The Bride of Catastrophe Read Online Free

of their families by the time her father came sheepishly down the gangway. He had a new baby daughter, in Europe; he was going to return there. All the time he was away and she was tending his image in her heart, keeping him alive there with memories and prayers—he had simply allowed himself to forget her.
    If my father had been sent to Berlin, or the Philippines—who can say? But this struck too deep a nerve. Every day she wrote to him, and every night took the day’s letter, ripped out the abject parts, and worked the rest until it showed her with castanets flashing. This was how it worked: you created a magnificent self so a man could fall in love with you, then you’d have to keep that self up, so as not to lose the man. And that way you’d never disintegrate.
    But when he didn’t write back, she found herself begging. “You’re all that matters to me,” she wrote.
    It was the abjection that moved him—she needed him so badly her life depended on him, so he could dare to count on her. And she’d given herself so easily, so fully, she deserved something in return. He went home on leave, half thinking to reassure her and escape, but just being near her he felt the old drowsy warmth overwhelm him. When he left she was pregnant. They were married; then came the rabbit in the road.
    And the sense they were damned to each other, and to this child, the indelible proof of their shame. He hadn’t really loved her, had married out of duty. She knew this by the instinct that taught her everything. He’d rather she were dead, rather he himself were dead, than yoked to her. He denied this, of course, but without real feeling. And there had been no rabbit! What more was there to say?
    By the time I was born, they were living with his parents and he’d started his own business, raising praying mantises in his mother’s greenhouse.
    *   *   *
    â€œ HIS FIRST venture,” I told Philippa, shaking my head with a rue I barely noticed, so completely was venture linked with failure in my mind.
    â€œYou feel sorry for him!” Philippa said. “It has never occurred to me to feel sorry for either of my parents.” She squinted into the distance, trying to imagine it. “They’d be mortified,” she said, with a shudder.
    â€œAphid control,” I said, feeling sorrier, wishing I could go back there to that first failure and flip the switch to set my father on the right track. He’d put an ad in the Sunday Times , which should have left him two weeks of incubation to take orders and make deliveries, but Saturday morning they started hatching and by afternoon there were thousands of them, advancing in phalanxes across the glass, cocking their eerie little heads.
    I had the story, like all stories, from Ma. And her stories existed to illustrate why she didn’t, and why I shouldn’t, love him. “The praying mantises were infinitely more important to him than you were,” she’d explained, telling how, when her waters broke (how like her, to go into labor like that right when he was in the midst of a disaster), he’d insisted she hold on until he herded the mantises to safety.
    But, here came the great moment of her life—the advent of motherhood, with its absolute authority.
    â€œYou have to take me to the hospital right now,” she’d said, amazed at the quiet certainty of her voice, and anger had flashed over him. Who was she, to tell him what to do? Then he remembered: she was the mother of his child. He’d wrought this change, he would have to live with it. The deep, lush world she’d taken him into that first night, that he’d dreamed of swimming off into forever—where had it gone? He’d meant to rescue her from her fears and rages; instead, he’d found her mad stare fixed on him.
    â€œIt’s the whole investment, gone,” he said, and she, incensed, lifted the