Read Online Rich Rewards by Alice Adams - Free Book Online

mother went down to Palm Beach to recover—at that time a quiet, cheap resort—and I was sent from Madison, where we lived, to Frederick, a small town in Iowa, where actually I had been born, but I hardly knew the town. And, staying there with my stately grandparents, I fell in love with my Uncle Don, the husband of my father’s sister Margaret. Don was a perfectly nice, rather ordinary young man in his middle twenties, with a round, prematurely bald head, wide flaring ears and small irregular teeth. Toward him I behaved so terribly, with such consistent brattiness, that he could not have suspected love to be its cause. Besides, whoever heard of a five-year-old in love? Certainly not Don.
    About my father’s death I understood very little, and it is possible that no one tried to explain; how could they? In anycase, I was sad and shy and embarrassed, and deeply puzzled. Dead? No one else’s father had died, why mine? What was pneumonia? I am sure that my grandparents were saddened by their inability to communicate anything of what they felt to me, along with their natural grief at the death of a much-loved son.
    Their household seems eccentric now; not so to any right-thinking person of that time. Simply, my grandfather had married a woman with three unmarried sisters, all of whom he supported in a small house attached to the rear of his own. From this distance it is hard to work out their ages, but since my parents were in their thirties when I was born, all those people would have been somewhere in their sixties. To me they seemed simply old—Old People, like those encountered in myths and fairy stories, and in the Bible.
    And then there were Margaret and Don, younger than my parents; but they were still grown-ups, much older than I was. And their baby, Peggy, who was too young for me to think about.
    My grandfather was my favorite of that aged group; to me he seemed both kind and reliable. He was the one who taught me to roller-skate, having decided that the old ladies of the house were much too frail for that task, and Margaret was too busy with her baby. In fact the grandmother and her sisters were all rather nervous and subject to headaches, fits of irritation.
    Across a tidy space of lawn from my grandfather’s decorous and shiningly white house, and sharing the boxwood that separated it from the sidewalk, was a smaller, narrower, yellow house; Aunt Margaret and Uncle Don lived there, with baby Peggy. Margaret, in her twenties, was a beautiful dark young woman, warmly and sensuously in love with her husband, who was truly in love with her. Bald Don. Margaret was thin, heavy-breasted.
    Don was an engineer, out of work in his profession—this was in 1940, just before the booming years of war. He had taken a job in a nearby cellophane factory. That winter we all, every evening just at four-thirty, ceremoniously went out to fetch him from the factory, in my grandfather’s dignified Chevrolet. I can still recall the smell of that factory, which was horrible but was mingled with my wild emotion at the prospect of seeing Don.
    Every morning all of us assembled in the parlor for morning prayers, the grandparents and the great-aunts, and me. Don and Margaret were excused from this ritual, probably because of his job, which everyone respected, and Margaret’s baby, whom they all foolishly—to my jealous mind—adored.
    On weekdays I was driven to school after breakfast by Stuart, the black chauffeur, who also drove Uncle Don out to the factory. The school was private, a few children in a house in a not very good part of town. I did not exactly make friends there. We were all rather young for real friendships, and also I was very aware of my temporary status: Frederick was not where I lived, and those children’s accents were strange, whereas at home in Madison there were people I had always known; I imagined that I always would.
    And, more important, my attention was so passionately focused on my surrounding world of