The Gorgon Festival Read Online Free PDF Page B

beauty.
    “You’re more than merely woman, Ruth. You’re sister and spouse, sweetheart and friend, brother and sister, son and daughter.”
    She smiled at his extravagance, “Thanks for omitting grandfather, but let’s not weigh this moment down with confessions. Thirty-one years are preliminaries enough.”
    Obediently he turned to her and noticed a peculiarity which brought again to his mind the trite image of baby’s bottom.
    “Ruth, you surely don’t pose in the nude for photographers.”
    “Pubic baldness, Alex. I’m seventy, but now, mine eyes have seen the glory la-di-da-di-da-di-da.”
    She hummed a few bars of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and when she swung into “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” he discovered he was not the only one with dark secrets. Doctor Ruth Gordon, champion of Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach, was a secret lover of pop rhythms.
    “Drifting and dreaming, la-la-li-la… Soon, I’ll be sailing, la-ta-ta… Sock it to me, daddy, ta-ti-ti-ta. John Henry’s a steel-driving man, hup-hup…”
    Her practice was so distracting that he tried to break into her titles and humming with a remark, “By golly, Ruth, you’re the best seventy-year-old woman I ever knew.”
    “Hoped I might be the only, but you can’t have everything, la-ti-da… Waiting on the levee… Come on along, come on along, Alexander… La cucaracha, la-li-la-la-la… Tralala boom de ra!!! So long, It’s been good to know you…”
    One adjusted. In fact, her announcement of the title of the next melody helped alter his tempo, and on the third movement, which proved to be the coda, he was singing along with her.
    When finally he had to depart, bending above her to kiss her good night, he asked, “Ruth, why didn’t you let me kiss you in the kitchen?”
    “My jawbones are brittle, and I couldn’t risk my bridge.”
    “Your sacroiliac’s quite limber,” he commented.
    “My rhythm was a little off,” she said, “because of long widowhood.”
    “No. You’re everything we dreamed of in Dormitory C.”
    “Thanks, but run along, Alex. You’ve got a schedule to keep and I’ve got some heavy thinking to do. You’ve got the biggest moral decision that ever faced a man facing you, and I want to make the right choice. Get cracking on your theory tomorrow, and I’ll work on social implications.”
    Inadvertently, he was humming the Brahms lullaby as he closed the bedroom door behind him and walked down the hall to the exit. Ruth had always been an influence on his life.
    He remembered his gear in the bathroom, but he knew it would be no problem for Ruth to put away now she had rid herself of arthritis. He would come back for it when he had more time.
    He closed the front door and went to his car, remembering his weak battery. Below him, Pinyon Verde Lane was illuminated and deserted of traffic. He cut the brake and rolled a block, coasting to get the car started, then switched on his lights and drove home, analyzing the evening.
    This event had been more than an illicit liaison. Possibly her arthritis had been hysterical, and not sugar phosphate but long friendship and mutual regard had been the catalyst which prompted his extended performance. Ruth’s action had been inspired by a psychic overload of affection built up from years of caressing only hamsters. Despite overtones of self-deception, the experiment had been fruitful, relieving Ruth of her imagined arthritis and demonstrating his own freedom from breast obsessions. And to his knowledge it was the first time sex had been used as a tool of pragmatism.
    Ward got home in time to take his call from Ester.
    He told her of the rose garden, of the flamboyance of the Scarlet Churchills, of the crunchiness of the macaroons, of the thrill of coasting downhill in the dark. It was a beautiful story, although he edited the triple denouement. Fervor touched his words, for when he closed, Ester said, “Honey, you sound like Tuesday night.”
    After they hung up, Ward