Daughters of the Revolution Read Online Free PDF Page A

she wraps a blue knit scarf around her shoulders. “My dark secret,” she says. “All my life I’ve been drawn to misogynist coots like you. Like a taste for black coffee—incredible when you think about it.” Even God is surprised that a free-spirited woman such as Mrs. Rebozos would so defiantly stand beside an old man, in his shadow, eat meat with him and be his prize!
    “I have to go,” he says into her ear. “You could stay all afternoon; you could have a bath.”
    “Just a quick shower,” she says. “I have a women’s thing. Last week, we inspected our cervixes. Mine looked like an eye. It
blinked.
”
    God tries to conceal his horror. At three, he descends, leaving Mrs. Rebozos to enjoy the rented room, whose extravagant price stabs him when he thinks of it. (In spite of the evidence, he imagines her as feminine, passive, mysterious and inert. Women in their beds, Rorschach blots on luminous sheets.)
    He advances through the lobby and rolls into the street like a well-oiled man on wheels. The atmosphere of hostility and depravity beyond the doors of the Parker House stings him like a slap. The street is filthy; even the city fathers are off their game, lax or stoned. Girls in paper dresses—temporary dresses for temporary girls—giggle at him. He’s harmless, they think, the last of a dying breed.
    God passes gently into a haze of mustard-purple-maroon and marijuana fumes. In spite of the expense of the hotel and the crudeness of the street, he feels deeply at home in this world. It is divided and antagonistic, filled with human hatreds bred by race, religion and economics; he loves it anyway.
    He turns a corner and nearly collides with a regiment of fife and drummers near the Old City Hall. A young man leads it, his fuzzy black Afro powdered white. God stops to watch. What history is being revised or protested on the plaza? Could it be Crispus Attucks, the first man to die in the Boston Massacre of 1770, or one of the famous Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment authorized by President Lincoln in 1863 to fight for the side of the Union? But no, impossible: A bevy of females masses together in the rear of this regiment, backing up the black man like Motown floozies. They whistle shrilly into tin piccolos and drown out the drums. A fantasy history! Who made it up, and why?
    The regiment plays “Dying Redcoat” and “Poor Old Tory.” A few rheumy veterans with tears in their eyes clasp Red Sox caps to their breasts; God also trembles to the revolutionary music. He has been something of a radical himself, the first Head to find promising colored boys in Roxbury, take them to the Goode School, wake them up and arm them against poverty, drugs and crime with Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare. Integrationwas
his
cause, his triumph! Now the trustees (Mrs. Rebozos most vocally among them) want to bring girls in.
    “Over my dead body,” he’d said.
    Aileen Rebozos, gamine as she appears, is quite a formidable figure. The first night, he took her to a steak house on the highway, a bit of cowardice he’d assumed he could get away with, as there seemed no question of the thing going anywhere.
    “Finish your peas,” he reminded her when she lit a cigarette in the middle of dinner; in reply, she poured her drink over his head. God chuckles, recalling aspects of her character that charm him—her direct speech and musculature, her randy infidelity. She and God are foot soldiers, she has informed him, in the sexual revolution. Together with her husband, Viktor, who is for some reason a source of embarrassment, Mrs. Rebozos contributed fifty thousand dollars to save the Goode School from financial exigency, which, Mr. Rebozos lugubriously explained to God, was a form of disease.
    “Goode
will
coeducate, just as it has begun to integrate,” Mrs. Rebozos pronounced at the last annual meeting. “We will not take no for an answer!”
    God had chuckled.
Over my dead body
. Perfectly serious, fair