Dinner Along the Amazon Read Online Free

itchy smell which came from his mother’s perfume bottles. He moved—and he began to wander, completely without direction, from one object in the room to the next—testing its openness with his eyes, and sometimes touching the handle of the drawer to see if there were any give to it. At the dressing table he lifted the tops from the bottles of scent. He stuck one of his fingers into the powder bowl and watched the faint pink dust explode into the air and settle in circular signals about the little round spheres and towers of glassware. It came into his mind that his mother would know by this that he had been there, where he wasn’t allowed: but it passed out again: he didn’t care: she had locked him out, and he had found his way in, as the wind had found its way back in through the windows.
    Harper went over to the bed and sat on it like an Indian. He pulled the covers up behind him so that they made a teepee over his head. He drank the milk out of the milk jug on the breakfast tray and waited.
    The door from the bathroom jerked open and a cloud of steam rolled into the bedroom. Out of this cloud, like a floating figure in a Japanese print, stepped Renalda Dewey, with the silence, the intensity, of a mime.
    She went towards the dressing table, trailing little licking tails of damp chiffon negligee, her dark Italian head held like something beautiful on a stick above the collar of her gown inclined towards the objective of her progress. After, in a trance of perfect silence, she sat before the mirror and let her eyes fall upon the compromise arranged before her. The manufacturer’s labels, of gold and silver, out of deference to expense, had numbers on them, one and two and three and four—with instructions for their application—and a touch of this, a daub of that, a trace of the other, finally a deft indication with a brush dipped in the fourth. She sat there, working, for a half-an-hour, but it seemed like a full hour or more to Harper sitting on the bed. Finally, however, she was finished and sufficiently clothed to let Harper see her.
    “You can come out of your tent now dear.”
    The teepee fell back from his head.
    She was pinning artificial roses onto her suit coat, three of them, grey and yellow.
    “Come along, dear, I want you to tell me how I look.”
    He stood up.
    “I think they’re very pretty, don’t you?” she said touching the roses.
    “Yes.”
    “I think I’ll wear flowers all this summer.”
    She looked into the mirror. It was as though she couldn’t find herself there. She had to go very close to it and lean one hand against the table to steady herself and she had to almost close her eyes before she found what she was looking for.
    “Yes. And later on I can wear real roses.”
    “Mother?”
    “Harpie, look out the window, dear, and see if the car is there.”
    They passed each other in the middle of the room. He looked—but she didn’t look back—she seemed, instead, intent on finding something—something, he sensed, that she wouldn’t allow herself to see until his back was turned.
    “Yes,” he said from the window, “it is.” He stood watching the chauffeur, who was smoking a cigarette. His mother was in the bathroom running the taps at the sink.
    In a moment she came out.
    “Goodbye, dear.”
    “Mother—aren’t you going to wear…?”
    “You have a nice day with Bertha, dear. And don’t upset her. Oh—and if you play the piano for heaven’s sake close the dining room windows. I don’t care how hot it is, you mustn’t disturb Mrs Jamieson.”
    “Yes’m.”
    She was suddenly in the hallway—then halfway downstairs—then in the kitchen saying something to Bertha to which Bertha replied “I’ll try m’am”—and then she was at the door, where she called out:
    “Goodbye, dear!”
    She stepped along the red bricks of the front walk towards the car.
    “Mother.”
    She stopped.
    The chauffeur threw away his cigarette.
    She looked at the budding roses in the