Read Online Three Short Novels by Gina Berriault - Free Book Online

back and his elegant head; and admired the small figure of her son in the pearl-gray sweater her mother had knit for him, his straight legs in jeans; and admired the self-conscious sprightliness in the actor’s body. They brought her—the three men—the excitement of pleasing them, the pleasure of pleasing them. She was glad that none of them had brought a woman. She was the only woman. The old woman in her hiking boots did not count as a woman; she was a past woman.
    They had drinks together in the parlor. David drank hot cocoa and sat by Max, with whom he exchanged riddles and jokes and she, the only woman, listened to her father and Russell talk about the nightclub they were to finance in partnership with a shipping-company executive, and, engaged with them, she felt the riches of her womanness—in her gestures, in the ease of her laughing, in theappreciation in her eyes and in her body of all they told to interest her and amuse her. And she saw that the man who was new among them, Russell Maddux, was glancing at her with that alternating peculiar to some men, a desire for her and a concealing of desire that passed over his eyes like a curtain shutting off their depths.
    They all went out into the woods early in the afternoon to hunt quail. She and her son were each given a shotgun, Russell instructing her in the use of hers and her father instructing David, and in a line they went through the brush and among the trees. Russell was to her left and Max beyond him, and to her right David and then her father. For the first time David had a gun in his hands, and she saw that he strove for an ease in his walk, an experienced hunter’s grace, but was stiff in the knees and the elbows. The space that was between her and him; his face, glimpsed in profile, set forward timorously, transfixed by the quail that might rise up in the next moment; the awkwardness and the grace of his small, slender body; the blindness of his feet in sneakers—all roused in her a desire for him to remain as he was, the only one and the closest one, the dearest, incontestably more dear than any man who was to become her lover and who was now a stranger. While she was bound over to the lover, her son might leave her forever. Walking three yards away from him—walking gracefully because the man to her left was a few feet behind her for a moment and was perhaps noting the movement of her buttocks in the tight, trim slacks—she felt a strong desire to embrace her son and to beg him not to allow another man to lessen her closeness with him, not to allow her to give herself over to another lover.
    A covey of quail whirred up, skimming over bushes, flying over the tops of the low trees. One was brought down, her father assuring David that, although both had shot at the birds, he had missed but David had not. David began a babbling prediction of hundreds of more quail brought down, and had to be cautioned by her father to be quiet. After that first shot, David’s attack on quail and cottontailrabbits was almost ridiculously pompous, more confident than the men’s.
    They tramped back through the cold woods—in the bag four quail and two rabbits among them all—and on the large round oak table in the kitchen tossed the game down. She was standing across the table from her son and saw his face was flushed from the cold, his eyes narrowed by the intense excitement of the day, and it seemed to her that the span of years between him and the others, the men, had disappeared.
    They stayed late around the table after a supper of roast lamb, of fruit preserves—the figs and plums of the hot summer—drinking brandies and smoking, talking about the division of Germany, and Russell about his experiences in the war in Europe, and Max about his entertaining the troops. David stayed with them in the parlor until midnight, listening and recalling at every chance everything about the hunt as if they had not accompanied him and