The Ghost in the Glass House Read Online Free PDF Page A

something of a savage.”
    Mack’s eyes traveled over his brutalized sweet peas and lilies with the harried resignation of a farmer evaluating storm damage. He didn’t contradict her.
    For the rest of the meal, whenever Mack found himself forced by politeness to meet Clare’s mother’s eyes, she gave him a nonsensically bright smile. By this, Clare knew that her mother was unhappy. A few years before, Clare might have spent the whole meal inventing compliments to make up for the ones Mack hadn’t made, or offered her mother bits of toast dragged in marmalade or bacon grease. When this failed, Clare would have used up the rest of the morning imagining more clever things she might have said, or better temptations she might have offered: all for nothing. The campaigns she had waged in the past to ease her mother’s sorrows had all been a waste, if they hadn’t made things worse. By now she knew the best thing to do was leave her mother be.
    As soon as the meal was done, Clare’s mother carried the bouquet back up to her own room, where she refused to allow Tilda to cull or freshen it for a week.
    â€œThey don’t have to be perfect to keep,” she told Tilda, at Tilda’s first attempt to remove several spent lilies on her morning patrol of the room. “Leave them for a day.”
    When Tilda returned the next morning, determination shining on her face, Clare’s mother again stopped her with a word. “Oh, you’d better leave them, Tilda,” she said. “I like to see how they change when they fade.”
    Thwarted for the second time, Tilda obeyed with a vengeance: over the following days, as the stems drooped and the water in the vase turned to thick milk, she ignored the bouquet completely. She even neglected to wipe up the gold pollen that fell on the slick wood of the bedside table where the vase stood.
    By the end of the week, the leaves of the trailing rose branches had turned gray-green and brittle. The small pink roses had folded, and their petals dropped to the floor in clouds at the vibration from any step. Half the color had drained from the splayed petals of the tulips, and the blue delphinium had gone almost black. The smell of sweet rot filled the room even when the windows were wide open.
    â€œDo you want me to take care of them?” Clare finally asked. She had come to see if her mother was ready to go down for breakfast, but stopped in the doorway at the strong scent.
    Her mother, arrayed in the seemingly infinite folds of a white chiffon dressing gown, her blond hair unbound and gleaming in the early sun, looked up from the wing chair by the window, where she was curled up with a history of Rome. She had discovered it on the bookshelf and had been terrifying her conversational partners with it all week, introducing crucifixions and regicide to the conversation with barely concealed glee whenever the topic turned to the popular novels or sentimental poetry her friends liked to read. Her friends, of course, were both fascinated and appalled. They couldn’t work up any indignation against a diseased imagination, since the events had actually happened, and they could hardly dismiss the history of the empire as a tawdry scandal, so after a few false starts they had begun to object to her comments on the basis of good taste: the world was full of true stories, they agreed, but simple truth hardly made a thing worth repeating. This charge allowed them to retell the gory tales, as evidence in the case against Clare’s mother, both endlessly and with impunity.
    â€œOh, sweetheart,” Clare’s mother said. “Does it bother you? I’ll take care of them right now.”
    In a rush of chiffon, she rose, swept up the amber vase and its contents, and carried it into her bathroom. A trail of pollen mixed with dropped petals marked her way. Clare knelt and collected the stray petals from the carpet, then followed.
    Her mother had