The Auerbach Will Read Online Free PDF

exactly what I mean, Mother. Some Auerbachs are real, and some aren’t. My analyst explained it all to me years ago, and I explained it all to you. We’re two families, we had two different sets of parents. Does Josh remember 5269 Grand Boulevard? No, but I do! Babette and I do! Babette and I remember a little house at 5269 Grand Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois, that had only one john, and it didn’t always work! And we had a mother who cooked our meals and ironed our dresses and darned our stockings and patched our underwear and walked us to the streetcar stop for school, and a father who came home at night in his shirtsleeves for dinner at the kitchen table under one bare light bulb. Oilcloth on the table. Catsup in a bottle. Boiled potatoes. And we had a mother who read us stories before we went to bed at night, holding the book in hands that smelled of onions and were red from washing dishes. Those were our parents, Mother. We were their children. Then Papa got rich. Then, when I was nine years old, along came Mogie, and ten years later came Josh. They never set foot in 5269 Grand Boulevard. They were brought up not by parents but by governesses and nurses and bodyguards and servants—a cook who wouldn’t even let the children into the kitchen of their own house, and a big estate in Lake Forest with a guard at the gate because of kidnappings. They had a mother who had a butler and a chauffeur and a German private secretary who guarded her like a hawk and who said, ‘You may go in to see your mother now, but she only five minutes has,’ and a mother who, if she was home at all, was dressing to go out to some grand ball. And a father who, if he ever came home at all—if he wasn’t in somewhere like Brussels or Copenhagen or Milan or the end of the world on business—if he came home at all, he came home in a tall silk hat in a private railroad car, to attend a reception for the Governor, or Henry Ford, or John D. Rockefeller. And if he came home at all , he was soon off again to address the League of Nations in Geneva. Those were Mogie’s and Josh’s parents, Mother. They weren’t my parents, Mother! Babette, remember the lemonade stand? Remember our lemonade stand? Two cents a glass, and we gave the money to Mama. Did Josh ever have a lemonade stand? No, everything was handed to him on a solid silver platter. Babette—” Her eyes are streaming now, but there are no sobs. “Babette—tell them about our lemonade stand. Tell them … tell them … Oh, please tell them.…”
    Babette fidgets nervously with her bracelets, twisting them this way and that. “I don’t remember it,” she says at last.
    Josh rises, a little wearily, and says in a flat voice, “Would anyone like a little music? How about some Christmas carols?” He walks to the piano, sits down, and runs his fingers over the keys. He begins to play “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” “C’mon. Let’s sing. It’s Christmas.”
    At first, no one responds. Then Linda quickly stands up and says, “If no one else will sing, I will.” She goes to the piano and begins to sing in her clear young voice, while Josh Auerbach accompanies her:
    O Little Town of Bethlehem ,
    How still we see thee lie .
    Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
    The timeless stars roll by.…
    All at once Joan rushes across the room to the piano and screams at her brother, “Josh, you little shit!” Then she bangs down both fists hard on the upper register of the keyboard.
    In the echoing, jagged silence that follows, Essie stands up and walks out of the room, to leave them to their bickering.
    The terrace of Essie’s apartment wraps around two sides of the building, the south and the west. The terrace is bare now, the awnings down, the garden furniture stored away, the planters and the window boxes empty. But on the first of May, all the things will come out again