Ever After Read Online Free Page B

“adventure.” He bore the constant burden of secrecy and danger. For a while the delusion was so strong that it turned into apang of regret: I had discovered this source of excitement too late—I could never, now, have access to it.
    And perhaps it was this sense of deprivation, rather than the simple fact that my father was dead, that made tears rush to my eyes.
    “Yes, my darling, you cry. Cry. Cry.”
    And, opening her arms again, stooping, but unweeping, she crushed me against that warm, ready bosom, where Sam, by now, must already have been crushed many times.
    She never used the word “suicide.” Perhaps I would not have known what it meant. Perhaps I guessed and only wanted, as she did, to gloss over the fact. It was Sam, in any case, who confirmed my suspicions. He and I were alone in the apartment. She had become a busy woman. I knew nothing about inquest proceedings, let alone in foreign cities. This must have been before she and I went back, the first time, with the body, to Berkshire.
    I said, “He meant to do it, didn’t he?”
    A bold, grown-up, not-to-be-evaded question.
    “Yes, pal. I guess so.”
    Later, it occurred to me that Sam might have been briefed to deal with this very point. But his brief, or his aptitude for it, only went so far. I was nine, he was twenty-four. Twenty-four seems now such a slender age—not so far from nine—but there was no doubt that during that time in Paris those fifteen years between Sam and me could be a wide gap to leap. Not so wide, it’s true, as the forty-six years between me and my father. Which gave Sam a distinct advantage in winning me over—along with the ability to slide into a boyish, big-brotherly familiarity quite beyond my father. But I always thought this was just a knack, an act for my benefit.
    That morning, days after my father’s death, was the first time that it occurred to me, from the vantage of my own unlooked-for access of experience, that Sam really was, perhaps, just a kid. The fact that almost as big a gap of years existed between him and my mother as between him and me did not escape me. Once, on one of those tumultuous afternoons that seemed now to belong to another age, I had heard my mother simper, beyond closed, impassive doors, “Come on, Sammy, come to Mummy.…” I recalled it now, not recognising one of the least exceptional idioms of love. It was as though at the very point when Sam was most culpable, I both saw he was most innocent and discovered a new cause for enmity.
    He took out a cigarette and I saw that his hand, his strong, young man’s hand, was shaking. He must have known I’d seen it.
    “Why?” I said. The inevitable follow-up.
    But “why” was not one of Sam’s words, the scrutiny of motives was not his strong point.
    “I guess you’ll have to ask your mother that, pal.” He managed to light the cigarette and took a deep, steadying draw.
    “I guess I’ll have to be looking after your mother now,” he added with a kind of feeble cheerfulness, as if the statement were half a question; as if he were watching his youth melt away.
    I asked my mother. She was ready to be asked. I suppose there must have been some confabulation between them, a two-stage strategy. It was the moment, of course, for her to have broken down, wept, begged my forgiveness, confessed that her shamelessness had driven a man to his death. The things that happen in opera, they happen in life too. But she didn’t. She spoke calmly, almost dreamily.
    “Perhaps there was something he knew that we shall never know.”
    Which was, of course, a twisting round of the truth. It was we who had known something which he hadn’t known; or which he had known all along and could no longer pretend not to know. Her eyes hardened into a sort of warning whose meaning was clear: Don’t play the innocent, sweetie. If I’m to blame, then so are you. You were a party to this. You allowed it, didn’t you? You let it happen.
    It was true: I might have