Lives of Girls and Women Read Online Free PDF

brooded over the idea of taking action herself but my father told her, “You’re in trouble from the start when you interfere with other people’s families.”
    “Just the same I know I’m right.”
    “You may be right but that doesn’t mean there’s a thing you can do about it.”
    At this time of year the foxes were having their pups. If an airplane from the Air Force Training School on the lake came over too low, if a stranger appeared near the pens, if anything too startling or disruptive occurred, they might decide to kill them. Nobody knew whether they did this out of blind irritation, or out of roused and terrified maternal feeling—could they be wanting to take their pups, who still had not opened their eyes, out of the dangerous situation they might sense they had brought them into, in these pens? They were not like domestic animals. They had lived only a very few generations in captivity.
    To further persuade my mother, my father said that Madeleine might have gone to the States, where nobody could ever find her. Many bad, and crazy, as well as restless and ambitious people went there eventually.
    But Madeleine had not. Later in the spring came a letter. She had the nerve to write, said Uncle Benny and brought the letter and showed it. Without salutation she said: I left my yellow sweater and a green umbrella and dianes blanket at your place send them to me here. 1249 Ridlet St., Toronto, Ont .
    Uncle Benny had already made up his mind that he was going down there. He asked to borrow the car. He had never been to Toronto. On the kitchen table, my father spread the road-map, showing how to get there, though he said he wondered if it was a good idea. Uncle Benny said he planned to get Diane and bring her back. Both my mother and father pointed out that this was illegal, and advised against it. But Uncle Benny, so terrified of taking legal and official action, was not in the least worried about undertaking what might turn out to be kidnapping. He told stories now of what Madeleine had done. She had held Diane’s legs to the bars of the crib with leather straps. She had walloped her with a shingle. She had done worse than that, maybe, when he wasn’t there. Marks of the poker, he thought, had been on the child’s back. Telling all this, he was overcome with his apologetic half-laughter; he would have to shake his head and swallow it down.
    He was gone two days. My father turned on the ten o’clock news, saying, “Well we’ll have to see if old Benny’s got picked up!” On the evening of the second day he drove the car into our yard and sat there for a moment, not looking at us. Then he got out slowly and walked with dignity and weariness towards the house. He did not have Diane. Had we ever expected him to get her?
    We were sitting on the cement slab outside the kitchen door. My mother was in her own sling-back canvas chair, to remind her of urban lawns and leisure, and my father sat in a straight-backed kitchen chair. There were only a few bugs so early in the season. We were looking at the sunset. Sometimes my mother would assemble everybody to look at the sunset, just as if it was something she had arranged to have put on, and that spoiled it a bit—a little later I would refuse to look at all—but just the same there was no better place in the world for watching a sunset from than the end of the Flats Road. My mother said this herself.
    My father had put up the screen door that day. Owen was swinging on it, disobediently, to hear the old, remembered sound of the spring stretching, then snapping back. He would be told not to, and stop, and very cautiously behind my parents’ backs begin again.
    Such steadfast gloom hung around Uncle Benny that not even my mother would directly question him. My father told me in an under-tone to bring a chair from the kitchen.
    “Benny sit down. You worn out from your drive? How did the car run?”
    “She run okay.”
    He sat down. He did not take off his hat. He