Read Online The Towers of Love by Stephen; Birmingham - Free Book Online

uniform and puttees; at his father in golfing knickers; at himself, in cap and gown, just graduated from Yale; at himself and Anne, in their wedding clothes on their wedding day; at his sister Pansy (so nicknamed because, as a baby, she was considered to have a perfect pansy face), sitting on the stairs in the white ball gown and long sleeves she had worn for her début; at his younger brother Billy, who had died, in his first long pants; at My Fancy, who had been one of his mother’s favourite horses; at stiff portraits of his Grandfather and Grandmother Pryor; at his Aunt Reba, looking silly in the tights she had worn for a Junior League Follies once long ago.
    â€œStop looking at the pictures,” his mother said. “Hurry and change.” He went out of her room and down the hall to his own.
    His room was the same as it had always been. Neither Titi, thank God, nor anyone else had done anything to it. It was still large and dark and cool, filled with the same old furniture—the desk with his initials carved in the top, the big mahogany chiffoniers, the wardrobe with the broken lock—that he had grown up with. All his old clothes still hung in the closet. He closed the door of the room and his image was trapped, as it always was, in the huge, heavy mirror that hung against one wall. No matter where you moved in that room, you could not completely escape that mirror’s gaze. It had been put there, after the polio, because he was supposed to exercise in front of it. He had exercised in front of it. He had worked out there day after day—with bar bells, lifting weights, with hand grips and chest pulls and foot stirrups and skip-ropes—chinning himself with the chin bar that had been set into the frame of the closet door, doing push-ups on a mat on the floor. In the mirror now he could almost see the boy who, sweating, in his undershorts, had exercised there through those long afternoons, month after month. He had been driven to do it, of course—driven by the fear of being crippled. And it had been his mother who had instilled the drive in him, she who had supplied him with the mirror, the mat, and the exercise equipment. “If it hadn’t been for your mother,” he had often heard it said, “there was a good chance that you’d never have walked again.” It had been in those days that she had shown some of the grit—not that she was made of, perhaps, but that her anatomy certainly contained. He stripped off his shirt now and tossed it over a chair.
    In the mirror’s reflection—he couldn’t help it, it was omnipresent—he saw himself, bare-chested, and he thought again of how everybody kept saying that he hadn’t changed. Perhaps they were right; perhaps he hadn’t. He walked closer to the mirror now and looked at himself—not admiringly, but dispassionately. His belly was still flat and hard. His shoulders were well muscled. His forearms looked strong, and there was hardly any sign visible to show that one arm, like one leg, had been affected. In the years of exercise he had come to know every muscle of his body by name and function, and he let his fingers run along some of these familiar muscles now—not narcissistically, but with a physician’s scrutiny—testing for flab, for weakness.
    He turned away from the mirror. Well, perhaps he had not changed. And he wondered suddenly why the fact that he had not changed saddened him somehow. Perhaps, he thought, I should have. His mother had not changed; the house had not changed. Oh, of course the rooms changed year by year, from Empire to Directoire to Chinese to French Provincial to Victorian—but the house itself didn’t really change. The way the rooms always changed was only a part of the house’s changelessness. Nothing had changed at all since he had been away, except possibly Edrita. Was Edrita Everett the only thing that had the luck to be impermanent? And