Heir to the Glimmering World Read Online Free Page B

to earn my way, if he was ever going to get me off his hands, was Albany Teachers' College. He couldn't afford to keep me in the dorms, and anyhow they were famous for resembling dungeons. With luck he might manage to talk cousin Bertram into putting me up. "Makes sense, doesn't it?" he said.
    I hated that college. There were classes in pedagogy and psychology and "early childhood and adolescence": these were taught like the tenets of a cult. I did not believe in any of them. I had no interest in becoming a teacher. I had observed enough of my father's predicaments to want to flee any reminder of schools. What I cared about was reading novels.
    Bertram lived on the ninth floor of a modern apartment building, with fire escapes jutting from the window ledges. I discovered that if I climbed out and stood on our own fire escape—a kind of latticed metal balcony—I could just see the roof of the State House. This was impressive; it was a glimpse of history, of law; there was gravity in it. Sometimes, when Bertram was away, I sat on the windowsill, with my legs stretched along the cool slats of the fire escape, and smelled the rain. Albany rain was different. It smelled of excitement.
    Bertram was away much of the time. Hospital shifts went halfway around the clock, and pharmacy hours conformed. Often he came home when I was already asleep. And once I was not asleep—I lay dozing, vaguely dazed: how had I arrived in this bed, in this room, in Bertram's big flat? I had a bedroom to myself, with a dressing alcove (Bertram had put a desk and a typewriter in there, and turned it into a tiny study), and my own bathroom. When my father forgot to pay my first quarter's tuition, Bertram instantly sent a check to the college bursar. I was certain my father had not forgotten; Saratoga, or poker with Wilson, had cleaned him out.
    Bertram was quietly loitering at the partly open door of my room. I heard him breathing, and wondered whether he was listening for my own breathing. There was something maternal about his standing there, and I wanted to call out; I wanted to ask, out of the darkness, whether it was true that my mother had died in childbirth. But I held back. Bertram was my mother's cousin, though not as my father had made me understand this: he was not a cousin by blood. Instead he was a cousin to my mother's first cousin; it was a tenuous in-law connection. Laughing, Bertram had worked it out for me—he was the son of my mother's aunt's husband's sister. He was not really a relation. He had never known my mother. He had no stories to tell. But when, some days afterward, I confided my phantom memory—my mother lying on a couch and holding a rag doll—Bertram said, "That's what you should trust."
    "My father says it's a hallucination. A wish-dream."
    "That's why you should trust it. The world doesn't get better without wishes."
    "My father doesn't care about the world." I thought of him crouching behind a closed door at Croft Hall, clandestinely gambling with his pupils.
    Bertram said mildly, "Well, maybe you'll make up for him."
    It was not only his work at the hospital that occupied Bertram's nights. He went to weekly meetings and occasionally to what he called "rallies," after which he was hoarse for days; sometimes he stood on picket lines. He was thinking, he said, of joining the Party, but he was still unsure. "It takes your whole life," he explained, "and I may not be able to give it the time. Got to pay the landlord. But they're on the right track, those people." I asked what the right track was; this made him smile. I had seen the half-turn of that smile before. It meant that he thought me as innocent as a savage.
    "First we're going to abolish rent," he said, "and after that tuition. Shelter and education for everyone." Again the twist of a smile: Bertram was not above self-parody. "To each according to his need. That's how the poet puts it."
    At that instant I discovered why he had let me come and live with him. It was