Читать книгу A New World - Robert M. Keane - Страница 7

Jill came back to the house with Jim. When Mr. Meagher heard her voice, he left the television set and came out to greet her. “Ah, Jill,” he said. She went right to him, and kissed his cheek as she always did, and he grinned.

“You’re a high blossom,” he told her, “from a sweet tree.”

Jill loved it. She loved him too. And he’d do anything for her. Just the opposite of his attitude toward Eva. The father wouldn’t give Eva the time of day from an armful of watches. The Polock. She wasn’t even Polish, but he had decided she looked Polish.

“What have you got against the Polish?” Jim had asked him one time.

“You’d starve to death with them,” the father said. “When I was new in this country, I went out once with a Polock, and she brought me to the house, and opened the ice-box, and sure there wasn’t a damn thing on the five shelves, but an apple, and that with hair growing on it.”

That was the origin of his favorite name for Eva: Hairy Apple.

Jim grabbed his baseball glove and went off to a ballgame in the park, leaving his father with Jill. As he walked along the street, punching his fist into the pocket to soften the leather, he wondered how his father ever got around to asking out a Polish girl in the first place. He must certainly have been a different man in those days. And what would his father have been like on a date? Jim couldn’t even imagine it. For the girl it must have been like going out with a grizzly bear. But no, he would have been tender, as he was with Jill. He was so many contradictions, that man.