Read Online The War of the Roses: The Children by Warren Adler - Free Book Online Page A

get yours. You said you wanted to clear the air,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of smog to dissipate before you can get a clear picture of my character.”
    â€œSo do I.”
    He was overwhelmed with this sudden compulsion to recount his family tragedy. It was, after all, the fundamental experience of his life, the quintessential reference point. There was no way of truly knowing him without knowing these circumstances.
    â€œI was twelve,” he said, watching her face. In it, he could see pity begin, which worried him. He didn’t want to inspire sympathy, only knowledge. Know me, he urged silently, offering a pun to take the edge of the sentimentality. “It was the die that cast me.”
    She smiled and nodded. Then, after a short silence, she prodded him.
    â€œHow did it happen?”
    â€œThe chandelier fell on them.”
    She looked at him with an expression of disbelief. Her lips formed a nervous smile.
    â€œYou’re pulling my leg. I was expecting a sob story.”
    â€œIt is,” he said. “The line between comedy and tragedy is a thin one.”
    â€œSo which one is this?”
    â€œBoth.”
    â€œWas it an accident?”
    â€œThat was the official explanation.”
    â€œAnd the unofficial?”
    Although he needed to tell it, he could never get to the root of it. Why had his parents turned on each other with such unmitigated ferocity? What had transformed their once-loving relationship into hate and horror? Why had it taken such a tiny spark to set it off? Had the fuse been set at the very birth of their relationship? Or before? Could such an affliction be inherited?
    He had thought about it obsessively from the moment of his and Evie’s discovery of their parents lying lifeless under the smashed chandelier. No explanation could ever satisfy him. And here he was seriously contemplating such a commitment to a woman he had been with less than an hour. Scared? He was petrified.
    Nevertheless, he told her the story with all its subplots and meanderings as if she needed to know it with the same attention to detail that he needed to tell it. He went through it incident by incident, including what he had seen with his own eyes or heard later.
    He told her of his father running over his mother’s cat Mercedes, his mother feeding his father pâté made from his beloved dog Benny, his father adding a powerful laxative to his mother’s elaborate dinner for her fancy guests and causing immediate diuretic havoc, his mother’s locking his father into his sauna in an attempt to create a human roast, his father’s binging on their rare and expensive wine collection, the deliberate mutual destruction of their carefully chosen antiques, the obliteration of their elaborate Staffordshire collection, their dogged hate-inspired fight for turf within their own scrupulously decorated and proudly self-designed home. Skirmish by skirmish, battle by battle, he squeezed out the painful story of their domestic war and the Armageddon finale under the deliberately unscrewed chandelier.
    It was, he told her, pure hatred run amuck as his parents destroyed their coveted possessions one by one and eventually themselves. As he told her this, he could barely keep his inner hysteria under control.
    She had listened in silence, mesmerized.
    â€œBeyond belief,” she whispered when he had finished.
    â€œThere was nothing Evie or I could do to stop it,” he sighed.
    â€œWhat could young children do?” she said, her eyes misting.
    â€œIt’s something we think about often.”
    â€œYou were helpless children, innocent bystanders.”
    He had told her the story, knowing it was a reconstruction based on the biased and limited observation as seen through a child’s eyes. What she really needed to know, he had decided, was its impact on him and how it would color any relationship established between them.
    â€œLosing one of them would have been