Daughters of the Revolution Read Online Free

dissipated. In the evenings, two living rooms contained two fires, and sometimes no one was there at all. In the mornings, Mrs. Snow put out coffee and whitefish for anyone who wanted it and then withdrew, leaving an elegant vacancy. Heck and Rebozos went outside one foggy morning and picked mushrooms—blewits, Rebozos said,
Clitocybe nuda
!—unusual in this season. (Heck knew nothing about mushrooms, but he trusted Rebozos.)
    Heck had brought them all wool scarves he had knit himself: royal blue for Mrs. Rebozos, deep gray for Mr. Rebozos, and crimson for his friend. “You made this?” Rebozos asked, holding the scarf reverently across his hands. During the long weekend Heck spent with them, Mrs. Rebozos wore her scarf constantly—wrapped around her sweater’s neck, around the collar of her bathrobe.
    They played tennis on the Rebozoses’ clay court and Heck won every set. “Cut me some slack, for Christ’s sake,” Rebozos said. And Heck laughed, disbelieving. No one had ever asked him to be less than he was.
    Another day, they walked along the edge of some rocky cliffs as the sun set. Rebozos wore a cashmere sweater and sunglasses. He pointed out mushrooms in the grass: “Milk caps, witches’ hats.”
    Heck and Rebozos squatted at the edge of a pool that ran off into the ocean. Squatted, because of damp grass, and then, as they talked, sat, their khaki pants gathering moisture. Rebozos gazed through his dark glasses at the ocean and confessed a secret: “I have a young daughter I haven’t met. She was born six months ago, in the islands. She worked for my parents at their place there. You’ll disapprove, Heck. The mother—my lover—is a Negro woman. I suppose I loved her. She never told me about the pregnancy until after the baby was born. Stupid, stupid. But what can you do?”

    Wind—had the ferry blocked it?—blew through Heck’s varsity jacket and used the resistance of his body to press the boat back toward shore, though there was no shore, no distance, just a bed of gray scallops over which he and Rebozos jangled. The sky glowed metallically and a fiery light poured across the surface of the water. Heck’s paddles struck the surface like matchsticks. He blinked away ice. He was a machine, made to go forward, to stroke and stroke. The plan became less important—lunch on the ferry, arriving, returning, having a drink with Lil later, telling or not telling her what he had done. The subject of the day had changed to something unsayable. Heck’s arms felt stronger than when they’d first started out—his muscles hot, greased. The ocean toyed with them, batted them off course and then pretended to leave them alone, lifting and dropping the boat as casually as a gull dropping a mussel on a granite shelf. Heck wiped some moisture from his face and saw red; his tongue must be bleeding. In a pause between the undemocratic waves, he turned and saw that Rebozos had removed the life jacket from the hold and put it on.
    A mass of shore lay ahead, and sometimes it did not lie ahead. Rain fell from the gray sky and drizzled down Heck’s head and face. His eyes stung, ached and fooled him. Here stood Mad Rock, an almost vertical pile. A cormorant with a gaping wound in its head looked down sadly on the men in the boat. “We have to stop,” Heck shouted. “I’ve got to fix this old bird.”
    “I want to eat,” Rebozos called up from behind.
    “I brought sandwiches and coffee.”
    “After this hell? I want a hot lunch and a drink.”
    Heck had the stronger arm. He put in at the rock, stepped out of the kayak and lifted the cormorant—its body stiff and itseyes dull—in his arms. He held his hand tightly over the wound until the bird relaxed and draped its long black neck against Heck’s shoulder. Soon it revived; its body began to hum like a machine and it slipped its wing under his arm. Wings were arms, Heck saw, and arms wings. The long bones and the blue-black feathers fit perfectly. That was it,