On the River Styx Read Online Free PDF

chandelier, the red wine glowed like liquid rubies, and I was a baron at a medieval board, drunk on the wine of my betters.
    When, late in the second course, the centerpiece ignited from a fallen candle, the flame ran a furious circle in the snow before an uncle had the wit to dash his wine at it. The inn was tinder in the molten cotton, and the whalebone reindeer pranced proudly on the table, freed forever of Saint Nicholas, who perished in his sleigh.
    In the chaos of motion and voices I saw Madrina, the only person still seated, observing the destruction as if the ruin of this antiquated treasure was somehow fitting, as if she sensed that, like the tapestries and urns, it was far too venerable and vast to serve the New World Hartlingens again.
    She did not respond to the condolences addressed to her, but sat in silence, her hands folded on her lap. When at last she could be heard, she said: “Milly … I would like to see Milly.”
    And as if the girl had been poised on the threshold, the door flew open and Milly appeared, in a flurry of snow and tears, stumbling forward to Madrina. Milly cried very loudly in Madrina’s embrace, and Madrina was crying, too, a harsh unwilling sputter which her glaring eyes denied.
    “It’s all my fault,” Milly was saying, “it’s all my fault.”
    And Madrina, looking over Milly’s shoulder at the black Saint Nicholas, said: “How foolish, my dear. I am as American as you are. We are simply celebrating Christmas Eve.”
    1951

L ATE IN THE S EASON
    I t was just at the edge of the late November road, a halted thing too large for the New England countryside, neither retreating nor pulling in its head, but waiting for the station wagon. Cici Avery saw it first, a dark giant turtle, as solitary as a misplaced object, as something left behind after its season. She nudged her husband and pointed, unwilling to break the silence in the car.
    Frank Avery saw the turtle and slowed. If he had been alone, he would have swerved to hit it, Cici decided, selecting the untruth which suited her mood.
    The small eyes fastened on the man. The tail, ridged with reptilian fins, lay still in the dust like a thick dead snake, pointing to the yellowed weeds which, leading back over a slight crest and descending thickly to the ditch, were flattened and coated by a wake of mud.
    Cici, hands in her trousers, moved in unlaced boots past her husband. The tips of the laces flicked in the dust like broken whip ends.
    “Poor monster,” she whispered to the turtle. “It’s late in the year for you, you’re past your season.”
    “Monster isn’t the word,” Frank Avery said. “I’ve never seen such a brute.” He ventured a thrust at it with his riding boot. “It’s not
really
a turtle?” he said.
    “A snapping turtle,” Cici said. She was a big untidy girl whose straw-colored hair blurred the lines of her face.
    “A man-eater,” he said. “It must be two feet across.”
    “It’s a very big old monster,” she said, sinking down on the crest behind it and stroking the triangular snout with her stick. The mouth reared back over the shell, its jaws slicing the stick with a leathery thump.
    “Dear God!” Frank said.
    Cici eased to her elbow in the grass, stretching the long legs in faded hunting pants out to one side of the turtle. She studied her husband. Frank Avery, precise in his new riding habit, stood uncertain beside the bull-like turtle, afraid of it and fascinated at once.
    The very way he behaves with me, the thought recurred to her, as if I were some slightly disgusting animal, and yet he prides himself on his technique, which doesn’t include having children. Romance is the watchword, but no children, not for a while. And then he is hurt because I don’t love him. As if we were haggling over love as the stud fee, as if I had bargained with him for his manhood, she thought, and didn’t realize until I took it home what a rotten bargain I had made.
    Frank Avery stretched out his