The Gorgon Festival Read Online Free PDF

grace which had attracted the cadets of Ethan Allen Military and Preparatory School. When he reached beneath the sink for the drying towel, the back of his hands brushed her thigh, and even his knuckles told him that she had good muscle tone. Despite her age, digging around in the garden had kept her muscles firm.
    He was standing beside and slightly behind her and she was bending over the sink when she said, “Alex, I hate to think of you going home to that empty house. Don’t you ever feel lonely? Don’t you ever get blue?”
    Sadness in her voice triggered an impulsive show of affection. From behind her, his arms circled her waist and he kissed lightly the skin of her neck.
    “Not so long as I have the mother of my spirit. I hope Professor Gordon appreciated a wife so wise, compassionate, and judicious.”
    She held his arms against her with one hand and reached back to stroke his cheek with the other. Her hair held a faint scent of lavender.
    “He never tried to get me elected to a judge’s bench, if that’s what you mean.”
    He chided himself for using abstract terms. Despite her logical mind, Ruth was a woman, and any woman preferred a compliment to her hairdo over praise of her mentality.
    “When I was a boy, I thought you were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Despite the age difference, if it had not been for my reverence for Professor Gordon I would have stood beneath your bower banging on my banjo until you consented to a bit of old New England bundling.”
    Her breath seemed to catch at his alliteration of “b.” “Watch your Oedipal feelings, Alex.”
    Beneath his right palm, her stomach muscles were hard and resilient. He patted them, affectionately. Her faith in her rejuvenation was drawing him into the orbit of her belief.
    “I have a theory why Professor Gordon died young,” he said.
    “I’m a pragmatist,” she said. “Demonstrate.”
    He moved closer.
    “Well, that’s not an invitation to a game of pinochle,” she said. “At my age it’s monstrous to have such thoughts, because you’re still the boy I met thirty-one years ago, my fresh-faced, smiling student; but even then you were teacher’s pet. We shouldn’t be standing here like this. If you’re going to misbehave, Alex, I’m going to send you to bed. No, Alex. Don’t kiss my lips. I forbid you. Come, young man, you’re going right to bed.”
    With his arm around her shoulder and her arm around his waist, the two old friends walked from the kitchen with a slow, ritual movement as if they approached some predestined altar before which friendship would be offered the supreme sacrifice. So rapt was Ward with the ripple of her thigh muscle against his that he forgot to turn out the light, and she forgot to remind him.
    “Thirty-one years, boy, is a mighty long time.”
    Before them, the long hall seemed endless, and he stepped up cadence as her remark lowered the weirs of his own long-pent and ill-recognized longing. In a spate of words, his dark secrets flooded out.
    “One of the boys in dormitory C, we called it masterbatorium C, drew your picture on the wall, and going to the John was called ‘going to see Ruth.’ Dear lady, you’ll never know how many lonely offerings were offered to you by the boys of Ethan Allen Military Prep. As first among your acolytes, I made Portnoy look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”
    Finally, in the soft forty watts from the bedroom ceiling, she unveiled the inspiration which in the shadows seemed as lissome as a girl’s. Memories touched on memories at the sight, and as Ward divested himself of impediments his verbal gusher continued to blow.
    “Perhaps my subconscious reason for choosing Ester was to exorcise your litheness from my heart, for your maidenly swellings mock the pneumatic bunnies on the center-fold spreads.”
    In the dim light he spoke the truth, for she appeared boyish and appealing. He sat on the edge of the bed, leaning over her and gazing down at her ageless