Daybreak Read Free Page B

described as a very small city, halfway between the Mississippi and the Atlantic. It is southern, its winters chilly but short, so that daffodils come to life in February. There is an impressive avenue through its heart; at intervals this avenue interrupts itself by turning a circle, at the center of which there stands a statue of some Confederate statesman, most often on horseback. Fine brick houses face each other across this avenue; as you travel farther out toward the country, toward the hills, the avenue becomes a suburban road, and the houses surround themselves with lawns and grand old trees, redbud, beech, and oak.
    “You must treasure this place,” said Laura’s good aunts who had reared her since she was three years old. “It was built just after the War, in 1870. When you are older, you will appreciate it even more. Solid brick it is, no fake brick facing. Solid as a rock. The slate roof alone would cost a fortune these days.”
    Memory goes back to the age of three, so it is said,and indeed it was where Laura’s began. Even without understanding them, she had accepted the facts that her father had gone to Heaven from a place called Korea, and her mother had gone to Heaven from the hospital, that large white building downtown near the store where aunts Cecile and Lillian, after a visit to the hospital with Laura, had taken her to buy a large blond doll in a carriage with a pink blanket. And after that, they had brought her back to the family house where they themselves had been born in the wide mahogany bed now occupied by Laura and her husband, Homer, known by all as Bud.
    Bud Rice, the respectable and respected, prosperous and generous, proud father of sons, dependable, honest, and—
    And what? What other word? Uncomprehending, maybe?
    For there were things that he never understood, that after nineteen years of marriage, she knew he never would understand. The way she cringes when he reprimands a clumsy waiter in a restaurant. (“But I am paying for service,” he says, which is true enough.) The way he laughs with relish at cruel racial jokes. Even the way, when music lingers after it has ceased, he cuts into the lovely silence.
    Uncomprehending … And yet she wants to love him. She has always loved somebody, aunts, friends, teachers, and now her children. Yes, she wants to love her husband, and yet does not.
    At the tall narrow windows now she parted the lace curtains and looked out. The heat was heavy, the afternoon asleep under a clouded molasses-colored sky. Soon it would thunder and rain would pour. Horses and cattle in the field can sense the oncoming storm,but the human being too is restless, so she thought, and releasing the curtain, turned back toward the quiet house.
    Almost without aim, she wandered into the library; the “British” library, furnished in dark oak, was the inspiration of a grandmother become an Anglophile after a trip to England long years ago. Its creamy plaster walls were embossed with scattered flowers: the rose for England and the thistle for Scotland. Under the diamond-paned Elizabethan windows stood the piano, a medium-sized grand. This was Laura’s own. It was here that she gave lessons. Music ready for the afternoon’s pupil was already open on the rack. The books belonged to her and to their son Tom, there being no other readers in the family. The photographs that were on the shelves and tables belonged to them all.
    Here was her father, a young major in his cap with a sweep of hair just barely visible. “The hair of the black Irish,” Aunt Lillian said. Her mother’s thin face, tense and witty, regarded him from the other half of the double leather frame. There were the formal photographs of Laura and Bud together, taken last Christmas as a present for the family. Still fair-haired, she was not one pound heavier than she had been as a twenty-year-old bride. But Bud’s thick fair hair, receding, had heightened a high forehead, and he had gained through the