Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman Read Free Book Online Page B

Not that I minded. I had nothing to hide from her, and a woman who doesn’t snoop after her man is either highly moral or doesn’t care enough. Eudora Anne Chambers, née Morton, was not highly moral. Most probably she was leaning back in my leather chair with my photograph box open on her lap, sorting through pictures from before I met her. She did that a great deal. She was especially fond of pictures of my mother, whom she only knew through photographs.
    My mother was uncommonly photogenic. Portraits from around the turn of the century usually made people come off stiff and dolllike because they had to hold their expression so long. Not so with Mother. She gave herself to the lens as if she knew she wouldn’t last, and so entrusted it with a disproportionate share of her being. She stares back from photographs as though trapped alive in them. The most striking one shows her in Atlanta just before she came to Chicago with the touring company; she was playing the title role in a translation of Racine’s Phaedra , looking very much the vengeful seductress with her high cheekbones and penetrating eyes. They were the eyes of a thirty-year-old. She was eighteen.
    Piecing together things my father had said in front of me while booze loosened his tongue, I believe my maternal grandfather had taken liberties with her for quite some time. It was these liberties, I believe, which had provoked her to run away from Whitbrow to Atlanta at fifteen, where she found work first in vaudeville and then with a Shakespeare troupe. A discreet but inept medical procedure during her Atlanta years had likely been responsible for her later difficulty carrying children. In one photograph of her holding me in a lacy toddler’s gown, her face bears an expression that most would take to be ecstatic distraction, but which I think may have been bewilderment.
    There were a lot of pictures in that box that Eudora enjoyed mooning over. She liked my school pictures. In one of them, Dan Metzger, John Giangrande and I were posing on the basketball court at St. Ignatius. Dan was too husky for basketball and got dropped from the team shortly after, but in that photograph he looked as proud as he could be.
    Dan was one of the friendliest and sweetest guys I ever knew. He was always half a head taller than the other kids and naturally built to carry weight, but he was soft. The meaner kids knew it and, when they could catch him alone, circled him like wolves around a bison. This never lasted too long before his friends came to help him and it turned into a proper tussle. If it was at school, Father Patterson would come out with two yardsticks taped together and scatter us. Following a general round of spankings (Father Patterson favored the backs of the thighs), it was even money whether his tormenters would get lectured for bullying, Dan would get lectured for not standing up for himself, or I would get lectured for my “flawed moral silhouette.” For a Jesuit, Father Patterson was remarkably inconsistent; I think he believed Jesus was happy as long as everyone was beaten and anyone at all was rebuked.
    When the war broke out, Dan and I signed up for the Illinois National Guard together, along with our mutual buddy from St. Ignatius, John Giangrande, whom the Poles, Irish and well-bred Anglo-Saxons of St. Ignatius had christened “Guinea-Granny” because of his name and the tiny, wire-framed glasses that were always slipping down his nose. We all had glasses, but his looked like an old lady’s, and he was unmistakably Italian, so the name stuck for good. His friends respectfully dropped the “Guinea” part, but there was no shaking “Granny.” He was two years older than us, but small and weak. He hung out with us gladly, having been socially rejected by his peers. Uncle Sam didn’t reject him, though. When the army found out how good Granny was at chemistry, they yanked him out of the 33rd Prairie and shipped him off to the 1st Gas battalion at the