Mortals by Norman Rush Read Free Book Online Page B

about why we’re so attracted to each other …”
    “Yes, the nonphysical reasons, if we could think of any. Yes indeed.”
    “Don’t be so mocking. Anyway I realized something about you. This isn’t exactly nonphysical but I bet it had something to do with how I felt. What I realized is that you look like the actor who played Woodrow Wilson in that biographical movie they made about his life and I realize I have just uttered a redundancy, so don’t bother. But that was absolutely one of my favorite movies of all time. I saw it in high school and I thought it was wonderful. Woodrow Wilson, or the actor, rather, was extremelyhandsome in case you don’t know. The same actor played Wilson young and then older. I’m comparing you to the younger Wilson. Can that movie be as good as I remember?”
    “I never saw it, but this is horrible news, isn’t it? You went for me because I reminded you of an authority figure you really loved? And I look like
Woodrow Wilson
? Didn’t he look like a bank president or a leading Presbyterian, something like that? I believe he looked very boring. Also wasn’t he a great failure, by any standard? War to end war and the League of Nations and all that? I’m not crazy about these associations, frankly.”
    “He was one of the four great presidents. He tried.”
    “Oh God and also in the end didn’t he turn into a vegetable and his wife was discovered to be running everything? I
hate
these associations.”
    “Well, I can’t help it. I think it was one of the first big Technicolor movies. That can’t be right. I think it wasn’t a recent movie when I saw it. We saw it for social studies. Well. Sorry I brought it up.”
    “I’m glad to know about this. And I have to report that I haven’t thought of anything other than your supernal beauty that originally knocked me out about you. I’m still trying. Something will come.”
    “I don’t want to hear about my beauty as an explanation for everything.” She spoke seriously, but was half smiling.
    “I know, I know. You forgot to say my
supposed
beauty, the way you usually do, by the way. Okay, no more.”
    “You know we have this difficulty,” she said, still smiling.
    “We do. I look like a movie star and you don’t and never did. Okay. That’s all on this subject. I’m sorry.”
    They sighed heavily in unison, and with the same impulse, they joined in pulling the sheet up to their shoulders.
    Ray began again. “We were living in North Oakland and my father wanted to move the family to Piedmont so he could be nearer his store. Where we were was still very white middle class but the writing was on the wall. Blacks were well established on the east side of East Fourteenth Street by then and a certain amount of panic selling was under way in the better neighborhoods. Probably he was just being prudent in wanting to move, but there was a problem. My mother was tepid to lukewarm about moving but Rex was absolutely determined against it, so when she saw how upset the idea made Rex she turned against it in solidarity with him, still wishywashily, though. My position was that I was happy to move.
    “Our house on Kingsland was really a peach. A building contractor had built it for himself, so it was only the best. It was a big mock Tudor,parquet hardwood floors upstairs and downstairs, hilltop site. The house was on a very sizable triangular lot surrounded by a retaining wall. This was late fifties. Rex was in junior high and I was in high school. The house sat up very high and you looked east at Skyline Drive and then the hills that hadn’t been built on yet. There was a lot of open space in reach and a few vacant lots right in the neighborhood where kids could build forts and play nasty if they so chose.”
    “What about friends, did you both have friends around there?”
    “Rex did. My social life was based around school by that time. But yes, in fact he had a particular friend, as it developed. His friend Michael. He did not