Mount Terminus Read Online Free

having been so selfish and unfeeling, angry enough to have irreversibly broken the bond they shared. That she sat beside him now, Jacob told her, was all that mattered. And they continued to study each other until she no longer saw the boy she once knew and began to apprehend what he had become. Touching the corners of his eyes with her charcoaled fingers, she said, Look at you. So young, yet so old. She could intuit how alone he had been. She could see in the lines that had begun to prematurely form on his face at what an unnatural rate he had grown into a man, and she promised him in that instant, We will never be apart again.
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    Every Saturday, they met at the bench set before Tiepolo’s painting, and every Saturday, Jacob asked why Leah hadn’t come to see him, and every Saturday, Rachel made excuses for her sister, until she could make no more. Leah, she confessed, hadn’t visited him not because she didn’t have the desire to see him, but because she was unaware she and Jacob had been reunited. Rachel, in short, had no way of telling her, as it had been some years since she had been estranged from her sister. This Jacob couldn’t begin to comprehend. It was incomprehensible to Rachel as well, but it was the truth. Jacob asked how such a thing was possible. And Rachel described the ways in which their adopted mother, Alexandra Reuben, had deliberately and maliciously undermined Rachel and Leah’s devotion to each other. From the moment they moved into their new home, Alexandra favored Rachel; she appealed to her better self; enticed her with gifts and rewards, with love and affection. When Rachel conducted herself well in company or performed well at school, when she met her potential, her mother praised her and held her up as exemplary. Leah, on the other hand, could do nothing to satisfy her. No matter how much effort Leah put into her music, her appearance, the manners with which she conducted herself, Alexandra voiced displeasure. Disheartening displeasure. No matter how well her sister played or sang at her recitals, Alexandra escorted her through the reception hall with her arm entwined in hers and in the most anodyne tones made apologies to her friends for her daughter’s inferiority. If Leah expressed an opinion in company about a book she had enjoyed or about a fashion she found appealing, Alexandra twisted her words and revised her sentiments to make them sound foolish and uninformed. Once their adopted mother had successfully undermined Leah’s confidence, she began to appeal to her baser instincts; she imparted to her dark secrets and gossip about the men and women who visited their home; and when she did so, she expressed, on the one hand, her disgust with the improprieties perpetrated by members of their closed circle, while, on the other hand, she whispered her tacit approval. About a young woman traveling unescorted by a man of standing, or about a mistress engaged in an affair with a married man, she might say: They should feel the blackest shame choke at them in the darkest hour of the night. Of course, she would say in the same breath, One must consider, how does a young woman not unlike yourself, Leah, rise above her lowly position?
    It wasn’t enough for Alexandra to merely encourage Leah to commit her own acts of transgression, she went so far as to manufacture them for her, by whispering, in the strictest confidence to her fellow matrons, lies about her own daughter’s exploits with strange men. Rachel and Leah dismissed their mother’s cruel and unscrupulous behavior as that of an unhappy woman too long alone and uncared for. They tried to take pity on her, but as time passed, as the sisters’ obscurity fell into relief and became more and more a distant memory, Leah’s resolve to deflect her mother’s fictions weakened, and she began to believe in and embody the character Alexandra invented for her. Taboo began to