By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham Read Free Book Online Page B

There was the upstairs window through which the girls had escaped at night, the three lordly and lazy old cats, the shelves crowded with books and elderly board games and seashells from Florida and framed, rather haphazard-looking photographs, the faint smells of lavender and mildew and chimney smoke, the wicker porch swing on which someone had left a rain-bloated paperback copy of Daniel Deronda .
    And there was Mizzy, about to turn four.
    No one liked the word “precocious.” There was something doomy about it. But Mizzy, at four, had figured out how to read. He remembered every word he heard spoken in his presence and could, forever after, use the word in a sentence, often as not correctly.
    He was a serious and skeptical boy, prone to occasional fits of hilarity, though it was impossible to predict what might or might not strike him as funny. He was pretty, pretty enough, with a high pale forehead and liquid eyes and a precise, delicate mouth—it seemed at the time that he might grow up to be a beautiful princeling or, equally plausibly, a Ludwig of Bavaria, with a great dome of vein-mottled forehead and eyes too full of quivering sensitivity.
    And (thank God) he harbored childish affections and inclinations along with his spooky proclivities. He loved Pop Rocks and, with an unsettling devotion, the color blue. He was fascinated by Abraham Lincoln, who Mizzy understood to have been president but who he also insisted had possessed superhuman strength, and the ability to conjure full-grown trees out of barren ground.
    That night, in bed (the Taylors, it seemed, just assumed), Peter said to Rebecca, “This is so incredibly lovely.”
    “What?”
    “All of it. Every single person and object.”
    “It’s just my crazy family and my creaky old house.”
    She believed that. She wasn’t being coy.
    He said, “You have no idea . . .”
    “What?”
    “How normal most families are.”
    “Do you think my family is ab normal?”
    “No. ‘Normal’ isn’t the right word. Prosaic. Standard.”
    “I don’t think anyone is prosaic . I mean, some people are more eccentric than others.”
    Milwaukee, Rebecca. Order and sobriety and a devotion to cleanliness that scours out the soul. Decent people doing their best to live decent lives, there’s nothing really to hate them for, they do their jobs and maintain their property and love their children (most of the time); they take family vacations and visit relatives and decorate their houses for the holidays, collect some things and save up for other things; they’re good people (most of them, most of the time), but if you were me, if you were young Pete Harris, you felt the modesty of it eroding you, depopulating you, all those little satisfactions and no big, dangerous ones; no heroism, no genius, no terrible yearning for anything you can’t at least in theory actually have. If you were young lank-haired, pustule-plagued Pete Harris you felt like you were always about to expire from the safety of your life, its obdurate sensibleness, that Protestant love of the unexceptional; the eternal certainty of the faithful that flamboyance and the macabre are not just threatening but—worse—uninteresting.
    Is it any wonder Matthew got out of there two days after he graduated from high school, and had sex with half the men in New York?
    No, don’t do that, it’s poisonous, it’s wrong, Milwaukee did not kill your brother.
    Rebecca said, “If you grew up here, you’d probably feel a little less romantic about it all.”
    “Then I want to feel romantic about it all for as long as I can. Mizzy told me the story of Abraham Lincoln, before dinner.”
    “He tells everybody the story of Abraham Lincoln.”
    “Which he seems to have mixed up with Superman and Johnny Appleseed.”
    “I know. He has to make a lot of it up as he goes along. We’re all gone, and Mom is a little, I don’t know. Over it. She loves him to death. But she could barely manage the maternal bit the first