Read Online Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick - Free Book Online Page A

handkerchief over his mouth. Volcanic coughing followed by a river of French.
    “English, please,” Bea said.
    “Oh, sorry, this stupid cold, so I thought it was . . . and when I saw it wasn’t . . .” A smothered row of gasps. “He’s away now, he’s in Milan for the month —”
    Bea said, “No, no,” and then, as if catapulted: “I was here in July, I tried to look you up. Julian? Julian Nachtigall? I have your sister’s letter —” She stopped and took him in; he was really no more than a boy. Even the mustache was undeveloped.
    He stared back with — it struck her instantly — her own father’s eyes: Tatar lids drawn low at the corners.
    “My sister.” Two spiteful grunts. He gave her his back — a rip at the collar — and shambled off into a large central room, out of which other rooms opened: impossible to tell how many. A palace, and too much furniture, a scattering of sofas and armchairs. Assorted articles of female clothing draped here and there, a stocking dangling from a lampshade, another thrown over a picture frame. A blanket on the floor. She shut the door after her — he didn’t care, open or closed, stay or go, he was indifferent. She saw his shoelaces, straggling, undone. A wilderness, it was all provisional. It was incoherent. He picked up the blanket and tugged it around his shoulders and foundered into the cushions of a divan.
    “You’ve got to be Iris’s aunt,” he said.
    “Yours too.”
    His recognition — of who she was, of what she appeared to threaten — was almost too rapid to assimilate; he had unhesitatingly understood what he took to be the whole meaning of it. An instinctiveness arrogantly sure of itself. It hinted at intuitive stirrings. It hinted at an inner life. But oh, the outer one!
    He said, “She told me she spent the night at your place. She came so you wouldn’t. She told you to stay away.” A rattling volley shook him; he wiped his eyes with an angry swipe. “My father sent you, didn’t he? He made you come.”
    “I came because I wanted to.”
    “But
he
wanted you to, you can’t deny it. Even if you think some-thing’s your own idea, he’s behind it. That’s how it goes with him, and don’t say it doesn’t. He always gets his way.”
    “Not with you. He’s asked you to come back, and you won’t.”
    “My mother thinks I’ve been abducted, I suppose you’ve heard. Little green Martians maybe.” He let out a resentful groan and flung the blanket over his head. “My God, you walk in here, what are you, the company representative, the family spokesman? When in my life did I ever know you? Whatever you think I’m up to is none of your business. It’s not my father’s either.” He reared up, shivering, from under the blanket. “Damn it, why aren’t they back?”
    She saw the dry swollen lips, the too pink nostril-wings, the fevered wretchedness of a sick and self-indulgent child. Sullen and stubborn. But she had surprised him, she was an eruption, an apparition — unfair and brutish. Standing there, tentative and stung, facing her nephew — Julian, the hard case — she had never so much as looked around, among all these little low tables and worn rugs and a bureau or two and a plethora of chairs, for a place to sit. The big room resembled a meeting hall, overused, abused, public, frayed. She had fallen into it no more than three minutes ago, and already a truculence was brewing. Had she crossed an ocean to be so quickly despised?
    Deliberately, she made a space for herself at the far end of the divan, at his feet.
    “Your father doesn’t know I’m here. I never told him I was coming.”
    “Then what do you want?”
    The question, even if soaked in phlegm, was pellucid. What did she want? It wasn’t that she had taken pity on Marvin, inconceivable as this was — when had Marvin ever needed her pity? The boy was right: in the end, for one reason or another, inescapably, she was doing Marvin’s bidding. Admittedly there was