A Good House Read Online Free PDF Page A

no-longer-favourite baby doll and an animal act, not just dogs leaping high through hoops but two miraculous cats, mother and daughter, who could walk around on their hind legs for a long time and another equally miraculous tabby who could almost talk, who could almost say mine and never.
    One of Paul’s friends practised short riffs on a bugle which belonged to his older sister who marched in the high school bugle band and another boy learned to do a half-decent roll on an ancient snare drum loaned to him by his neighbour, an old, old man no one had ever imagined beating a drum.
    Murray selected the acrobats, the girls who cartwheeled every spring day across front lawns on the way home from school. He deferred to their wishes when it came time to pick the handlers, the boys who would lift and throw them up to each other’s shoulders and try to catch them, to protect them from injury when they fell.
    Charles Taylor, Charles the First, they called him, came every night, dressed up in his shirt and tie and, hanging from his neck on a braided cord, his silver safety whistle, his signal. Everyone was familiar with the sound of the whistle because Charles blew it when he thought he was lost and when he didn’t like the look of the dog that was following him and once, very loudly, when he tripped running across the train tracks and hurt his back. Charles stood off to the side and watched with devout attention as the girls practised their routines and the kids made him help sometimes, but not with saving the girls.
    A trapeze was suspended from one of the girders under the water tower. Murray bought the rope and the pipe new at the hardware, to be safe, to be sure, and then he had to ask to borrow the town’s extension ladder, and when he did Archie Stutt said he’d better climb up there himself. He refused to climb as high as some of the kids, the boys in particular, wanted, telling them as they steadied his ladder that they’d be smart to get themselves into the habit of thinking twice. The next day one of the boys discovered a length of braided steel for the high wire, in the back of one of the town trucks, and so Archie hauled his ladder out again and tied one end of the wire to another girder and the other end to a foothold on a telephone pole on the street. It was eight feet off the ground and it sloped, slightly, but Archie said that was all right, high wires could slope.
    Below these main aerial attractions Murray called for mattresses which were volunteered by their owners and pulled from beds and carried back and forth daily through the streets. Patrick had stepped forward to take charge of the mattresses and he made sure they were returned every night after practice to the right beds and then set them up again the next time, organizing his friends who were the oldest, sturdiest boys because it took at least two of them to keep each mattress from dragging itself to shreds on the sidewalks.
    During practices, while the girls perfected their acts, each time pushing themselves and each other further, harder, Patrick and the other boys stood at a slight distance with their arms folded, trying to keep their eyes on the mattresses in case some moron shoved one of them out of position by mistake.
    Daphne was the youngest of the girls chosen for the trapeze and the high-wire act. She was chosen because she was slight and fearless and because her natural expression was an open smile. Showmanship, Murray called it. He said it was more important than anything else and he told the older girls to watch Daphne smile, to do it that way. Daphne had known she would be picked even before Murray gave her the nod because at twelve she already knew quite a bit about showmanship and its rewards. Like many happy girls, she had long since learned that a laugh or a smile paid off.
    Paul was a clown, he asked to be, and he volunteered to stand on the stump beside the telephone pole on the street to take the money when