Читать книгу The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Selected Tales of the Jazz Age Сollection. Адаптированная книга для чтения на английском языке. Уровень B1 - Френсис Скотт Фицджеральд, Френсис Фицджеральд - Страница 10

One September day (a few years after Benjamin had handed Roger Button & Co., Wholesale Hardware, over to young Roscoe Button) a young man, about twenty years old, entered Harvard University in Cambridge as a freshman. He did not make the mistake of announcing that he was over fifty, he also didn't mention the fact that his son had graduated from the same institution ten years before.

He almost immediately got a leading position in the class, partly because he seemed a little older than the other freshmen, whose age was about eighteen.

But his real success was due to the fact that in the football game with Yale he played so well, with so much energy and with such a cold anger that he scored seven touchdowns[44] and fourteen field goals for Harvard, and as a result eleven of Yale men were carried one by one from the field in despair. He became the most celebrated man in college.

Strangely enough[45], in his third year he was hardly able to play football. Everybody noticed that he had become much thinner and was not quite as tall as before. He made no touchdowns – indeed, the team kept him only in hope that his enormous reputation would bring terror to the Yale team.

In his senior year he left the team. He had become so thin and weak that one day he was taken by some second year students for a freshman, an incident which humiliated him terribly. He became known as something of a prodigy – a senior who was surely no more than sixteen – and he was often shocked at the life experience of some of his classmates. His studies seemed harder to him – he felt that they were too difficult. He had heard his classmates speak of St. Midas's, the famous prep school, at which so many of them had prepared for college, and he made up his mind to enter St. Midas's after his graduation, where the life among boys his own size would be more natural and comfortable to him.

Upon his graduation in 1914 he went home to Baltimore with his Harvard diploma in his pocket. Hildegarde moved to Italy, so Benjamin went to stay with his son, Roscoe. But though he was welcomed there, Roscoe obviously had no warm feeling toward him – his son seemed irritated to see Benjamin, who was walking about the house in his sad youthful dreams. Roscoe was married now and had a good position in Baltimore life, and he wanted no scandal in connection with his family.

Benjamin was no longer persona grata[46] with the debutantes and younger college men, he found himself alone, only three or four fifteen-year-old neighbor boys were his companions. His idea of going to St. Midas's school came back to him.

«Listen», he said to Roscoe one day, «I've told you over and over that I want to go to prep school».

«Well, go, then», answered Roscoe coldly. The matter was unpleasant to him, and he wished to avoid a discussion.

«I can't go alone», said Benjamin helplessly. «You'll have to take me up there».

«I have no time», declared Roscoe suddenly. He looked uneasily at his father. «As a matter of fact», he added, «you'd better stop[47]. You'd better not go on with this business any longer. You'd better – better», he paused and his face turned red as he was trying to find words – «you'd better turn around and start back the other way. This has gone too far to be a joke. It isn't funny any longer. You – you behave yourself!»

Benjamin looked at him, close to tears.

«And another thing», continued Roscoe, «when visitors are in the house I want you to call me „Uncle“ – not „Roscoe,“

but „Uncle,“ do you understand? It looks absurd for a boy of fifteen to call me by my first name. Perhaps you'd better call me „Uncle“ all the time, so you'll get used to it[48]».

With an angry look at his father, Roscoe turned away…