The Hours by Michael Cunningham Read Free Book Online Page A

from behind the wheel.
    ‘‘Well,’’ she says, after the car has disappeared. Her son watches her adoringly, expectantly. She is the animating principle, the life of the house. Its rooms are sometimes larger than they should be; they sometimes, suddenly, contain things he’s never seen before. He watches her, and waits.
    ‘‘Well, now,’’ she says.
    Here, then, is the daily transition. With her husband present, she is more nervous but less afraid. She knows how to act. Alone with Richie, she sometimes feels unmoored—he is so entirely, persuasively himself. He wants what he wants so avidly. He cries mysteriously, makes indecipherable demands, courts her, pleads with her, ignores her. He seems, almost always, to be waiting to see what she will do next. She knows, or at least suspects, that other mothers of small children must maintain a body of rules and, more to the point, an ongoing mother-self to guide them in negotiating the days spent alone with a child. When her husband is here, she can manage it. She can see him seeing her, and she knows almost instinctively how to treat the boy firmly and kindly, with an affectionate maternal off handedness that seems effortless. Alone with the child, though, she loses direction. She can’t always remember how a mother would act.
    4 7
    ‘‘Yo u need to finish your breakfast,’’ she says to him.
    ‘‘Okay,’’ he says.
    They return to the kitchen. Her husband has washed his coffee cup, dried it, put it away. The boy sets about eating with a certain tractorish steadiness that has more to do with obedience than appetite. Laura pours herself a fresh cup of coffee, sits at the table. She lights a cigarette.
    . . . the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
    She exhales a rich gray plume of smoke. She is so tired. She was up until after two, reading. She touches her belly—is it bad for the new baby, her getting so little sleep? She hasn’t asked the doctor about it; she’s afraid he’ll tell her to stop reading altogether. She promises that tonight she’ll read less. She’ll go to sleep by midnight, at the latest.
    She says to Richie, ‘‘Guess what we’re going to do today? We’re going to make a cake for your father’s birthday. Oh, what a big job we have ahead of us.’’
    He nods gravely, judiciously. He seems unconvinced about something.
    She says, ‘‘We’re going to make him the best cake he’s ever seen. The very best. Don’t you think that’s a good idea?’’
    Again, Richie nods. He waits to see what will happen next.
    Laura watches him through the meandering vine of cigarette smoke. She will not go upstairs, and return to her book. She will remain. She will do all that’s required, and more.
    4 8
    Mr s . Dall ow ay
    C lariss a carries her armload of flowers out into Spring Street. She imagines Barbara still in the cool dimness on the far side of the door, continuing to live in what Clarissa can’t help thinking of now as the past (it has to do, somehow, with Barbara’s sorrow, and the racks of ribbons on the back wall) while she herself walks into the present, all this: the Chinese boy careening by on a bicycle; the number 281 written in gold on dark glass; the scattering of pigeons with feet the color of pencil erasers (a bird had flown in through the open window of her fourth-grade classroom, violent, dreadful); Spring Street; and here she is with a huge bouquet of flowers. She will stop by Richard’s apartment to see how he’s doing (it’s useless to call, he never answers), but first she goes and stands shyly, expectantly, not too close to the trailer from which the famous head emerged. A small crowd is gathered there, mostly tourists, and
    4 9
    Clariss a positions herself beside two young girls, one with hair dyed canary yellow and the other with hair dyed platinum. Clarissa wonders if they intended to so strongly suggest the sun