Read Online Cajun Waltz by Robert H. Patton - Free Book Online Page B

the Georgia Hill grounds unfurl before you was to understand that nothing beats money sometimes. It was a lesson that his daughter Bonnie, the older twin by minutes and by temperament, instinctively endorsed. Not so her brother. The difference went far to explain why they’d never got along.
    Rather than warm to the child most like them—one prudent, one feckless—their parents had each favored their opposite. There’d been something poignant about this in Esther’s case. Her feelings for her son held a bit of whatever once had been positive in her marriage to Richie. She’d wanted mainly to give Leopold a grandchild, but Richie had attracted her with his energy and chatter. He was even romantic when he made the effort. Their early times together, he would slide down her big body and lay his head between her legs, her pubic hair a tickly pillow under his cheek, and declare, “I could die here with a smile.” She would pull him on top to stop him from talking. Embarrassment felt like love in those moments.
    Where R.J. disappointed was in traits he shared with his father—his evasiveness, his third-rate friends. But Esther tapped the same indulgence toward him that she’d shown Richie in the beginning. It wasn’t easy; she was happiest when working in solitude at matters of business. Nor was it easy to ship him off to boarding school at age thirteen. Eluding the draft had been only one reason. Esther had begun contemplating removing R.J. from his father’s influence the second Richie had hit her that first time in Block’s. Subsequent incidents—slaps on her cheek or backside much harder than playful, maybe a grip on her arm tight enough to remind her that he could draw blood if he wanted—had made fierce her desire to give R.J. a life beyond Richie. She’d done it in small ways already, letting the boy dabble at playing guitar and slipping him catalogs to purchase the race records he liked listening to, frivolous wastes of time in her view but worth allowing if it made him think of his mother as not some all-business robot. She did hope military school would sharpen him up some. More than that, she wanted it to happen away from her husband.
    Esther didn’t miss R.J. in his absence; nor did he miss her. But when each on occasion thought of the other, it was with generosity enough to suppose that mother and son might have become close in the future. R.J.’s were the only moist eyes at Esther’s funeral other than Abe Percy’s. Richie had arranged the event to be held at the Baptist church; accommodating his wife’s Jewish heritage was too much trouble given her non-practice and the continuing dreary news out of Europe about death camp survivors and hollow-eyed peasants that no one knew what to do with. Richie was well known in Lake Charles, but few of the funeral attendees had any sense of Esther beyond her being plainspoken and obese. R.J., on bereavement leave from the military academy, was praised by his father’s friends for showing maturity in the face of what everyone agreed was his mother’s pathetic death by gluttony. He knew their praise was based mostly on his cadet uniform, its crisp formality an improvement on his hometown reputation as a rich man’s shiftless son. The contempt this aroused in him tempered his sorrow and enabled him to keep tears at a minimum.
    At just under six feet, R.J. was taller than his father. He had his grandfather Leopold’s high forehead and long nose that gave an intellectual effect not borne out in the classroom. The look was enhanced by his cigarette habit, the hang on the lip, the curling blue cloud, the clack of his Ronson lighter contributing to the impression that he was a young man of world-weary mind. He’d been aware from childhood that his family was well fixed. He knew that in time he could claim his share of Block’s. It didn’t matter if he deserved it or not.
    His