The Legacy of Eden Read Online Free PDF Page B

abandoned child, a product of other people’s charity.
    It was as if she had been branded and nothing could remove it. Not seducing and marrying the town doctor; not moving into a house of her own, which was only slightly smaller than her uncle’s. Often she would wonder if this was to be it. If she would live and die as nothing more than the doctor’s wife and her uncle’s former charge. She would think these things as she cooked, or ran her errands, and she would suddenly be consumed with an urge to utterly annihilate everything around her. Once she took the kitchen knife to the soft pink curtains that hung over the window above the sink. She slashed at them, not caring where she plunged the knife, thrusting so deeply that the point scraped against the glass, leaving long thin scratches on the pane. She eventually stopped, the energy just draining from her, but once it was over she hadn’t felt contrite or ashamed. She bundled up the material, composed an excuse for her husband and ordered some new curtains from a magazine she subscribed to. Why she felt like this she did not know. It seemed to her she had always been this way: always bitter and resentful because she did not count, and even now she did not know how to change this.
    As she climbed the mound to the house, which was already strewn with lights, she began to prepare herself for the night ahead. She knew it annoyed her husband that she couldn’t interact with their neighbors. He had known about the comments and gossip that started after their engagement had been announced, but only from a distance. To his face, at least, it was clear that all the men were secretly envious that he had managed to entrance a pretty nineteen-year-old. He did not know that the women had labeled his wife a harlot and a temptress; that despite the respectability of his name, to them she was still no better than his whore. Nor did he ever guess at how they stared at her belly after the first six months and noted with pursed lips and inward smiles that it had continued to stay flat. He did not sense their distaste, he only saw her isolation, an isolation he believed was self-imposed. That was why he left her at gatherings. After a few weeks into their marriage, he told her that if he stayed with her, she would never force herself to socialize. He chose not to acknowledge that whether he was with her or not, it made no difference.
    So when they reached the door and were shown through to the garden, he immediately detached himself, leaving her standing on the back porch, cradling the flowers she had brought and staring at the islands of people knotted among the expanse of green punctured by white-clothed tables and multicolored streamers of silver, turquoise and gold.
    She moved through these islands like a navigator through treacherous waters, slipping between the gaps she could find until she reached a small clearing that had not yet been invaded. She did not even try to see where her husband had gone. She came near one of the long tables covered with steaming hams and bowls of salad and rested the flowers near the paper cups and the punch bowl. Nearby stood a group of huddled men, whom she ignored. Instead she served herself a drink, and as she picked over the food she began to wonder how she would be able to get through the evening without taking a knife to something.
    “Must just eat you up, Leo,” one of the men near her said.
    “He’ll be gone soon, we all know he won’t stay.”
    “What was he doing up in Oregon anyway?”
    “Salesman.”
    “Walter knows he ain’t no farmer. Blood or no blood he’s seen you sweat over this place and he won’t do anything that ain’t in the interests of the farm. Ain’t no salesman can farm.”
    “Yeah, but he did use to farm here, didn’t he?”
    “That was a long time ago, though.”
    “To be sure.”
    “You’re the one who’s been here. No one cares about that firstborn stuff. It’s about what you done, not what position