadow of Arlington, drove around the Lincoln Memorial with the dim heroic figure of the great emancipator seated in the lighted sanctuary, and turned down the river again toward Georgetown.

      I was too troubled to notice the dirty sidings and belching smokestacks that always strike me after I leave the parkway and turn up 30th Street toward home. I couldn’t get Karen’s smile, and that victorious so-that’s-that gesture with her open palms, and the passionate justice of Jeremy’s voice, out of my mind. I unlocked the door and let myself in, and went along toward the sitting room. Downstairs I could hear Lilac banging pots and pans, and wondered what had happened now—the sounds of the kitchen being the perfect barometer of the state of our small nation. And in the living room door I stopped abruptly.

      Jeremy Candler was sitting hunched together on the ottoman in front of the fire, her little pointed face as pale as old ivory under her mop of burnished hair.

      “Hello,” I said.

      “Hello. I hope you don’t mind my barging in this way. Lilac says you’re not having anybody in tonight.”

      She turned quickly to the fire and started poking it, but not before I saw the trembling collapse around her red mouth, and the blinding flash of tears in her autumn-streaked eyes.

      “I think it’s swell,” I said. “Let me put my things up. I’ll be down directly.”

      I knew she wouldn’t want me to see her cry, so I changed into a house coat and pottered about, as Miss Doyle said, for a few minutes. When I came down she was still pale and still hunched together on the ottoman, but quite composed.

      “It’s snowing again,” I remarked.

      “That’s why I didn’t want to drive out to Alexandria,” she said. “My tires are frightfully smooth. I thought maybe you’d lend me some pajamas and let me stay all night. I’ve got to be at the office early in the morning.”

      It was far from me to say “My lamb, you’re telling the most frightful story.” I said:

      “I’m delighted. I can even give you a toothbrush I got at a one-cent sale yesterday.”

      “You really don’t mind?”

      “Really.”

      “Then I’ll call up . . . home.”

      She got up unsteadily, sat down in the end of the sofa and picked up the phone. After a moment she said, “William—this is me. Tell . . . my father I’m staying all night with a friend in Washington. Oh, I’m fine. Be sure to lock the side door, won’t you? Goodbye.”

      She sat there staring into the fire. I picked up the paper and looked through it. Finally, as if she recognized that neither of us was acting quite normally, she said, “I’ve got sort of . . . of a headache, so don’t mind if I’m . . . I’m stupid, will you?”

      “You’d probably like to go to bed early,” I said. “You’ll find some non-lethal sleeping pills in the bathroom, if you’d like one.”

      Just then the phone on the low table at the end of the sofa rang. I picked it up. A man’s voice that I didn’t recognize said, “Is Miss Candler there, please?”

      I glanced at Jerry. The quick fear that leaped into her eyes and the sharp panicky shake of her head really alarmed me, but I said in a quite normal voice, “Sorry. Would you like to leave a message?”

      “No, thanks,” the voice said. I put the phone down.

      “Was it . . . my father?” Jeremy whispered.

      I felt the sting of perfectly reflex tears in my own eyes—she so obviously hoped it was. I shook my head. “I’d have recognized his voice,” I said, and added my younger son’s “And how!” to myself. I don’t think I could mistake that firm utterly impersonal tone in a thousand years.

      “Maybe it was Sandy,” she said tentatively.

      “You do want one of them to care where you’ve got to, you poor baby,” I thought.

      “But you’d know his voice too, wouldn’t you?”

      She was trying desperately to sound as if it didn’t matter, and fortunately just then Lilac’s black moonflower countenance appeared in the dining room door.

      “Dinner’s served, madam,” she announced. She always goes slightly formal after she’s lighted my great-aunt Deborah’s Georgian candelabra, and she always drops it as instantly as she did now.

      “Miss Jerry, Ah ain’ goin’ take that plate till you eat every las’ СКАЧАТЬ