Читать книгу Scarlet Woman - Gwynne Forster - Страница 7

Melinda looked out of the only window in her tiny one-room apartment and saw nothing. Not the children jumping rope and playing hopscotch, nor the single mothers who sat on the stone bench beneath a big white oak tree escaping the late-August, Maryland sun. Over and over, her mind replayed Prescott Rodgers’s proposal. Marry and live with him in his home and brighten his life by doing for him what he couldn’t do for himself. He wanted her to read to him the classic literature of the English language. Although he was a brilliant man, dyslexia had deprived him of the pleasures of reading and writing. He had contacted the high school at which she taught English, offering to pay a student to read to him. None found the idea attractive, and she eventually volunteered to do it one or two hours weekly at no charge. But his tales of his world travels, especially his wanderings through Italy, so intrigued her that the few weekly hours soon became a daily ritual, a treat to which she looked forward each day.

A self-made man, inventor of a film-developing process, a fluid for contact lenses, and a type of eyeglass lens, all of which yielded hefty royalties, Prescott Rodgers had amassed a fortune. He lived a reclusive life, fearing scorn because he could not learn to read.

“We’re both lonely,” Prescott had argued, “and we have much to give each other. I know the chemicals I’ve worked with all these years are shortening my life, and I’d like to spend what’s left of it in your company. Marrying me would still the tongues of those curious about your daily visits.”

“Well, I…I don’t know—”

“Will you accept a marriage of convenience? That’s selfish of me, I know, because you’re young, and I’m sixty-eight years old.”

As a married woman, she would escape much of her father’s intolerance and authoritarianism, and she would have a companion. Musing over her own life of loneliness—for which her father’s self-righteousness and his indictments of all who disagreed with him were largely responsible—she reasoned that at last she would have a niche. She would belong with someone. Melinda added up the advantages, shoved the doubts and disadvantages out of her mind, and agreed.

She married Prescott Rodgers in a private ceremony in the office of Blake Edmund Hunter, Prescott’s lawyer, with only Hunter and her parents as witnesses.

Prescott gave her a monthly allowance of $1,100 for her most personal needs, provided her with a housekeeper, and bore all other expenses. She read to him each morning, entertained for him, sparing though it was, and enjoyed the remaining four and a half years of his life as his wife.