By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham Read Free Book Online Page A

glass-eyed effigy is paraded annually through the streets and into the central square.
    Before Mizzy, though . . . There was, still is, the big old dormered house beginning to go terminally soggy under the accumulated heat and soak of eighty-plus Richmond summers. There is Cyrus (professor of linguistics, a small, quietly confident man with a head like Cicero’s) and Beverly (pediatrician, brisk and ironic, defiantly indifferent to housekeeping). And there were, are, three lovely daughters: Rosemary, Julianne, and Rebecca, five years apart. Rose was the beauty, solemn, not unfriendly but not available, either; the girl for whom some older boy with a car was always waiting. Julie was less stunning but more easily amused, a one-of-the-guys girl, loud and funny, a champion gymnast, unapologetically sexual. And then there was Rebecca, born famous thanks to her two older sisters; Rebecca, who was small and pale, gamine, the least beautiful but most intelligent; who had the same aloof, guitar-playing boyfriend since the eighth grade; whose girlhood is epitomized (for Peter) by the yearbook photo in which she, wearing the homecoming crown and holding homecoming roses, stands laughing (who knows why, maybe at the absurdity of where she finds herself) in a little sparkly dress, flanked by the two runners-up, the princesses, who smile mightily for the camera, and who are slightly stolid in their beauty, unremarkable, descendants of those sturdy “marriageable” girls in whom Jane Austen was not particularly interested.
    And then. When Rebecca was about to graduate from high school, when Julie was in her second year at Barnard and Rose was already thinking of divorce, the Mistake arrived.
    Beverly had had her tubes tied years before. She was forty-five; Cyrus was past fifty. Beverly said, “He must have been desperate to be born.” This statement was taken seriously. She was an expert on children, a doctor of children, and not prone to romances about them.
    Peter had met Mizzy when Rebecca brought him for the first time to Richmond. He was nervous about meeting her family, embarrassed over the putative note of impropriety—wasn’t it a little creepy for a graduate student to date an undergraduate from his seminar, even if he had waited until after the semester’s end? Rebecca’s father was a professor, could Peter really and truly believe Rebecca when she assured him that her father didn’t disapprove?
    “Just shut up ,” she told him as the plane descended. “Stop worrying. Right now.”
    She had that intoxicating, young-girl certainty; she had that Virginia lilt. Jest stop warying. Raht now. She might have been a nurse in a war.
    He promised to try.
    Then they were off the plane and there was Julie, vital and friendly in a cowgirl way, waiting for them outside the airport in the family’s old Volvo.
    And then, there was the house.
    The photo Rebecca had shown Peter had prepared him for its decrepit grandeur—its tangles of wisteria and deep, shadowy front porch—but not for the house in situ, not for the shabby wonders of the entire block, one lovely old matronly house after another, some better cared for than others but none done over or restored—it apparently wasn’t that kind of neighborhood; Richmond probably wasn’t that kind of city.
    “My God,” Peter said, as they pulled in.
    “What?” Julie asked.
    “Let’s just say it’s a wonderful life.”
    Julie lobbed a quick glance at Rebecca. Oh, right, one of those very, very clever boys.
    In fact, he hadn’t meant to sound cynical, or even particularly clever. Far from it. He was falling in love.
    By the end of the weekend, he’d lost count of his infatuations. There was Cyrus’s study—a study!—with its profoundly comfortable swaybacked armchair, in which it seemed you could sit and read forever. There was Beverly’s applauded (if failed) attempt to impress Peter by baking a pie (which was known afterward as “that goddamned inedible pie”).