Dinner Along the Amazon Read Online Free Page A

flower beds. She picked one and held it to the artificial flowers. For a second a look of displeasure crossed her face, and she made a gesture to throw the real rosebud away—but then she reneged and put it inside her handbag. Then she smiled.
    He had never seen such a smile and he knew suddenly that she was smiling because she was escaping him.
    She said something to the chauffeur and got into the car. Sitting in the rear seat she gave her attention entirely to the yellow rosebud which she had removed from the handbag—putting it this way and that in the air and holding it to her nostrils to catch its embryonic perfume.
    The chauffeur got into the front seat and started the engine. It gave a roar.
    “Mother.”
    She was—
    “Goodbye!”
    —Gone.
    One morning, a month later, Bertha Millroy got up from the kitchen table, tucked the paper under her arm, picked up the breakfast tray and said:
    “You’re not to come no more.”
    Upon which she fled, under the protection of shock, into the newly forbidden reaches of the upper floor.
    So it was that later in the summer, when the heat came down into the city like a flood from the hills, Harper Dewey didn’t see his beautiful mother for days on end. And although it was obvious that she was still in the house (sometimes he would hear her call out, but never for him), her presence was not made visible to him.
    Sometimes at night he would be awake in bed when she came home—and he would listen to her clicking up the brick walk and turning the key in the front door. Then he would sit up on the edge of his bed and she would be heard talking downstairs in the front hall. He never caught the words, neither what they were, nor their significance—he surmised that she was alone because of the form of intonation. They had a hollow sound, as words do which are not caught in the shell of an immediate ear; and they seemed to have been cast adrift, like pieces of foam from the edge of the sea, and they had disintegrated and drowned long before they reached his bedroom.
    At night, his bedroom was his cave, where it was dark and he sat or slept like a secret unspoken in someone’s mouth.
    While she moved about in the lower regions of the house he would follow her footsteps as she went from room to room and through the passages between. This walking about lasted for a long time and he determined that she must do it in the dark because there was—on most evenings—a constant shuffle, which accompanied the wander, as though she were bumping into things, or only just avoiding them and stepping aside in that sudden startled way of people in the dark. And her voice would go with her through the dark, calling out when she fell and whispering in satisfaction when she cleared some obstacle which had been in her dark path and when she found what she sought (and he did not guess what this was) she would sigh and mutter and then be silent.
    It was the silence which followed each of these nightly preambles which frightened him and mystified him the most. Her very breathing and indeed his own as well, would appear to have stopped and in the whole house nothing would stir, not even Bertha Millroy in her attic room, not even she in the midst of all her dreams, would stir.
    In the silence Harper set his mind upon the repose of things in the dark and he would see the Lilliputian heads of the pearls strung on a gargantuan string and he would begin to cry at the sight of their ghostly faces.
    Finally he would lie down on his back and the silence would break, but no one would hear it break. He would be long asleep before she would turn out the lights below and climb the stairs and lock herself in her room.

    Summer became itself on the street where Harper Dewey lived with his mother and Bertha Millroy. There were elm trees on the boulevards on either side of the street and beyond the boulevards wide sidewalks bordered with fences and low stone walls. All of the homes had a Victorian flavour about them,