To Make Death Love Us Read Online Free PDF Page B

to sweep and scrub with soap and brush the stone porches,
side­walks, and even the cobblestone streets. She was raised in one of the better
neighborhoods.
    Lace curtains
enhanced the tall windows of the row houses built in another and better age. Each house had
trees—carefully ringed with white-painted, wrought-iron cages—planted opposite the front door.
The doors them­selves were freshly painted each year and were rich with shining brass. The houses
were many-roomed, elegantly appointed, and clustered together in an architectural ring of
beauty—a haven for the well-to-do—beseiged, sur­rounded on all sides by zones of vice and human
misery.
    The black ghetto
engulfed this fading world of yes­terday's elegance. Not all at once, but gradually, with each
passing year. Indirectly, this slow transition abetted the death of Serena's father.
    With the passage of
time, the cobblestones were tarred over to make better surfaces for the automobile. The horses
and carriages that had once thundered down the streets were gone. With the coming of war upon
war, the wrought-iron cages and gates were torn up in patriotic zeal and offered for
scrap.
    The world changed,
got older and tired and the white stone of old Baltimore grew grey and the sidewalks fell into
disrepair. Once-gracious houses were broken up into tenements, all the grace and majesty of what
had gone before disappeared under the
grinding hell of poverty, under the terrible reality of life in the black ghetto.
    In the very heart
of this ghetto, there stood a strong anachronism, a single house which withstood the ravages
wrought by the jungle of the city. In this house, which would soon know murder, the world outside
seldom en­tered. It's windows were still veiled with delicate lace curtains in a pattern of
bluebirds holding cartouches of ribbons in their beaks. The boot scraper at the door was painted
shining black and the stone steps were freshly painted white every three months. Even the shadows
cast by the surviving trees opposite the front door—and still caged in wrought iron—seemed
undimmed by the dirt and filth of the overindustrialized city. The trees budded in spring with
the very palest of green.
    The children of the
ghetto—for no reason they could or would explain—respected the caged trees and the house and the
people who lived within it. They were—the peo­ple who lived in this strange house—in their
fashion, the neighborhood's private mystery and special treasure.
    The people who
lived within the mystery were white gentry whose bloodlines went so far back in the history of
the pre-Civil War South that they seemed wrapped in magnolia and legend.
    The husband, Enoch
Pratt, was frequently consulted by various historical societies, for he was the possessor of a
most unique library of long-out-of-print books concerning Baltimore's history. He had made of
himself the curator of the past. A curiosity lay in the fact that he was unaware of it. He saw
himself, did Enoch Pratt, as very much a keeper of the present. It was not his fault that his
present was everyone else's past.
    Enoch dressed in
slender trousers with elastic straps that looped beneath the insteps of his short boots, a style
fifty years out of date. His shirts were made by an old firm that kept the pattern in use in order to fill the occasional requests of
theatrical costumers and historical-drama soci­eties. The sleeves were puffed at the wrists, the
front heavy with pleating, and the collars high.
    His wife, Mary,
also dressed in the fashion of the 1800s, her hair always in the intricate, curled fashion of
days gone by.
    Their dealings with
the outside world were conducted almost exclusively through tradesmen who delivered. They
subscribed to no newspapers or magazines, had no radio, and generally lived as if what was so was
not so.
    It was a rare and
exceedingly fine madness.
    Of course, in
avoiding the world so completely, it changed all