Read Online The Short History of a Prince by Jane Hamilton - Free Book Online Page B

there were driveways instead of alleys, that there were no stay-at-home mothers, no tired housewives in curlers, no women who started drinking whiskey sours at three in the afternoon on their porches. Where was that leisured class, the Mrs. Gambles, who took it upon themselves to police the families, the dogs, the village employees? Mrs. Gamble could detect the tantrum of a spoiled child in a faraway house. The squall of a husband and wife. The low rumble of the garbage men, always late, coming from the west side of Oak Ridge. There was no point and certainly nothing attractive in middle-aged despair, and yet, Walter thought, someone had to have angst. It should not have been surprising that the old neighborhood would slowly vanish as the children grew up and their parents moved away and the world changed, but he was on hand to say, I am surprised! I am dismayed. I don’t like it!
    There was a quietness about Lucy’s street, as if each house were stranded on its own lawn. It was hard to believe that men and women were really behind their closed paneled doors, couples thinking, cooking, making love, banging on a piece of wood with a hammer down in the basement, something, anything, for home improvement. The shades were drawn all down the street as if a president had been assassinated, as if one a day got a bullet through his head.
    Walter arrived in Schaumburg on Saturday morning, just as his three-year-old niece was getting ready to go to her ballet class at the park district. Lucy had invited Walter especially for the class, because of his interest in the dance. He was standing on the blue mat that said Welcome! in red cursive, talking to Lucy before she appeared. “Linda’s too young,” he was saying as the door swung open. “Do the park district officials look at the feet? Would they know what they were seeing if they did? Who does she take after, you or Marc?” He waved his hands in front of his face. “It doesn’t matter—the fact is she’s too young.”
    “Walt,” Lucy said, smiling at him. “I’m fine too.” She was the only person who had ever called him Walt. He had also once looked up“Walt” in the Oxford English Dictionary . It meant to revolve in the mind, to consider. It meant to fall into anger or madness. His name, in any form, did not portend an easy life.
    Lucy took him by the arm and led him into the entry that was as large as the New York studio apartment he had left behind. His sister’s house always had the gift-shop aroma of dried flowers and scented candles. Walter took a whiff and coughed. He wondered how a suburban girl had taken to the country craft movement, if it was pure chance, a mutation that had made his mother’s home-decorating gene run amok in Lucy. There were plaid bows around the stems of the brass candlesticks on the mantel, checked gingham curtains with tiebacks, and at every turn a fabric goose, a wooden goose, a porcelain goose, a stenciled gaggle of geese. There were pigs too, pink pigs, white pigs, stuffed pigs, china pigs. The house had come with the opulent foyer chandelier, a dazzler, all right, with several hundred prisms hanging from ever smaller steel circles that went up to the ceiling. The fixture clashed with the barnyard motif, but unfortunately it seemed to be attached to the main beam without hardware, a natural and permanent outgrowth from the ceiling. Walter’s niece was sitting on the carpet through the way into the living room, picking out bits of pink lint in the white tulle skirt in her lap. “Hello, Miss Queen Dido,” he called to her.
    Linda looked up, slowly, blinking, as if she’d been asleep. She hadn’t rushed to the door, calling his name, spinning around, wriggling with excitement. “Hi, Uncle Walter,” she said dutifully.
    He thought her terrifyingly well mannered, as quiet and closed as the houses in the neighborhood. To Lucy he said, “Her feet are not ready for ballet. Her bones are too malleable. I looked at them last