Heir to the Glimmering World Read Online Free PDF

land just once, even if unintentionally, on my lips.
    "What's this?" he said. He had found the paper with the anagrams. I had left it on the dining room table. "Berm? Tare? Is this some sort of test? Something from your psych class?"
    "It's everything that comes out of Bertram," I said. "All the words."
    "How about that. Rosie, I told you, to me you're a kid."
    After that he began bringing his girlfriends home to supper. Sometimes all three of us would walk over to a nearby movie house, I feeling sullen and stifled, Bertram with his arm around whoever his date happened to be. Later he and the woman would march me back, right to the door of Bertram's flat, where the two of them would leave me. Once again I was alone for the night. "Remember to put the chain on," Bertram would remind me. He had a fear of break-ins. It was hard times, he said, not human nature, that promoted thievery.
    Bertram thought well of human nature. The women he brought home did not. These were always women he met at rallies, or on picket lines; they all had short black or brown hair and fiery tongues given to malice. Most wore thick lisle stockings stuffed, whatever the weather, into thonged sandals. One dangled long earrings made of shells that clattered; another had nearly identical earrings, but arrived in work shoes and men's trousers. They were like no women I had ever known. They were zealots; they argued and theorized and wept with enthusiasm. I did not understand their talk, wave after wave of Bukharin, Lenin, Trotsky, Budenny, Stalin, Ehrenburg. They disputed over skirmishes, kulaks, trials, solidarity, scabs. I could not tell one alien phrase from another. It was not how Bertram talked or thought. In his dreamy water-color way, Bertram spoke of poverty abolished, the lion lying down with the lamb, the hopes of mankind: it was like a painting on the wall. You could contemplate it or you could ignore it. But these fierce political women spoke of men, living men, whom they despised and would gladly have torn to pieces. Bertram admired their rages and excitements, but I was afraid of them—of their clipped hair, the forwardness of their dress, their hot familiarity with far-away crises, their blurting passion. They were angry and omniscient. It seemed to me that they were in command of the age.
    The woman who wore the shell earrings and dressed like a man (occasionally she turned up in overalls) was called Ninel. It was not her real name; it was a Party name, in honor of Lenin. "Just try spelling it backward," Bertram told me, grinning. Ninel enchanted him; the play of her name enchanted him, and I was stung: he had disliked my search for a secret signal in the letters of his own name. Yet Ninel had done the same, and it pleased him. Even Ninel's big work shoes and clumsy worsted pants with the zipper in front pleased and amused him.
    Ninel disapproved of Bertram's flat. If she saw that I had already set the dishes out on the dining room table, it made no difference, we had to move back into the kitchen to eat. Bertram's mother's furniture sickened her: that china-closet thing with the glass doors, she said, whatever it had cost, could feed a famine. She asked Bertram how he could stand to live with it. With Ninel we never went to the movies. She was scornful of stories told by shadows. She maintained that movies were the new church, a diversion for the masses; she was too serious; she was combative. Whenever Ninel came, I ate quickly and ran to hide in my little study with my book: Emma and Mr. Knightly were soon to unite. "Don't you see the point, Bert?" I would hear Ninel growl. I had chosen Bertram to be my own Mr. Knightly; instead he was being led away from his proper Emma by a woman who was conducting a revolution in his kitchen. "It's all about exploitation, however you want to look at it."
    It turned out that they were arguing about Croft Hall. "You got the kid's father a job at a place like that? What were you thinking? "
    "The man was