Читать книгу A Reunion of Ghosts - Judith Mitchell Claire - Страница 12

The American Civil War is three years over. Abraham Lincoln is three years dead. Jesse and Frank James have just joined the Cole Younger gang. And in the city of Breslau, in the Kingdom of Prussia, a pair of first cousins have fallen in love and eloped.

When the cousins return home and announce what they’ve done, the groom’s father and bride’s uncle declare the union unnatural. The bride’s father and groom’s uncle pour themselves stiff drinks. The mother-aunts embrace and sob.

“What kind of child do you think a marriage like this will produce?” the fathers and mothers, the aunts and uncles, demand.

We think it’s sad that the bride never gets to say, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe a Nobel Prize–winning kind of child.” She never gets to say it because she dies nine months later while giving birth to the future laureate. From the first, his head is exceedingly large.