Читать книгу The Mighty Franks: A Memoir - Michael Frank, Michael Frank - Страница 7

“My feeling for Mike is something out of the ordinary,” I overhear my aunt say to my mother one day when I am eight years old. “It’s stronger than I am. I cannot explain it. He’s simply the most marvelous child I have ever known, and I love him beyond life itself.”

Beyond life itself. At first I feel lucky to be so cherished, singled out to receive a love that is so vast … but then I stop to think about it. I am not sure what it means, really, to be loved beyond life itself.

Do I love my own mother that way? Does she me? Is such a thing even possible?

And why me and not my two younger brothers? What do I have that they do not?

“I wish he were mine,” my aunt blurts after a moment.

From where I am crouching on the stairs in the entry hall, I can feel the weather in the room change. A long, tense pause opens up between the two women. I hear them breathing, back and forth, into that pause.

They are sitting at right angles to each other, I know, my aunt on the sofa, my mother in the chair next to it. This is how they always sit in our living room, not face-to-face but perpendicular, so that they don’t have to make eye contact if they don’t want to.

“I wish you had a child of your own,” my mother says carefully. Ever the second fiddle, the third born. The diplomat.

“So do I,” says my aunt in a pitched, emotional voice.

Maybe you would be a different person if you did.

My mother does not say this. She thinks it, though. Everybody in our family does. But that’s not what happened.

This is.