Harriet Doerr by The Tiger in the Grass Read Free Book Online Page A

down the slopes to arrive at last at her own house, where her mother is saying, “What a miracle!” And her father, “Now we’ll have chiles. Now we’ll have corn.” He will buy her an ice cream stick to eat standing in her wet blue shoes.

2
    Sun, Pure Air, and a View

    One summer, a few years ago, a widow named Morgan Sloane, barely past forty, mother of two, came to live among a dozen exiles in the Mexican town of Santa Felicia. The hill where the foreigners lived with their bridge tables, vegetable rows, and wide green view bordered the southern edge of town. An overgrown strip of park and a zoo of fifteen cages divided the slope from the houses of the poor, who crowded together on the outskirts of the city. On clear evenings, jukebox music and an occasional lion’s roar rose on the still air and reached the expatriates’ open windows.
    The first time Morgan heard a lion, she asked Carlos about it.
    “Where is that animal?”
    “In the zoological garden,” he said. “There are monkeys there also, and macaws. You will hear them all.”
    Carlos was the mozo who came with the house. He polished the floors, watered the roses and the limes, drove the car, and, when there were guests, put on a white jacket and served vodka and cuba libres. The moment he was out of the room, some woman would say, “So handsome,” and another, “Those eyes.”
    Morgan spoke to him in abbreviated sentences of the Castilian Spanish she remembered from a summer in Seville twenty-two years ago.
    “How many houses are there on the hill?” she asked soon after her arrival, and Carlos said, “Eight. They are owned four by North Americans, two by English, one by a French, and one by Danes.”
    “Why have these people come here?”
    “Consider this, señora,” Carlos said, and from the edge of the terrace where they stood, he embraced the landscape, drawing to him the municipality of Santa Felicia, the presidencia, the cathedral, and the zoo, as well as all the plowed and wooded world beyond. “Consider the sun, the pure air, and the view. Consider the tranquillity. These people have abandoned their other lives. Now they have this.” He lifted his hand toward scenery in general.
    Morgan listened while Carlos, in these words, described flight.
    Like the other dwellers on the hill, Morgan, too, had fled. She had taken flight from the sheer weight of the events of the past year. These included a loss of patience with infidelities, a legal separation from her husband, and her widowhood a few months later, when, stricken without warning, he died.
    “Your husband has given you this house,” Carlos remarked on the day of her arrival, and she said, “Yes,” without adding that this husband, or former husband, Ned, had left her everything he had. Whether by intention or by mistake, believing he had half a lifetime left to change his will, she might never know.
    “And you will live here alone,” said Carlos, “until your family comes to visit you.”
    Morgan said nothing. She chose not to mention her daughter or her son, children who still existed, but somewhere out of sight, lost at the center of their teeming causes, inhabiting communes, organizing marches, tossing away their pasts.
    On her first night in Ned’s Mexican house, Morgan shivered for an hour between sheets that had been folded damp, and wondered whose side of the bed this was, Ned’s or a woman’s. Awake in the white room, she had heard the rain stop and had walked barefoot to the window to push it open. A gust of wind blew in the smell of drenched earth and a shower of scattered drops. Below her, at the foot of the hill, lights glimmered. There was Santa Felicia, most of its citizens asleep at home, the rest huddled in portals to keep dry, wearing newspapers for capes and paper bags for hats.
    Morgan turned back to her wide bed. Behind it hung a long red tapestry, and now, for the first time, she noticed the head-board. It was made of heavy pine, stained dark. Across