The Wintering Read Online Free PDF Page B

shopping later. Amy felt guilty, staring out at the rain-struck people, having never seen she was not responsible for the emptiness of her mother’s days.
    Quill’s expensive shirt had a smell of being freshly laundered, hand-ironed, making Amy think wistfully of feeling cared for. When the light changed, his face took on a greenish, electrified look. Seeing his profile in repose, she thought for the first time that Quill was handsome. He felt watched. He turned and his eyes expressed, silently and excitedly, “We’re going!” She nodded, but kept her true excitement inside. They left the final sign reading QUILL BLVD. It was easier to have a freer sense in tangled countryside, too poor even for pastureland. The smell of rained-on ground rushed to the car window when she lowered it; the rain had almost gone.
    In its polished loafer, Quill’s foot pressed the accelerator harder. Though his hands were pudgy, they were inordinately clean and their nails looked buffed. They held fastidiously the rosewood steering wheel, which had a mellow shine like good furniture, cared for. He gave Amy more of a feeling of being disordered. She moved her own feet farther from that polished shoe on the accelerator. It seemed unfair that all Quill had to worry about was losing weight and admission to a certain club at Princeton. He was telling her now about a new diet, consisting only of grapefruit. She sometimes turned her head, as if listening. As they went through a small town, she was attentive to the clay soil washing redly toward the sidewalks. Wasn’t her life passing repetitiously? Years had accumulated in which she had known Quill, and always he had been either gaining or losing weight. But at twelve, when she had been in dancing school, he had been the only boy ever to ask her to dance. She looked at him now, thankfully, remembering her terror. She had never really gotten over it. She thought how even her father had said, in those days, she was cute. But she had never been able to make animated conversation with little boys, as instructed by Edith. Trying to rattle on gaily in conversation, she had failed. After mingling at the punch bowl, she would then not be chosen as a partner; always, she had to dance with another superfluous girl. Feeling guilty about that, she had never told Edith, who had wanted her to be popular and to attend. Keeping unhappiness to herself, Amy had believed strengthened her character; she had been very early concerned about strengthening it. But, at dancing school, something besides shyness had kept boys away, some difference in herself she could not explain. And wishing that it had a name, she turned to Quill with pretended interest and said, “But don’t you get tired of nothing but grapefruit?”
    â€œOf course,” he said. “And I cheat.” The diet was his father’s idea, who was frantic about Quill’s appearance. Quill had to succeed him as president of the bank founded by Grandfather Quill, for whom the boulevard had been named. Once, Quill had confided eagerly that he really wanted to be a painter. “Then aren’t you going to?” Amy had said. He had replied in a flat voice, “I have to be a banker instead.” Robust and hearty and wearing slimming dark suits, he would sit in the gilt-laden old foyer greeting depositors, and his soul would be a painter’s. Flecks of gold had appeared in his green eyes when he spoke that day of painting. In the light of this rosewood dashboard, he had one night read her The Prophet , with the car doors open to night and the aged smell of the Mississippi, a cavern of darkness down the bank from them. Innocently, she had said, “But would your father really care if you didn’t become a banker?”
    â€œCare!” Quill had half-screamed, in astonishment. And the word Care! had flown out into the darkness, like a rallying cry. How, she had wondered, did people reconcile themselves