Читать книгу Forbidden Area - Harry Hart Frank - Страница 6

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When Katharine Hume stepped out of the River Gate she paused on the entrance walk and shook her head as one does to rout a nightmare in the reassuring sunlight. To her right the Jefferson Memorial rose like a white bubble against the cobalt sky. To her left the Lincoln Memorial gleamed in serene splendor, the nearest thing to a temple that her countrymen had erected to mortal man. Two girls in white shorts, carrying tennis rackets, brushed past her. From the river she could hear the dissonance of racing outboards. Overhead an airliner lowered its undercarriage and gracefully wheeled into the glide path for National Airport. A tiny foreign car, a girl and golf bags inside, came to a stop directly in front of her. A young lieutenant with the patch of SHAPE on his sleeve came down the steps two at a time, kissed the girl, climbed into the car, and they laughed and drove off. Katharine wished she were the girl in that car. I don’t live in a real world, she thought. That air-conditioned vault inside isn’t real. It’s grisly. It’s out of Dante. Real people make love and have babies and worry about bus fares and P-TA politics and the starling plague. She lifted her face to the sun. If you brought the sun down to earth, and touched it to Washington, the result would be about the same as the kiss of the enemy’s thirty-megaton bomb. That also was a fact, true and real, but few people were troubled. A half million of the untroubled would be away from Washington that afternoon. They would be up in the Shenandoahs and clustered on the beaches from Jersey to the Carolinas and three foursomes deep on every hole of every golf course within fifty miles, or perhaps only walking, by twos, in Rock Creek Park. They could live in the present while she stirred the muddy cauldron of the future. She felt a hand on her arm and Raoul Walback said, “Give you a lift, Katy?”

She said, “Thanks, Raoul,” and walked with him to his car. She felt better. It had been bitterly lonely, there for a moment.

They were crossing Arlington Bridge when he said, “Doing anything tonight, Katy?”

“Yes. I’ve got a heavy date with a couple of books on biophthora.”

“That’s a big word.”

“It has a big meaning. The destruction of life—all life, that is. It’s from the Greek.”

“Katy, why don’t you relax for twenty-four hours? How’s about driving up to my place in the mountains?”

“I’m not playing any one night stands this season.”

He drove in silence until they reached Dumbarton Road and pulled up in front of the red brick apartment building, saved from ugliness and uniformity by shrubbery and vines, in which she lived. Then he said, “I’ll make you another proposition. Let’s get married.”

She had realized that one day he would ask and she would have to answer. At first there had been lunches in the Pentagon cafeterias, and then dinners at Hall’s and Herzog’s and Normandy Farms, and then dancing at the Shoreham. There had been a quite proper professional weekend visiting the Crageys in Charlottesville. She had been invited to dine at the Walback home, a marble mausoleum big as an embassy, on Massachusetts Avenue, and she had been presented to his mother, an authentic Washington cave dweller. Yet now that the question had been put she found herself off guard, with no answer ready. In a city where unmarried young women outnumber eligible males three to one, this was unfortunate. “Are you serious?” she asked, to gain time.

“Absolutely.”

He was handsome enough, goodness knows. He was witty and companionable. They danced well together, a definite indication, he claimed, that they would get along fine in bed. He deferred to her at the conference table, a tonic for her ego. He was rich. Katharine didn’t remember her own mother, who had died when she was nine, very clearly, but she did remember one thing her mother had said: “Katy, it’s just as easy to marry a rich man as a poor one.” This had been said, half in jest, at the dinner table at the end of a polite argument over a bill at Woody’s. Her father was not poor. His salary, as Military Curator of the Library of Congress, was considerably above the average paid government workers. But he was poor according to the standards of people like the Walbacks. It was curious that out of the total advice her mother must have given her, this alone she recalled exactly. Yet she found it necessary to say, since she was resolutely honest, “Raoul, I’m not sure I love you. If I loved you, we’d be on the way to the mountains right now. You wouldn’t have to bribe me with marriage.”

“You haven’t given me a chance, really, to find out whether you love me or not.”

Katharine inspected him as she never had before. You look at a man differently after he suggests that you live with him for the rest of your life. Raoul did everything properly, everything right. His courtliness was a little something extra, like the dimple in the clean buttress of his chin. She had no doubt that their life together would be a symphony of gracious living, as glossy and impeccable as the color plates in Town and Country and House and Garden. Yet when she projected her thoughts ahead, she was disquieted. He would want her to quit her job, and eventually she would have to because there would be children. She would find her political discussions confined to discreet chitchat at receptions, and her research downgraded to equations involving boiled water, evaporated milk, Karo syrup, and pablum. He would want her to live in the Massachusetts Avenue house, at least for a year or two, but she doubted that twenty rooms would be big enough for both her and Raoul’s mother. Or fifty. She would find herself Mrs. Walback, junior, the one who had tried such an odd career, now producing grandchildren for the Mrs. Walback. She wondered whether, at this moment in history, she wanted children at all. The first legacy that a child should have was a reasonable chance to grow up. She said, “Sorry, Raoul, but I’m going to stay Katy Hume.”

He put his hand on her arm. He was so very civilized, Raoul was. She would bet that he never took a girl without verbal permission. “Think it over some more,” he said. “I’m going to ask again. Perhaps if we tried it out—”

“Are you sure that what you want isn’t simply a twirl with a girl?”

“Plenty of girls in Washington,” he said. “What I want is a wife. I’m choosy. I want you.”

“That’s a very pretty speech,” she said. “I’ll put the matter on the agenda.”