Daughters of the Revolution Read Online Free PDF Page B

restaurant, the skeleton of an old warehouse beckons feebly, bricks and broken windows that God recalls from his youth, the dying days of his grandfather’s factory—Byrd Brothers India Rubber. An out-of-date sign on the brick offers the building FOR SALE OR LEASE .
    A Chinese woman shows God to a table, where the menu appears under glass. At the adjacent table, four public high school students eat fried egg rolls and play a game of questions. “Ever lose more than fifty dollars on a bet?” “Ever have sex while unconscious?” “Why did thirteen women willingly open their doors to the Boston Strangler?” “Ever been pushed down a flight of stairs by a family member?”
    He asks for a bowl of rice. The warm, glutinous graintogether with the chopsticks on the table and the polite offer of the necessary spoon all remind him that he is part of history. He helped to liberate Shanghai!
    The revolutionists want to revise history, judge the past by the gleaming standards of the present and kill off old men, men like God. Then the new era will roll out, democratic and diverse. His body buzzes with the same excitement he feels when close to Mrs. Rebozos (the danger, her money and heat). Once again he’s the enemy, the target.
    God pays for his rice, drapes the fugitive wool coat over the shoulders of his raincoat and marches out into the night, along the postindustrial corridor of Route 8, past the old Byrd Brothers rubber works, which once employed hundreds of men and women in making boots, raincoats, life preservers and, eventually, more delicate female items fabricated and manufactured under his aunt Olympia’s supervision. Now only the ghost building survives, followed by an eight-screen cinema and a scrubby, disreputable-looking woods behind the auto mile.
    The moon flickers in and out of view. God stumbles on clods of burst tires and cracking ice. Since the navy he hasn’t felt so vulnerable or bold. To keep himself company on this strange journey, he works on the memoir he is writing for the Goode School Press, so that future generations might understand what sources nourished the souls of dead white men. Last month, the trustees invited him to retire, to make way for fresh blood. He won’t give way until his hour is up, but has been writing in his head for weeks, casting even intimate reflections in polite prose:
    For many years I used to behave badly. We were raised to be moral, but supple. Within certain restrictions—to behave decently in the end—we were perfectly free. We understood that our wives could not be expected to bear the burdensthat men such as ourselves must impose. I remember meeting my father’s mistress, Mrs. Fiske, when I was nine or ten. She had been drinking coffee in the sitting room with my father. I remember their amusement, and my sudden awareness of the circle of people—myself included, and my aunt Olympia and Mrs. Fiske—who contributed to my father’s position and well-being. Like my father, I admire youth in a woman—glowing skin, a narrow rack of ribs, milk-bottle arms, sandaled feet, sharp new teeth—
    As he walks home, now along the old Post Road toward Cape Wilde, he moves on to larger themes. Cape Wilde is a hard place. Judges used to send girls into exile here rather than bother burning them at the stake, and let Indians take them, or wolves eat them. Sailors have drowned here for centuries; their ships crack up. These days, it’s a motif for Sunday painters, who describe the docks and barns and churches whose spires impale the air. There is nowhere God would rather live.
    He grew here among other, older Byrds: his father, grandfather, and Olympia, his mother’s sister, a radical reformer, an embarrassment and a curiosity; she spent her vital years traveling across New England, campaigning for birth control and the sexual gratification of women. She also advocated for fair working conditions, though she, like God’s father, proved mildly oblivious to the anxieties of