Читать книгу Angel and Apostle - Deborah Noyes - Страница 7

With Mother slumped in the stocks, he settles before her, circling his knees with long arms. He lays palms together as if he would pray, but instead the words come tumbling again like petals from a failing rose: “As a young man in London—I beg your hearing once more—I oft lurked in playhouses, a frustrated scribbler. That instinct has lately returned, and to speed my nights I’m writing your story, our story, from which I am removed for your sake.

“How will I tell it? Shall I grant you a nobler lover? Shall I let you have, for posterity, your sainted minister? And why not, too, a twisted demon of a husband—an old cripple, perhaps? Few in more tolerant times than ours will fault you then.

“I can do this much if it’s all you’ll allow, or at least act the roles in turn, for I will try anything, be anything but this merely”—he finds his feet again, swiveling in a fool’s bow—“outcast from your heart.”

When she will not suffer a glance for his antics, his voice rises like floodwater. “Will you not take passion over loathing? Would your pride not affix better to that?” He paces, and his long shadow plagues her. “I confess the quill falters in my hand. But history, at least, should revenge you. Tell me,” he commands, “cannot life become art—to save itself?”

Now she lifts her head with effort, and she is lovely, this muddied muse, my mother. “Spare me more words,” she says. “They spray from you like water shaken from a dog. Leave me. Please.”

For a moment more he stands on the damp grass, gathering resolution, and then he lopes away. “Pray,” he calls back, over and over in memory, into the silence of a vanished morning. “Remember me . . . who looks out from your child’s eyes.”