Oswald's Tale by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online Page A

She doesn’t know if this was true, but that’s how she felt. If she came home late at night, her stepfather would lock her out. He grieved over her mother so much, however, that Marina doesn’t think her stepfather was really a mean person. She looks at him differently today. “Now that I’m fifty-two, I walk in my mother’s shoes. After my mother died, it haunted me. That remark I made to her in the hospital. She was always lovey-dovey with my stepfather, and I was jealous.” She had overheard too many intimacies between her stepfather and her mother. When she would hear the bedsprings squeak, she would put pillows over her head. She couldn’t think of her mother as a woman until she had her own children. Until then, she didn’t think women were supposed to have such needs. It was such innocence. How could her mother allow that to happen when other people were present in a room, even though the room was dark? Marina wasn’t embarrassed for herself; it was that her grandmother was sleeping there, and Marina had to think, “What if she heard?” Since they all lived in one room, Marina thought it was awful, and she was embarrassed for her mother. Just like dogs; couldn’t wait. It wasn’t that frequent, but . . .
    In later years, when her mother was sick, she could overhear her stepfather’s mother, Yevdokia, saying, “Why did you have to marry that woman? You could have got a healthy woman. Why do you bother to cater to this one?” And all the while Marina was thinking that if her mother had married Alexander in order to give her child a name, she had not succeeded so well. She was still Marina Prusakova. Alexander had never adopted her. That was another blow.
    After her mother died, she had nobody to come home to. She might be free, but she felt like a slave. She didn’t know what to do with freedom.
    She had a neighbor, a girlfriend who had a bad reputation, and Marina knew it. She liked this girl anyway. Her name was Irina, and she had an illegitimate daughter and worked to support her child. Irina’s man had not wanted to marry her. He had said he wasn’t sure the child was his. Irina was a young girl and she had given him all her heart, so when this man saw that Irina’s baby daughter did look exactly like him, he changed his mind and was ready for marriage, but Irina said, “No thanks. Not after I went through all that embarrassment.” So when everybody told Marina, “Don’t talk to this girl, she’s no good,” she and Irina would meet anyway, not in their neighborhood, but away, and they would talk. She found out about another side of Irina, who said, “Yes, I work from nine to five, but at night I dress up and sleep with men. They are doctors and lawyers, and they pay. I slice myself up for the whole world because that’s how I can get what is best for my daughter, I love her that much.” And Marina thought to herself, “A dedicated mother.” She was almost seventeen then, and Klavdia had died a year ago.
    Now, it was April, two months away from the White Nights, when even at midnight it is still close to twilight, and Marina came back from an outing with other kids on the outskirts of the city. A telegram was there; her grandmother’s funeral was taking place, and Marina didn’t have money to buy a ticket to go to Minsk for her burial. That was a stab to her heart. Everything she loved was gone with Klavdia and now, a year later, it was gone again with her grandmother, and she thought about Irina, who sacrificed her reputation for her daughter’s sake.
    One time when she was out with Irina, it was late. Marina knew that Alexander would lock her out if she was not home by eleven, but Irina said, “I met some guys who just came in from Vitebsk, a soccer team. They brought some fresh fruit. Let’s go there and have a drink.” Marina said she’d have no place to sleep because her door would be locked, but one of the soccer people overheard, and told her, “We have a room, everything