Ten Days in the Hills by Jane Smiley Read Free Book Online Page B

Hare, and he was all over the picture, even though the ‘you’ in the title was supposedly my father, who was overseas. Anyway, at one point, Joseph Cotten gives Claudette Colbert a bigger-than-life-size picture of herself as a naval recruiting poster. She’s in a short-short skirt and high heels, no stockings, and she’s leaning forward. Her derriere is out to here, and a little skirt is fluttering around it, and she has a mysterious smile on her face, luring young men into the navy. Claudette Colbert is, of course, a little scandalized when Joseph Cotten gives her this picture, and they hang the picture somewhere out of the way, but not before the camera gets a good full-frontal look at it.” Max and Stoney chuckled.
    “Except that we had that picture in my mother’s room for years, the very same picture that Morton Hare painted. Only it was a nude.”
    Everyone laughed except Isabel, who produced an authentically shocked look. She was a handsome girl, Elena thought, so similar to Max.
    “Of course, in the movie, they are very careful to establish that Claudette Colbert only has eyes for my father. I had realized which one was my father by that time, of course.” She jutted her jaw saucily at Delphine. “But Joseph Cotten only has eyes for my mother. He keeps turning up and giving us things.”
    “He was sinister onscreen,” said Max. “Effortlessly sinister.”
    “What made me cry was the dog. It was my dog! He was an English bulldog, and I suddenly remembered that at some point they took him away, and then at some point they brought him back. In the movie he does exactly the same thing as he did around the house—nothing. But there are lots of shots of him doing it. It’s a very slow movie. Delphine and I had to stop watching at the intermission.”
    “Well,” said Max, “it was basically propaganda. People were in the mood for it at the time. It was nominated for a lot of Oscars. I don’t remember how many it won.”
    “I think I ended Shirley Temple’s career. The better job she did acting, the more accurate and convincing her portrayal of me, the more unappealing she was onscreen. But it was fun for us. My mother wrote a few more movies about the war, I rode ponies and horses, my sister became a specialist in international law and later met Shirley Temple at diplomatic functions, Selznick married Jennifer Jones, Jennifer Jones got rid of that strange young man, Morton Hare got a wife of his own in Europe, and the Allies won the war in part thanks to all the good-will trips Shirley Temple had to do.”
    “More pancakes?” said Delphine.
    Isabel gave her grandmother a kiss on the cheek. Delphine said, “Did you eat, Isabel?”
    “I ate some of the cantaloupe, an orange, two slices of whole-wheat toast, and a piece of pineapple.”
    Delphine said, “Isabel is a vegetarian.”
    “Vegan.”
    Everyone looked her up and down.
    Delphine said—fondly, Elena thought—“When Isabel was five years old, she came through the kitchen while I was fixing a chicken and she said, ‘
God,
what’s
that
?,’ and I said, ‘It’s a chicken,’ thinking that she had eaten plenty of chicken, but she looked at that chicken, and that was that. No chicken ever again.”
    “I am an overtly self-righteous vegan,” said Isabel. “My position is the moral-high-ground position.”
    “Except around me,” said Delphine, “because I know that all this started not because you knew anything about agribusiness, but because you couldn’t stand the sight of an undressed chicken.”
    “It had feet on it. And a neck.”
    “It was a good chicken. And it tasted good, too.”
    “I’m sure of that,” said Max.
    “Anyway,” said Isabel, lifting her chin, “Mom left me a message that she and Paul have decided to go wait out the war at some Buddhist monastery up north, and they are leaving today, and so they are stopping by on their way out of town.”
    “Do you think they’ve eaten?” said Elena.
    “I’m sure they