The Pig Comes to Dinner Read Online Free PDF Page A

telling now. You needn’t admit it to me. But you’ve always admitted it to yourself. You know you’re a prophet. You know you hold the truth, and I’m the one knows it as well as you.”
    â€œI do it for the money. Isn’t it obvious?”
    â€œAnd did you write the truths told in your retelling of Jane Eyre ? Anyone with the slightest sense of justice would have done what you did—given the rage and the talent that’s yours. There was Miss Charlotte Brontë trying to tell us it’s a great fulfillment for poor Jane to have her Rochester after all, a bit battered though he may be. And how did Miss Brontë manage that? By having Jane step over the broken bones of a dead madwoman. Is that the path to happiness? Has Jane no conscience? You did it right. Rochester throws himself headfirst from the attic because Jane will have none of his bigamous offer. And it’s his bones broken, and it’s over his dead body Courtney—” Here she became puzzled. “Is it Courtney or is it Tiffany you call the Jane character?”
    â€œBrianna.”
    â€œAh, yes, Brianna. And it’s over his dead body—is it Kyle or Kevin?”
    â€œKevin.”
    â€œAnd so it’s over Kevin’s dead body Tiffany—”
    â€œBrianna.”
    â€œâ€”Brianna steps over, and she and the madwoman, cured by Brianna’s kindness and caring, settle down to a life fulfilled enough, what with the pottery, weaving, and a bit of animal husbandry. Now that ’s the work of a truth teller. A tale told by a prophet. You. Kitty McCloud.”
    Kitty tried to stop the squirming that no amount of previous doomsaying had been able to accomplish. The Seer was, indeed, making revelations that Kitty, from the beginning of her career, thought she’d been able to keep to herself.
    Her motive wasn’t really the money. It was her insistence on truth, on justice. Then, too, she had her wrath, a bottomless cauldron from whose roiled depths would surface some of the most deeply honest fiction of her generation.
    But none of this must ever be known. If her worldwide readership—yet another by-product of so-called globalization—ever saw in her not the shameless, exploitative hack of unscrupulous ambition and insatiable greed but a prophet inspired by nothing less than principles of the highest order, she would be abandoned by her votaries. Supermarket book racks, airline newsstands, drugstore check-out counters would no longer offer her output. Best-seller lists, hardcover and paperback, would deny her the accustomed listings, their notations of the number of weeks, the months, the years of her prominence. Critics would ignore her, their vilifications no longer applicable. No more miniseries, no more amused condescension from the academics. Her fame, her fortune would dissolve. She would be forgotten, impoverished, bereft. Maude McCloskey’s voice must be silenced, her powers nullified.
    To achieve this, Kitty simply reached for the most effective weapon she could summon: not denial but agreement swaddled in ridicule. “Oh, yes, Kitty McCloud, the great crusader! The Maude Gonne of the literary world. Writes with a flaming sword handed down by St. Michael himself. An unquenchable thirst for truth, repository of a wrath not seen since Queen Maeve herself. Take a good look, Maude McCloskey. When will you see the like again?”
    â€œMock me if you will. I’m used to it. But it changes nothing.”
    â€œOh? Until you uttered this last nonsense I was almost ready to consider that the gunpowder might still be lurking somewhere and I could go heavenward at any moment. But now my mind is eased for good and forever. What you speak, my dear, is one absurdity after another—and I thank you for the assurance it gives me that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Without your gracious idiocies I might have completed my entrance into the married state