Far-Flung Read Online Free PDF

foreign parts. She believed everyone should live where he was born. She had lived in the same house in Bedford since the 1920s. It was a large brick house with many rooms and much furniture. She led Jack, rather slowly, into the living room.
    “Where is Aunt Helen?” he asked. His Aunt Helen, who was really his grandmother’s cousin, had lived with his grandmother for the last three years.
    “Mrs. Whitcomb is drying out,” his grandmother said. She always referred to Helen as Mrs. Whitcomb.
    “Drying out?”
    “She’s at that clinic where you have to make your own bed. In California.” She pronounced California with five syllables.
    “I didn’t know she had a drinking problem,” Jack said.
    “Of course she has,” his grandmother said. “What do you think she has been devoted to all these years?”
    “Nothing, I suppose,” he said.
    “Wrong,” Mrs. Carter said. “She has been devoted to the bottle. And I don’t understand this sudden urge to hop on the wagon. It seems a little late in the game.”
    “Better late than never,” Jack said.
    His grandmother snorted.
    “How long will Helen be away?” Jack asked. He was worried about his grandmother living alone. She was eighty-six.
    Mrs. Carter waved her hand. “Enough of Mrs. Whitcomb,” she said. “I want to hear about you. Tell me about your show. Are the paintings big and ugly?”
    “They’re somewhat smaller this year,” he said.
    “But just as ugly?”
    “You would think so,” Jack said.
    She smiled. “I still hope that before I die, you will paint me a nice picture. Would you begrudge me that?”
    “I gave you the pick of the last show.”
    “No. I’m not interested in ugly paintings. I want a painting of something. I know that makes me hopelessly old-fashioned, but so be it. You know what I would most like? A painting of the house at Benders Bay. Surely you could paint that for me? After all your education and training, which I hasten to remind you I financed.”
    “I’ll pay you back.”
    “Pay me with a painting of Benders Bay.” Benders Bay was the house his grandmother once owned on Fishers Island. “I have a photograph of it, if you have forgotten what it looks like.”
    “I don’t paint from photographs,” Jack said.
    “Then you could go out there and paint it. Although I wonder if it’s still there. Perhaps it’s been torn down.”
    “I doubt it,” said Jack.
    “Yet it’s somebody else’s now,” his grandmother said. “Anyway,” she continued, “I would like you to paint me something before I die.”
    “I’ll go up to Fishers next week and paint you the house,” he said.
    “That makes me very happy,” she said. “You have no idea.”
    Jack’s grandfather had built Benders Bay as a wedding present for his wife. They had gone there every summer from 1923 to 1970, the year his grandfather died. Jack spent the summers at Benders with them. His father worked in the city, and his mother, a beautiful and not untalented actress, was usually in a show. She worked very steadily on Broadway during the ’40s and the ’50s. When Jack was fifteen she killed herself.
    The summer weeks at Benders Bay always followed the same pattern: On Sunday, after the matinee, Jack’s parents would arrive. His mother would bring an entourage—people from the cast, or other friends—and the house would be filled with exotic glamorous adults, with noise and music and cigarette smoke, with dancing and charades, with men and women running down to the water in the middle of the night, and reappearing, fully clothed, sopping wet, to dance some more. Then on Tuesday afternoon they’d pack everything up and depart in a caravan of honking cars for Manhattan, and an 8:30 curtain, leaving the elder Carters and Jack behind.
    When his grandfather died it was revealed that he had several large debts, and his grandmother sold Benders to pay them. She never returned to Fishers Island.
    “I am thinking of selling my accessories,” Mrs. Carter