House of Gold Read Online Free PDF Page B

like a plan to me. You're willing to move, but are purposely in denial as to why. I'm watering the lawn. And Sam...and Sam, he..."
    "Sam is Sam."
    He pulled his legs off the chair, and deftly positioned the baby on his knees. Airplane!
    Packy squealed.His drool came down on Buzz's shirt. The trick, Buzz thought, an expert dad, is to keep that drool from going in my mouth.
    "Did I ever tell you about the time me and Donna and Sam went to the beach in New Jersey?"
    "Like all your stories, yes, many times. But tell me again."
    "Forget it."
    He laughed, and snuck under the table and grabbed Markie's legs, making growling noises. "I'm gonna bite yourbelly! The lion is hungry!"
    "No!" Markie shrieked with false terror, meaning, essentially, Please go right ahead.
    Mel shook her head. Boys will be boys.
    It was the same every night. Yes, she loved them all. Her three little boys.
    +  +  +
    Sam was snoring. His wife rose from the bed and padded into the bathroom, flicked the light, and gently closed the door halfway.
    Ellie took a hard gaze at herselfin the full-length mirror. She was wearing a smock, as Sam called them, for reasons she never fully understood. Perhaps his mother had called plain cotton one-piece pajamas smocks.
    No, that couldn't be. He lost his mother when he was a child. Me, Buzz, Sam–motherless children all.
    She stepped closer and looked into her own eyes.
    Who was this girl before her? She still thought of herself–of Mel,of Marie Penny, Kathy Lawrence, her woman friends–as girls.
    But they weren't girls. They were moms. Front and center. First and foremost. Top to bottom.
    Am I looking at a mom?
    She placed her hands on her stomach, and yearned for a working womb the way a paraplegic yearns to walk.
    This was a useless place to go, but she would go anyway. Chris made her a mom. Of course. And she hid her yearningswell. From Sam, from the girls, from herself. She was thirty-eight. It was a physical impossibility that she could conceive a child, but even if she could, that hypothetical part of her life as a woman–the part with a precious eight-pound bundle, a bundle worth more than all the gold in all the vaults in all the world–the part with nursing, strollers, with quiet times on the bed with just her anda baby–was passing by so quickly, so inexorably. They had taken out one ovary. The other one–she couldn't ever, ever, forget the phrase the doctor had used, thinking she was out of earshot–her remaining ovary was shriveled up.
    Shriveled up. Not a day went by. Not a day.
    Thirty-eight. Pushing forty. Soon, she would not even be able to hope against hope.
    She shared everything with the other moms–exceptthe yearning. Mel, Marie, Kathy–all they ever seemed to talk about was their children and having more children. They were proto-modern Catholics, part of the new generation of believers–still a minority–that loved children, loved the idea of children, loved mothering, and embraced the very cross of motherhood as if it were the True Cross of Christ. They loved 'being open to life' more than lifeitself.
    Perhaps other generations had embraced motherhood, but none against a culture so hostile to children.
    Pope John Paul II had led the way. In the vast Ocean of Death that was the late twentieth century, this new breed of mothers flew the standard of life on the masts of their little arks.
    Weary of her own image, she looked back to the bedroom. Sam's feet hung over the end of the bed.
    Melmarried crazy Jack, she thought.
    And I married the Beanstalk.
    And like the beanstalk of the famous fairy-tale, her husband's lofty top poked up into another world. A world of certainties. And there was a giant bug up there.
    Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an IBM.
    She smiled at herself.
    Is he right? Is Sam right?
    She knew Bucky and his friends were wrong. She had heard it in their voices–theignorance, the smug denial. They had written Sam off so casually.
    Sam was never wrong. Never about