Souvenir of Cold Springs Read Online Free

and a half weeks. Gloria in excelsis Deo .
    Her mother finally decided on the trees and the broken-down fence, and she praised Margaret’s taste. For years, she had paid compliments meant to encourage Margaret’s artistic talent. She thought Margaret should be a painter. Margaret hadn’t painted in years, not since high school. She hated to think of the paintings she had produced, the lame attempts at drama and shock (a dead squirrel she found in the backyard that she painted in various stages of decomposition, a sequence of dead flowers in expensive cut-glass vases) and the cheap symbolism she sometimes attempted as a commentary on current events—like Reagan grinning on a television screen that was really a coffin. She knew she couldn’t paint, even if her mother didn’t have the sense to realize it. Or maybe her mother did, and encouraged her anyway because she was perverse, or because she wanted Margaret to be mediocre, or because she wanted Margaret to get off her butt and back in touch with reality.
    Except that now she was exempt from getting off her butt because she had a cold. She wondered how long she could hang on to her precious germs. She thought about writing a poem, “To a Virus,” the way poets used to write poems to mice and fleas. Hail thou microscopic beastie. On my blood thou hast thy feastie . It was pleasant to be sick. Her father ran errands for her. Her mother made hot toddies, lentil soup, custards. She framed a print of the trees and gave it to Margaret to cheer her up, propping it on the top shelf of her bookcase between the pottery vase full of chrysanthemums and the old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock.
    Her mother’s passionate quest for domestic perfection usually seemed to Margaret a form of insanity—everything relentlessly clean, tidy, and aesthetically pleasing, the whole house a monument to anal retentiveness. Or to her parents’ empty marriage. Or her mother’s vague but stifled creativity. Whatever. But when she was ill she liked it. Sunlight, flowers, neat bare surfaces—they made her feel pampered, like a movie heroine with a wasting disease, someone beloved who would be missed when she was gone. Everything was ready: the camera crew could move right in, wouldn’t have to touch a thing. Just dab some makeup on her red nose.
    She liked the tree photograph. It would be one of the things she would take to California, as a souvenir. It was perfect: dead-looking trees, photographed by her mother.
    â€œIt looks nice on the shelf,” Margaret said.
    â€œIt’s pretty bleak,” her mother said dubiously.
    â€œIt’s supposed to be bleak, Ma. November is the bleakest month.”
    Her mother smiled at her, as she always did at the hint of a literary allusion, any evidence that nearly three years at Harvard plus a home life rich in culture had done its work. “Are you reading anything good?” she asked. “Besides House and Garden ?”
    Margaret held it up, open to the stables people. “James goes to Oxford, Alexander’s at Eton, and Charlotte’s won the watercolor prize three years in a row at her school. And look—that’s Tony’s little playhouse.”
    â€œPlease, Margaret,” her mother said. “Let’s not have our House and Garden argument again.”
    â€œI’m also reading Middlemarch .”
    â€œGod—what’s that? The fifth time?” Her mother used to be proud of her for reading it so many times. Lately it was worrying her. It was like when Margaret was eleven and used to read about keeping bees. She wrote to the Department of Agriculture and the National Beekeepers’ League for pamphlets, and subscribed to an English publication called The Apiarist . Her Bible had been The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture . At first her mother thought it was cute, an eleven-year-old who knew, and would tell you, that bees won’t fly unless the temperature is at