Big Silence Read Online Free PDF

looking at Abe who sipped more coffee and knew that all chances of a movie were gone.
    “I cheated on him,” Lisa replied.
    Abe put down his cup and stared at his daughter, who met his eyes for an instant and then looked down into the dark liquid she hadn’t tasted.
    It was Lisa’s second marriage. Her first husband, Todd, the father of Melisa and Barry, had remarried an older colleague at Northwestern University, where Todd Creswell taught classics and had the annoying habit of quoting morbid passages from Greek tragedies.
    Now Marvin Alexander. The man was nearly perfect. An M.D., internationally respected pathologist, forty-nine. He had taught at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and spoke nearly perfect Hebrew. Lisa was a biochemist who had left her husband with her children and later left her children with Abe and Bess and moved to California to “put her life together.” Imagination had never been Lisa’s strength. She had always been an outstanding scholar, a serious child and woman.
    Todd had not been Jewish. Abe and Bess could live with that. He was, as far as they could tell, a good husband, a good father.
    Marvin Alexander was an African American, which bothered Bess and Abe only insofar as knowing that if Lisa had another child he or she might be black and have to face the trials of growing up black in America. Both Abe and Bess liked Marvin and, frankly, in bed in the dark, on more than one occasion, they wondered what Dr. Marvin Alexander had seen in their daughter that made him decide she would be a good wife. Her history so far had indicated otherwise, and Marvin Alexander had seemed to them smart enough to see that.
    “Cheated?” Bess repeated, looking at Abe for help that he was not yet ready to give. He was a cop. He believed in letting witnesses or suspects talk themselves out before he started asking questions.
    “An intern at the hospital where Marvin works,” she said. “Where I work. I didn’t know … Morris is so young. I just …”
    “How young is this Morris?” asked Bess.
    “Twenty-five.”
    “He’s Jewish?”
    “Yes.”
    “Married?”
    “No.”
    “How many times did you …?” Bess asked.
    “Never,” said Lisa. “Close, but never. Marvin found out. Does it matter how many times?”
    Bess looked at Abe. It clearly didn’t matter to him.
    “Marvin’s a good man,” said Lisa. “I can be difficult. You know that. He knew that.”
    “There’s difficult and there’s … never mind,” Bess said. “Go on.”
    “I don’t want to live with Morris. He doesn’t want to live with me. I don’t want to marry him. I want Marvin to forgive me, to take me back.”
    “Did he hit you when he found out?” Bess asked, trying to keep her voice from cracking.
    “Marvin? He’d never hurt me. I hurt him. This is the kind of person you’ve helped turn me into.”
    The last was directed at Abe. He hoped he was not about to hear the list of charges against him once again. Lisa had the memory of an advanced computer and every error, every missed conference, every intended comic remark to a date, every absence because of a homicide, every … well, Lisa’s failures were primarily the fault of Abraham Lieberman. He had come, in fact, to believe that she was probably right though there had to have been some point many years ago when Lisa should have taken responsibility for her own life.
    “As I recall from reading the Bible in the bathtub, God even forgave Cain for killing Abel,” Lieberman said.
    “There is no God,” Lisa said wearily. She had first said it when she was eleven. She had gone on saying it. Lieberman was not sure she was wrong though he was now, largely to please his wife but partly because it gave him some peace of mind, an active member of Temple Mir Shavot on Dempster Street who spent much of his nonworking time considering the question of God’s existence or nonexistence and the meaning of whether He existed or did not exist.
    “You want Marvin to take you