Family Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

should remain in opposition, but more often they seemed inscrutably linked. Her daughter no longer fell in the night. Margaret was tucked against Tracy, trying to sleep. Yet, she got out of bed and went into the other room. Celeste was dreaming; she lifted the girl’s wrist and massaged her fingertips.

C am was in the worst period of his divorce: before court proceedings, far enough into it to have lost all the minor comforts of his previous life without gaining any new advantages. After Easter, Cam moved out of his house. His last chore for his wife, Darcy, was to take the spoiled colored eggs out to the trash. He didn’t place the eggs in the can. He hurled them one by one into the street, where they rolled under the parked cars.
    He was living in his office at the BringhurstApartments, where he managed the units, cleaned the swimming pool, and kept the parking spaces reserved for the tenants. Margaret knew he had other duties, but Cam didn’t like to mention plunging the toilets, running a snake down the drains, or spraying chlordane to kill the cockroaches. He told her that his boss gave him extra jobs, “personal errands,” such as taking suits to the cleaners or picking up liquor for parties Cam wasn’t invited to. Cam kept asking her to visit. He called her every day, and when the telephone rang, Margaret lifted it off the hook before Tracy could get to it.
    “I don’t have anyone. Why don’t you come back to Wilmington?”
    “Is it my fault you still live in Wilmington?” she told him.
    “It’s our hometown,” Cam said.
    “I’m never going back there. Don’t you understand?” Her voice shifted to a high level, her throat closing tight on her words. She hung up the telephone.
    Tracy was standing behind her. “Listen to yourself, the hysteria in your voice—”
    “Cam makes me crazy with these ideas!” Margaret said.
    Tracy said he wouldn’t mind a change. “The Delmarva area. That’s okay. Anywhere above the Mason-Dixon is fine with me. I could try to get a job writing for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
.”
    “Shut up,” she told him.
    “Wilmington has a lot of growth going on.”
    “Out of the question. Who cares if it’s growing?”
    Wilmington, the Chemical Capital of the World. She recalled Du Pont’s billboards, BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY . Then, during the fuss about napalm and chemical weapons, the motto was changed to BETTER THINGS FOR BETTER LIVING . Tracy said he could probably get a job writing copy just like that for Du Pont brochures, label instructions, manuals, for more money than he made at the paper. She just looked at him.
    Cam once took a part-time position at Du Pont, afternoons after high school. His job was in a basement film library where Du Pont’s educational and sales films were sorted and rewound, sometimes spliced, before going back out. Only a few of the films addressed ethical questions:
Man in the Twentieth Century
and
Chemicals—For or Against Mankind?
Cam brought Margaret back to the tiny office. It was a small, hot room with projectors and stacks of empty film cans. She stood next to Cam in the dim light as the celluloid accelerated, lisped, and fluttered on the reels.
    It seemed like everyone in Wilmington worked for the company, and Margaret was always pleased her father had his own business. Cam reminded Margaret that Richard was just as dependent, since he distributed industrial equipment to all the Du Pont plant sites.
    Margaret disagreed. “He sells everywhere. He sells to Atlas and Hercules too, he sells to Doeskin Paper,” she said. She liked the mural on the side of the Doeskin Paper plant, a baby deer, his tail lifted like the large, oversized puff that came with her Avon Bath Powder.
    Cam shook his head. He said she was ignorant. She didn’t understand these big monopolies. They could callit the chemical industry, but it was a
dynasty
. To prove it, he drove Margaret up the Brandywine Valley to see Grenogue, the Du Pont family’s