Day of Wrath Read Online Free PDF

of herself," Sylvia said petulantly
and gave me an ugly look. "Anyway, I don't know where she went."
    "When was the last time you saw her?" I said.
    "I don't know. Four days ago, I guess."
    "On Sunday?"
    "Whatever," Sylvia said.
    "In the morning or the afternoon?"
    " The morning."
    "Did she talk to you about leaving home?"
    Sylvia shook her head condescendingly. "No. You could
hardly blame her, though."
    "Young lady!" the mother barked.
    "Well, geez, Mom, everybody knows Mildred's a basket case.
I don't know how Robbie put up with her for as long as she did. Always
checking up on her and all. Never letting her go out and have any fun."
    "What kind of fun?" I said, before Madge could step in
again.
    " Fun," she said with exasperation. "You know, fun? Like
going to parties and dancing and going out with guys."
    "I thought she went out with Bobby Caldwell?"
    Sylvia laughed scornfully. "That fag. They didn't go out,
they just hung around together. That's probably where she went—to Faggot
Bobby's house. Him and his big deal music."
    I had the feeling that Sylvia Rostow had been interested
in Bobby Caldwell herself, until Robbie had come along and claimed him.
She certainly sounded like a jealous girl.
    "Did she say she'd be going to Bobby's on Sunday?"
    "She didn't have to say it. She's always over there—like
some groupie."
    "Sylvia," the mother said.
    "Well, it's true, Mom. You've said it yourself. If you
hang around trash, you become trashy."
    The mother ducked her head a bit. "She does seem to spend
a lot of time with those trashy people. I really can't understand it. A
nice girl like her."
    "She's not a nice girl, Mom," Sylvia said with an evil
little smile. "Not anymore."
    "What does that mean?" I asked.
    "Co talk to Bobby," she said. "Ask him what it means."
 

    5
    S0 I WENT TO ASK BOBBY. WALKED THROUGH THE RAIN to the
intersection of Losantiville Avenue, where Eastlawn Drive dipped down in
a long, scythe-shaped curve before rising again at the edge of Roselawn
Park. Across the intersection, the neighborhood changed character.
    The red brick colonials became old yellow brick apartments,
with glass block set in their facades and street addresses written out
in big metal numbers fastened to the brick. The apartments looked like
they'd been built in the late forties, during the postwar boom—low-rent
housing for the soldiers coming home from overseas. Functional, three-
and four-story rectangular brick buildings, divided into sixteen two-room
units with paper-thin walls and pine floors and a bare minimum of fixtures
and appliances, they had never been meant for show. The developers hadn't
even planted trees in the front yards. Just an occasional hedge, running
like a thin green bunting at the bases of the facades, and a few scrubby
pines growing in the saw-toothed shadows between the buildings. The plain
grass lawns stretched, one after another, down the hill and up to the park,
separated by narrow concrete driveways and by tall, black-stemmed, white-capped
gas lamps which had begun to glow a warm yellow against the late afternoon
sky.
    There was no movement on the street. No cars. No kids.
No bird sounds. No street noise. Nothing but the melancholy hiss of the
rain and the sputtering yellow lamps and all that damp green lawn and all
those mean yellow buildings. It didn't take much exposure to that part
of the street to understand Mildred Segal's ferocious sense of propriety.
Because this was precisely what she was afraid of. Not poverty, but this
lower-middle-class life with the shine rubbed off, with all but the smallest
pride in appearances swallowed hard.
    At one time the street had probably been home to the auto
workers at G.M. and the factory workers at Hilton-Davis. But most blue-collar
types were no longer willing to settle for the purely functional decency
of these worn buildings. They'd moved on to Sharonville. Or to Montfort
Heights. To brand new brick and drywall tenements, with built-in dishwashers
and