The Other Side of Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

secret.”
     
    “I should have told you years ago. But it never seemed fair to Humphrey. He’s so proud of you.”
     
    “Are you saying Dad’s not my real father?”
    He detested his croaking voice.
     
    “He isn’t. But he’s forgotten he isn’t. Wyatt, so help me God, I often think facing up to it would kill him.”
    A straightforward businesswoman, Rossie avoided the least hyperbole.
    “He loves you so much.”
     
    Wyatt leaned back against the wooden headboard. Three years ago he had used part of his inheritance from his Wyatt grandparents to buy the sleek Danish modern bookcases, the pinch-pleated linen curtains, the desk. Suddenly the familiar room seemed alien. Though he had often inwardly wondered why the nuptials hadn’t taken place until a month before he made his arrival, he’d never questioned his
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    siring. Why should he? Humphrey was forever pointing out that he, Wyatt, had the Kingsmith height, that he had inherited dark eyes and sandy hair from his long-dead Kingsmith grandmother, that he had Porteous’s high IQ.
     
    Wyatt’s hand hovered above the round gold watch, but his muscles refused to grasp it.
    “What happened? Did he leave you in the lurch?”
     
    “Wyatt, I said he was my husband.”
    She paused.
    “I met him my first year up north at Radcliffe.”
     
    Rossie Wyatt Kingsmith came from Wyattville in Rossie County, Georgia. Prior to the War Between the States, as the Rossies and the Wyatts referred to the Civil War, the two interlocking families had accumulated more than three thousand slaves, a cotton gin, warehouses and a railroad spur. Now his maternal kin, attended by what they still called
    “their darkies’, descendants of their property, nursed their superiority and talked in softly slurred voices of genealogies. Whenever he’d visited Wyattville he’d been filled with gratitude that his mother had been smart enough to leave the first woman in the intertwined families to head north to college.
     
    Rossie was watching him.
    “Both our families disapproved,”
    she said.
     
    “Because you were too young?”
    His mother hadn’t been twenty when she’d married his father - Humphrey Kingsmith.
     
    “Oh, you know what unreconstructed Southerners my folks are. And he was a damn Yankee.”
    She paused as a car racketed up 72nd Street.
    “His name was Myron Leventhal. He was in his second year at the Harvard medical school. His parents were beside themselves that he was going around with a gentilejirl.”
     
    “Jewish …
    “
    Wyatt whispered. W
    His spine was stiff against the headboard. Though he had no close Jewish friends and had never taken out a Jewish girl, he’d also never guffawed at casually told anti-Semitic jokes and had preferred not to go through rushing because fraternities were discriminatory. He was therefore shamed by the images of Jews tumbling through his brain. A fat woman who smelt of sweat and garlic grabbing the taxi he’d hailed. A pair of bearded, hatted men talking a guttural language. The short belligerent commie called Goldberg arguing Marxism in the Poli Sci class. Wyatt wore only his pyjama bottoms. Looking down, he had a certifiably insane thought. The upper half was familiar and Episcopal, the lower half, hidden by his striped Pima cotton pyjamas, belonged to a stranger. Shouldn’t I have been circumcised?
    Rossie tilted her head.
    “I realize this is all coming as a shock.”
     
    “I’m an adult.”
    He managed a wry smile.
    “So you were married because I was on the way?”
     
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    ‘Good heavens, no. It wasn’t like that at all. We just wanted to spend our lives together. We were married by a Justice of the Peace, and the next day we took the train to New York to see his parents. They lived not far from Columbia, in one of those big old houses. His father was a judge, humourless and stiff. When we refused to get an annulment, he said that Myron was dead to them. They would sit shiva for him - that’s a