Snow White Read Free Page A

about my blood. It is blue,
     the bluest this fading world has known probably. At times I startle myself with a
     gesture so royal, so full of light, that I wonder where it comes from. It comes from
     my father, Paul XVII, a most kingly man and personage. Even though his sole accomplishment
     during his long lack of reign was the de-deification of his own person. He fluttered
     the dovecotes with that gesture, when he presented himself as mortal and just like
     everybody else. A lot of people were surprised. But the one thing they could not take
     away from him, there in that hall bedroom in Montreaux, was his blood. And the other
     thing they could not take away from him was his airs and graces, which I have inherited,
     to a sickening degree. Even at fifty-five he was still putting cologne in his shoes.
     But I am more experimental than he was, and at the same time, more withdrawn. The
     height of his ambition was to tumble the odd chambermaid now and then, whereas I have
     loftier ambitions, only I don’t know what they are, exactly. Probably I should go
     out and effect a liaison with some beauty who needs me, and save her, and ride away
     with her flung over the pommel of my palfrey, I believe I have that right.But on the other hand, this duck-with-blue-cheese sandwich that I am eating is mighty
     attractive and absorbing, too. He was peculiar, my father. That much can safely be
     said. He knew some things that other men do not know. He heard the swans singing just
     before death, and the bees barking in the night. That is what he said, but I didn’t
     believe him, then. Now, I don’t know.”
    HENRY was noting his weaknesses on a pad. Process comparable to searching a dog’s
     underbelly for fleas. The weaknesses pinched out of the soul’s ecstasy one by one.
     Of course “ecstasy” is being used here in a very special sense, as misery, something
     that would be in German one of three aspects of something called the Lumpwelt in some such sentence as, “The Inmitten -ness of the Lumpwelt is a turning toward misery.” So that what is meant here by ecstasy is something on
     the order of “fit,” but a kind of slow one, perhaps a semi-arrested one, and one that
     is divisible by three. “Should I go to Acadia and remove my parents from there? From
     that parking place where they have been parked since 1936? It is true that they are
     well connected to the ground now, with gas and water lines and geraniums. The uprooting
     would be considerable. The fear of the father’s frown. That deters me. He is happy
     there, as far as I know; still I have this feeling that he ought to be rescued. From
     that natural beauty.” Then Dan came in. “Dan, what is an interrupted screw?” Henry
     asked. “An interrupted screw,” Dan said, “is a screw with a discontinuous helix, as
     in a cannon breech, formed by cutting away part or parts of the thread, and sometimes
     part of the shaft. Used with a lock nut having corresponding male sections.” “This
     filthy,”Henry said, “this language thinking and stinking everlastingly of sex, screw, breech,
     ‘part,’ shaft, nut, male, it is no wonder we are all going round the bend with this
     language dinning forever into our eyes and ears . . .” “I am not going round the bed,”
     Dan said, “not me.” “Round the bend ,” Henry said, “the bend not the bed, how is it that I said ‘bend’ and you heard ‘bed,’
     you see what I mean, it’s inescapable.” “You live in a world of your own Henry.” “I
     can certainly improve on what was given,” Henry said.
    “THOSE men      hulking   hulk in closets and outside      gestures eventuating against
     a white screen difficulties      intelligence      I only wanted one plain hero of
     incredible size and soft, flexible manners      parts      thought      dissembling
          limb      add up the thumbprints on my shoulders      Seven is too