A Good House Read Online Free PDF Page B

homburg which had belonged to his grandfather, a man he had never met. He draped his father’s white, monogrammed, silk scarf around his neck and to finish it off, to bring attention to his hands, he wore a pair of his mother’s white cotton wrist gloves, which he had found beside the Bible in the drawer in the front-hall table and tried on without her permission, a trick that was both out of character and effective because once he’d tried them on the gloves were forever useless to Mrs. McFarlane.
    He welcomed the crowd using elaborate circus language. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Feast your eyes.…” he said. “Ask yourselves if you have ever seen.…” He praised each act as he introduced it, indicated with a broad sweep of the cape where the crowd’s attention should direct itself. He gestured dramatically with the baton that had been loaned to him by a retired drum majorette who was new in town and who worked in the Bank of Commerce. She had pushed it through her teller’s window after she’d changed his bills to coins, asking him only to promise her he would be careful with it.
    They were good. Nearly all of them were very good. People applauded generously, laughed in appreciation for the obvious effort behind the performances. Archie’s ropes and cables held fast and the girls’ tarted-up costumes looked almost professional under the Christmas lights. The dogs and the cats seemed oblivious to the crowd, did what they knew they had to do to earn their treats out behind the tent. The smell of onions frying in butter prompted people who were not even slightly hungry to fork out an exorbitant fifty cents for a hot dog and someone put a baby in Paul’s arms for a picture. The baby stared up into his white clown face and oversized red lips calmly, as if these were just one more thing to learn.
    When Daphne fell near the end of her thoroughly practised trapeze routine, the mattresses, although laid down just as Patrick had ordered them laid down, were not enough. People who’d had experience in such things immediately agreed that the loud cracking break in Daphne’s right forearm would mend, kids broke their arms regularly, but the break in her jaw looked like it might turn out to be a dog’s breakfast.
    Sylvia Chambers had just finished telling Margaret Kemp about her new sewing machine. Watching her daughter drop and then seeing her hand go to her face soon after she’d landed, she said aloud, “Oh, Daphne. Oh, honey.” And looking quickly up at the trapeze, which was still swinging in the twisted air, still moving with the last of Daphne’s tricks, she thought, Why does it have to be us?
    Bill Chambers was standing over near the Rotary grills, talking to some of the other men. He had watched the first part of Daphne’s performance but then someone said his name and he’d looked away. He didn’t see her fall. After the guy beside him pulled roughly on his arm to turn him around again he thought only to move forward, to push his way forward, and kneel to hold his daughter gently under the shoulders. Holding her he told her to go ahead and yell if she had to. “Let it out,” he whispered. “There’s no need to be brave.” The skin at her wrist had been pierced by a small nub of bloody bone and he recognized the break for what it was, knew that it could be set and that it would in time heal. But her mouth and inside her mouth. The skin covering her jaw was firm, unbroken, but the bones under it had been knocked out of alignment. The bones were completely askew. He had to steel himself, counsel himself not to look away.
    He was leaning over, watching her face, waiting, as if the next move was up to her, and Daphne did make a sound but when it came into the air it was not the sound she had sent from her throat. She could see as soon as she heard it that she had terrified her father. He hadn’t