The Captive Condition Read Online Free PDF Page A

Dickensian orphanage, a troll-infested forest, a vast wildlife preserve teeming with ravenous jackals and hyenas. He pictured in exquisite detail smoking electric chairs and old-fashioned firing squads—fusillading, the French called it, which made execution seem almost enlightened. He saw those two chortling brats, handcuffed and blindfolded, cigarettes dangling from the corners of their mouths, standing against a bullet-ridden wall in a prison courtyard; watched the decorated commandant give the signal, the soldiers raise their rifles; and for a split second, in the stillness of the summer day, mistook a backfiring car for the sudden crack of gunshots. Beyond these delightfully gruesome images he would not allow his mind to wander, because, as he liked to remind his students, “An unrestrained imagination poses certain dangers to its owner.”
    In the dazzling sunshine his daydreams seemed harmless enough, particularly when the breeze died and the ripples on the pool vanished so that its smooth surface rolled back and forth in silver filaments of light, but with the girls lurking nearby it never took long for an idyllic scene to turn sour. Gliding stealthily along the shallow bottom like a couple of perversely smiling moray eels, Madeline and Sophie found Christopher’s legs and lavished their pinches upon him. Blue in the face and gasping for air, they rocketed to the surface to shout in their victim’s ears, one girl on either side for proper stereophonic effect, “We love you, Christopher, we do, like a brother we do!”
    When they grew tired of this game, they ran helter-skelter around the pool, fishing for compliments, doing a late-summer saraband, jackknifing and cannonballing in the deep end. Then they raced across the yard to the clothesline, where they wrapped themselves in the white sheets and shouted, “Booo!”
    Emily jumped from her chair. “You monsters, I just cleaned those!” She tried to coax them back into the water, but Madeline and Sophie let out two horrific shrieks that sent the blackbirds flying in a panic from the treetops.
    “Well, that’s one thing you definitely forgot to consider,” said Emily, slumping into her chair.
    “What’s that?”
    “If people married late in life, there would be far fewer children in this world. The older you get, the less patience you have for them.”
    “Ah, yes,” said Kingsley, “it’s an engineering problem. If Nature had the capacity to reason properly, if it weren’t so blind, it would have made us eager to reproduce beginning in middle age, not before. Think of all the problems that would solve.”
    “Are you saying fatherhood doesn’t agree with you?”
    He pondered this for a moment, and when he finally answered, he tried to sound assertive; for him never an easy thing. “I’m not convinced men, especially young men, are cut out for the job, that’s all. You wouldn’t trust another man with your children, would you?”
    She squeezed his arm and smiled. “I trust
you,
Martin.”
    From behind the sheets Madeline and Sophie performed an infuriating shadow play, pantomiming the adults, using lewd and obscene gestures, and with awful exuberance they resumed their impersonation of Pontificating Professor King-silly.
    “Something to harden the soul,” they proclaimed, “something to harden the soul, something to harden the soul before a long, brutal winter!”
    —
    Deciding it was time to take shelter from the sun’s blistering downward rays, Kingsley and Emily led the children under a patio umbrella and prepared a late lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. After wiping sticky mouths and fingers, they ordered the children into the family room, where Emily turned on the television. Madeline and Sophie nestled against each other on the sofa, their eyes growing heavy with exhaustion. In the flicker and fog of gray light, the twins looked somewhat less impish, and Christopher, curled up on a recliner, looked positively cherubic. At the