Read Online By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham - Free Book Online Page B

ask Julie to come up next weekend,” Rebecca says.
    “She won’t,” Mizzy answers.
    “She can leave the children for one night. They’re not babies anymore.”
    “I’m just saying. She won’t do it.”
    “Let me work on her.”
    “I don’t want you to have to work on her.”
    “She’s going to drive them crazy. Those kids. It’s not even about them, it’s about Julie being the greatest mother who’s ever lived.”
    “Please don’t force Julie to come to New York. I’ll go see her.”
    “No, you won’t.”
    “One day I will.”
    Mizzy sits cross-legged on the sofa, holding his glass in his lap as if it were an alms bowl. He is, no denying it, another Rebecca, but it’s more about incarnation than it is about resemblance. He’s got her youngest-one ease, that sense of unquestioning self-possession— Behold me, the promised child. He’s got her tilt of the head, her fingers, her laugh. He isn’t tall—five nine, probably—and his body is compact, sinewy. It’s not hard to picture him sitting disciple-ishly at the edge of a holy garden. He does, in fact, look a little like one of the swoony Renaissance Sebastians. He has those waves of mocha-colored hair, those pinkish white, sinewy arms and legs.
    Peter hears his name.
    “What?”
    Rebecca says, “When did we go see Julie and Bob?”
    “I don’t know. Eight or nine months ago, I guess.”
    “Has it been that long?”
    “Yeah. At least.”
    “It’s hard to feel all that enthusiastic about going down to D.C.,” she says to Mizzy. “And spending the weekend stuck with them in that monster house.”
    “I’m a little scared of the house, too,” he answers.
    “Are you? It isn’t just me, then.”
    Peter drifts out again. It’s catch-up, it’s Taylor-talk, he can’t be expected to stay tuned. He watches Rebecca lean in toward Mizzy as if she were cold and he gave off heat. All three sisters insist on Mizzy as their familiar, their daemon, the one in whom they can confide about the irregularities and infelicities of the other two.
    Mizzy does, in fact, possess a certain aspect of disembodiment. He’s a little spectral; he feels like a fantasy he’s having, his own dream of self, made manifest to others. That’s surely due, in part at least, to a childhood spent alone with Beverly and Cyrus in that big house, as Beverly grew worryingly neglectful of domestic particulars and Cyrus, who turned sixty the same month Mizzy turned ten, lived increasingly in his study, the only refuge from the amassing evidence that his wife’s eccentricities were hardening, with age, into something darker. The girls came when they could, but they were starting lives of their own. Rebecca was at Columbia and Julie was in medical school and Rose was engaged in her epic battle with her first husband out in San Diego. What must it have been like for Mizzy, who came too late to the party; who spent his adolescence in barely lit rooms (thrift having become one of Beverly’s fixations) among the leavings and artifacts? On a visit there when Mizzy was sixteen, Peter wrote his name in the dust on a windowsill. He found a very old dead mouse behind the ficus in a corner of the living room, scooped it into a dustpan, and disposed of it secretively, as if he hoped to protect the Taylors from some feared diagnosis.
    Mizzy. It’s hardly beyond understanding, neither the straight A’s that led to Yale nor the drugs that led elsewhere.
    If anything, he looks to have come through surprisingly well, in the fleshly sense at least. When he was a little kid he was slightly odd-looking, but as he grew older a sharp-faced handsomeness manifested itself almost as if it had been called down for protection, as a fairy godmother might bestow an enchanted cloak on a troubled prince. Girls, or so rumor has it, started calling before he’d turned eleven.
    Rebecca is saying, “. . . and into the great room , which is what she calls it, with a perfectly straight face.”
    Mizzy