Real Life by Kitty Burns Florey Read Free Book Online

“So do the Garners. They go out nearly every Sunday. Maybe they’d take you with them.”
    â€œI’m not interested in birds,” Hugo said.
    The conversation seemed inadequate to the occasion. Shouldn’t something formal have taken place? An exchange of vows? I, Dorothea Gilbert, hereby swear I will do my best to—what? bring you up? be responsible for you? be a mother to you? And I, Hugo Gilbert, swear to be a good boy, to stay out of the way and not be a nuisance, and most of all to be nothing like my father.
    â€œBirds all look alike to me,” Hugo said.
    â€œWas she nice—Mrs. Wylie?” Dorrie asked him.
    He looked up at her from his plate of tuna salad, the first time he had met her eyes since she sent him out with his basket of clothes. “I wish I was back at Grandpa’s,” he said. “I wish he hadn’t died.”
    â€œOh, Hugo, so do I,” Dorrie said.
    They both had tears starting, and this agitated Hugo so much he left the table and went outside. She watched him out the back window, running down to the dock, a shadow among shadows. She washed the dishes and then sat in the living room, trying to think, to take it in. If she looked out the window again, she knew she would see him, a small dimming figure huddled with his grief. The pond would be darker than the sky, and gradually they would merge, the sky going navy blue, then black. Hugo invisible. But there, still there.

2
    Dome’s father, Martin Gilbert, had taught Victorian literature at a small, second-rate Connecticut women’s college that had shocked and dismayed him when, in the early seventies, it began admitting men: “The Invasion of the Barbarian Hordes,” he called it. He never altered his opinion that coeducation leads to mediocrity. He blamed his own disillusion with teaching on the invasion, but the truth was that as he aged he found his job more and more futile and tedious, and he was aware that his students considered him boring and old-fashioned and hard. He even grew tired of his subject. Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning wearied him; their world seemed far removed from his own. He knew by heart the novels of Trollope and George Eliot (from which he had named his children), and he didn’t want to read them anymore. After he retired, he hardly read anything at all except magazines and the newspaper, and he discovered television.
    But this was years after Dorrie had left home for good. During her childhood, her father had been ambitious and full of schemes. At the college, he served on committees that fought for stiffer entrance requirements, tougher grading policies, more rigorous courses. On vacations, he worked at his cluttered rolltop desk making notes on cards and annotating the margins of his books and filling out grant application forms. He drove all over New England looking in secondhand bookshops for works on his subject, for art books and old prints. He had a true admiration for the sanctimonious paintings of the Victorian age, and he and his wife had dinner table arguments about art, Anna defending modernism, pure form, experimentation, Martin going for realism and moral uplift. The arguments were sincere and informed and a trifle self-conscious: the Gilberts were proud of their ability to carry on a civilized discussion about an interesting subject, and the friction of mind against mind, opinion against opinion, was good for the mental development of the children, even though it was obvious that Dorothea daydreamed through dinner and Phineas bolted his food and then slumped glassy-eyed in his chair until he was excused to go out with his pals.
    Martin wrote articles for scholarly journals, and occasionally but not often one of them was published—never in the prestigious publications. His great love was the book he worked on throughout his forties and fifties, a study of the interrelationship of Victorian art and literature. When he finally sent it